About shokupan, or Japanese sliced bread

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my sudden yearning for making Japanese sliced bread. I was actually inspired to get the bread machine while writing my latest Japanese Kitchen column for the Japan Times, which is indeed about shokupan, or Japanese sliced bread.

As you can see from the article it’s basically um…well, sandwich bread. It is an edible (but delish! to me anyway) edible napkin, like Wonderbread. Hence my guilt about craving it. But you know…the much lauded French baguette is really not that much better nutritionally speaking. ^_^ Like everything else, soft white bread needs to be enjoyed in moderation. (And I don’t think that whole wheat bread is that much better for us anyway…if we want ‘good grains’ we should just eat whole cooked grains. So phooey to those wholegrain bread nutrition-snobs I say. (I do enjoy whole grain and alternative grain breads, but mainly for their taste.))

Anyway, as I noted in the article, the thicknesses at which shokupan is sold varies around the country. Since my Japan base, and where I grew up, is the Tokyo-Yokohama area, we rarely ever see big thick slices of bread. But in Kyoto for instance, this kind of thing is pretty normal.

This is cheese on toast that’s about 3 cm thick. The cheese on top is very ordinary sliced processed cheese (cheese awareness in Japan is not that high yet…) and the bread is regular shokupan, but it was so delicious. It’s served at a tiny cafe, which was about a 2 minute walk from the house of a family friend that I am allowed to stay at sometimes when the owner is absent. I had it with a cup of outstanding coffee almost every day for a week.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the article!

View the original article here

What's so healthy about Japanese food?

A lot of people who come to this site or JustBento are here because they think Japanese cooking is very healthy. By and large it is, but, like any cuisine it’s not 100% healthy by any means. I’ve been thinking about what parts of Japanese cuisine are indeed healthy, and what aren’t, following up on my previous posts about sushi here and here. Here’s what I have come up with.

The biggest health issue with Japanese cuisine may be that it’s centered around refined carbohydates, in the form of white rice, noodles made white flour, and bread - most of the bread consumed in Japan is as white as snow. Some people think soba noodles are healthier than other types of noodles, and while buckwheat (soba) may have some beneficial qualities, most of the soba you can get, especially the dried kind, contains a lot of white wheat flour (buckwheat on its own is pretty hard to form into thin noodles). Japanese cuisine is quite high in salt. Condiments like soy sauce are quite salty of course, but there are lots of salt-preserved foods like umeboshi, pickled, salt-cured vegetables and fish. Salt was very important as a preservative before the widespread adoption of canning and refrigeration, as were drying/dehydrating, smoking and sugar. Until fairly recently the leading cause of death in Japan was by diseases related to high blood pressure, such as stroke. (Both my maternal grandparents died of stroke-related complications.) If you don’t have blood pressure problems you don’t have to worry too much about salt probably, but if you do it is an issue. Modern Japanese cuisine, from the Meiji period on, has quite a lot of battered, breaded and deep fried foods. Tempura has been around for a while, and it’s been joined by things like tonkatsu, ebifurai (breaded deep fried shrimp), korokke (Japanese croquettes), menchikatsu and more. Sugar is used quite a lot in savory dishes. Mostly it’s used in tiny amounts, but some dishes are quite sugary even if they are savory. (One reason for could be that traditionally, Japanese meals did not have a dessert course; sweet things were eaten as in-between meal snacks.) Although a spoonful at a time of budo mame will not hurt me too much, I do have to limit my intake of it severely. Some of the most popular Japanese dishes around the world are sadly not that healthy. Besides the issues with sushi, ramen for example is wheat noodles in a fairly fatty (but oh so tasty) broth; tonkatsu is, as mentioned above, breaded and deep-fried; and Japanese curry is basically a hearty European style stew served over a big mound of white rice.

Two foods that are integral part of Japanese cooking are tofu and green tea. Tofu is a great source of vegetable based protein, that has been eaten for hundreds if not thousands of years in East Asian countries. However, when people take the idea behind tofu and consume massive amounts of it, in the form of soy protein isolate and so on, it may or may not cause some problems. I do feel there’s quite a lot of bad science around this issue, too. Western anti-soy/tofu advocates tend to underreport the typical amounts of tofu that Japanese or Chinese people traditionally eat (it’s not that uncommon to eat a whole block of it at a meal by yourself for example), but it’s really hard to over-eat plain tofu the way you can over-dose perhaps on protein shakes and the like.

Green tea has also been consumed in East Asia for quite a long time. Green tea has been given all kinds of amazing health benefits - mainly in the West. In the countries where drinking green tea is part of the culture, people don’t really think about the health benefits; they just drink it because it’s enjoyable. I’m always rather suspicious about things that are purported to have amazing health benefits, because it seems to me that the more exotic and foreign or just plain odd something is, the most miraculous it’s supposed to be. This applies to almost any place. For instance, in Japan green tea it too common to be miraculous, but pu-erh tea is supposed to lower your cholesterol, make you lose weight, and grow hair on your head. (I just made the last part up, but you get the point.) Green tea probably does have some health benefits, but drinking green tea while maintaining an otherwise unhealthy lifestyle is not going to make you healthy. And again, there’s really no telling what will happen to your body if you take massive amounts of any food, no matter how ‘natural’ it is.

I’ll get to what I think is the healthiest aspect of Japanese cuisine in a minute, but to go over some individual things:

The wide variety of vegetables and legumes (beans) consumed is a good thing. The Japanese diet includes quite a few land and sea vegetables (seaweed). Not that many cuisines are into sea vegetables, but they are very low in calories, pretty high in fiber and packed with minerals. Beans are a big part of Japanese cooking too. Seafood is mostly good too. Fish is lower in calories generally speaking than meat, and the fats it contains are of the ‘good’ kind. (The biggest things we have to be concerned about regarding fish consumption these days are the near-extinction of some species, and the amount of mercury.) Fermented products add various kinds of beneficial flora to our digestive systems, which are critical to their er, smooth functioning. Miso is the best known fermented food in Japan, but there are also a wide variety of fermented preserved foods, as well as rice malt or koji, both sweet and salty. Salt-cured rice malt or shio-koji has become very popular in Japan in recent years, and I see it slowly making its way onto the shelves of Japanese grocery stores in other countries too. I hope it becomes as commonly available as miso because it’s really versatile. People have been using sakekasu or sake lees in cooking for a long time too. I don’t count the use of sake and mirin, two alcoholic products, as part of the ‘healthy fermented foods’ mix, but the lees or mash left over after sake production are pretty low in alcohol and full of that beneficial flora. (Soy sauce is too salty to be taken in amounts big enough to take advantage of its fermented nature.) Japanese cuisine also uses quite a few things that are naturally high in fiber and low in calories. Shirataki noodles is the best known of these: it seems to be trendy all around the world, or at least in North America and Europe, as a ‘guilt-free’ alternative to pasta. There are other foods like that too, such as konnyaku which is made from the same substance as shirataki. I described some of these foods in a mini-series a while back: seaweed or sea vegetables, dried vegetables, and of course konnyaku and shirataki.

The best, healthiest parts of Japanese cuisine have little to do with individual food items. It has to do with the way food is consumed: in moderation, and with lots of variety. During a typical day, a Japanese person consumes about 15 to 20 types of food if not more; nutritionists in Japan urge everyone to eat at least 30 different types of food a day. This may seem impossibly daunting if you come from a meat-and-two-veg food culture, but it’s not a big stretch in Japanese food culture. If you eat a lot of different foods, you are much more inclined to eat a healthy balanced diet. Of course you can cheat and choose 30 types of snack foods and candies, but that would be silly. As I explained during the Japanese Cooking 101 course, a typical Japanese meal has ‘1 soup, 3 dishes” besides the main carbohydrate. Even if you don’t cook Japanese style a lot, trying to add more variety to your meals may make your everyday meals just a bit healthier.

And the other part of Japanese cuisine, or Japanese food culture, that makes it relatively healthy is small portions and moderation. If you go to Japan you will see that the streets of its cities, especially Tokyo, are just filled with restaurants and various food related establishments. People enjoy a huge variety of cuisines and foods, some of them not at all inherently ‘healthy’. French pastries for example are tremendously popular, despite reports to the contrary. All kinds of junk food abound in stores. Yet, most Japanese people manage to stay pretty slim. It’s all about portion size and moderation. You can eat your cake and your ramen and your tonkatsu, as long as you don’t eat it all the time or in huge portions and you balance it out with other foods. It’s not a sexy quick-fix kind of characteristic that grabs headlines. But I’m convinced it’s the most important one.

This is not nearly as concise as Michael Pollan’s rule of “eat food, not too much, mostly plants”, and I sort of disagree with him on some things…but anyway here’s a list I came up with yesterday when answering this question on Quora.

eat a lot of vegetablesa decent amount of fruita moderate amount of protein and carbohydratesmonounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats over saturated or trans fatsdon’t forget fiberas well as getting some beneficial flora into your system via fermented foodswatch out for sugar and refined carbohydrate overload (critical if you’re a diabetic; still important if you don’t)some people need to watch their salt intakevariety is goodAnd above all, MODERATION.

I admit I don’t follow these rules all the time myself! But, I aspire to. ^_^;

View the original article here

An article about Kyoto in Asia Eater, a brand new magazine about food

I have an article in the premier issue of a brand new food magazine called Asia Eater. Published by Sabre Media, a company in Bangkok, Thailand and printed in Singapore, it’s a quarterly printed magazine all about food. As their website states:

Asia Eater is a quarterly print magazine about Asian food and food culture in Asia. Through features, essays, photo series, guest contributions, interviews and recipes we aim to cover all aspects of Asian food and drink including cooking, eating, farming, production, sustainability, trends and chefs. The magazine does not feature restaurant reviews nor any paid content.

I just received a copy of the first issue, and I really love it. It’s really refreshing to see a brand new print magazine in this day and age anyway, but one dedicated to food? From Asia? That’s not all about poncey restaurant reviews, but rather features in-depth articles about food, interviews with chefs, and even some recipes? I’m in, even if I didn’t have an article in there. Each feature is copiously illustrated with full color photographs (including mine) too. It’s slightly smaller than regular magazines, sort of a National Geographic size but wider, so I can see keeping the issues for referring to again and again. I highly recommend it if you are interested in Asian cuisine in general. The first issue has articles about Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and a lot more.

My article is about the kanmidokoro, or traditional tea and sweets restaurants, of Kyoto, with a bit of the long history of wagashi in that historic town. If you enjoyed my Postcards from Kyoto series or plan to visit Kyoto someday, I think you will enjoy it.

In any case, as I said it’s really nice to see a well put together food magazine make its debut. Check it out!

Asia Eater website I’m was interviewed by editor in chief Terry Blackburn for the latest edition of their podcast too. (I have such a hard time listening to my own voice. >.<)

ETA: You can also buy a digital copy from this link (Sorry I forgot to mention that earlier!)

View the original article here

Japanese Cooking 101, Lesson 1: It's All About the Dashi

Welcome to the first lesson of Japanese Cooking 101! Throughout this course I hope to teach you about the foundations of traditional Japanese cooking or washoku (??), as well as how to cook some Japanese dishes. So let’s get started!

Dashi or stock (often called dashi stock, which is kind of redundant) is the foundation of all savory washoku. It’s not just used in soups; it’s used in everything, from sauces, dressings, as a liquid when stewing vegetables, and more. Without dashi, your Japanese dishes simply aren’t right. If anything, dashi is more critical to Japanese cooking than meat, vegetable and fish stocks are to French cooking.

So what is dashi? Basically it is a liquid that is packed with umami, or glutamates. Umami is an essential part of any savory cuisine, but particularly so in Japanese cooking. It’s not at all surprising that it was a Japanese scientist who invented the purest chemical form of umami, monosodium glutamate (MSG).

While using MSG or a instant dashi powder or granules is very handy, and although the quality of dashi powders have have improved in recent years, dashi made from time-tested, natural ingredients is more rounded and better tasting. The difference between dashi made from instant powder and one made from scratch is like the difference between a bouillon you make with a stock cube and one you make by simmering bones and vegetables for hours.

Luckily for us, the Japanese of yore came up with ways to make whipping up a batch of dashi very easy. Various dried ingredients, mostly from the sea, which can be kept without refrigeration, are used to make dashi quite easily - so much easier than making a meat stock. (I mean, dealing with those icky greasy bones after making chicken or beef stock is not nice.)

Dashi is made from one or two of these ingredients:

kombu seaweed is a slightly leathery seaweed. It may come in wide sheets, or long ropey strands. kombu is the most widely used dashi ingredient, and has the most neutral flavor of them all. If you are a vegan, a pure kombu dashi is an all-purpose, neutral tasting dashi.

Good kombu is covered on the surface with a fine white powdery substance. Do not wash this off - it’s not caked on salt or dust! It’s full of that umami we want to extract.

(Note: Many Japanese cookbooks instruct you to wipe the dirt off the surface of kombu with a tightly wrung out kitchen towel. The truth is, this really isn’t necessary in most cases these days, since the kombu we get has already been cleaned very well. If you happen to get a batch with some gritty stuff on the surface you’ll need to wipe it off, but make sure you’re not getting rid of that powdery white stuff in the meantime. If a tiny bit of grit does make it into your dashi you can always strain it off later.)

Also called kezuribushi or okaka.

Katsuobushi is a bonito fish (katsuo) that has been dried and fermenented to develop a lot of umami. The fish shrinks down and hardens until it’s like a block of wood. This is then grated or shaved into thin flakes, rather like wood shavings. The shavings are used in cooking. Good, fresh pre-shaved katsuobushi is fluffy and yellowish-beige in color with a hint of blush pink. Katsuobushi is the second most common dashi ingredient after kombu. Most of the dashi used around the country in restaurants uses a combination of kombu and katsuobushi.

Katsuobushi is usually available in flaked form, although you can get a whole katsuobushi and a special box grater and grate your own. While freshly shaved or grated katsuobushi is very flavorful, it’s a pain in the ass to grate manually, so most people, including professional cooks, use the pre-shaved stuff. (I’ve seen some electric katsuobushi-shavers sold in Japan, but they’re pretty expensive.)

We won’t be using these ingredients for this lesson, but these items are used in dashi too.

Small dried fish such as nishin or iwashi (???, ???: herrings and sardines) are often used instead of katsuobushi. Some regions of the country prefer them over katsuobushi, and some people just use them because they are cheaper. The dashi made with these don’t taste overly fishy, but are a bit more fishy than katsuobushi. Dried shiitake mushrooms (????) are used for dashi on occasion. The soaking liquid from reconstituting dried mushrooms makes a very strong tasting dashi, which can be used on its own or with kombu dashi.

Simply put, ichiban dashi or first dashi is the dashi you make from fresh (as in previously unused) ingredients kombu and katsuobushi. Niban dashi or second dashi is dashi made from the kombu, katsuobushi and so on that has previously been used for making ichiban dashi. Ichiban dashi is used for things like soups, or when you want the maximum amount of umami possible. Niban dashi is used for things like stewed dishes, when other ingredients like meat and vegetables will add more umami to the dish so a subtler dashi is adequate. Niban dashi is really a way of being frugal with your dashi ingredients.

In this lesson we will be making a standard ichiban (first) kombu and katsuobushi dashi, but I’ll also show you how kombu-only dashi is made.

Long time readers of the site may know that I’ve given you a couple of different ways of making dashi in the past. They all work well, but here I’ll walk you through the method that I think makes the best tasting dashi.

We will making 1 litre, or about 4 U.S. cups of dashi. For this you will need:

10 to 15 grams (1/3 to 1/2 ounce) of kombu10 to 15 grams (1/3 to 1/2 ounce) of katsuobushi 1 litre or 1000 ml / 4 U.S. cups of water plus a bit of extra water (about 100ml or 1/3 cup) to allow for evaporation during cooking

The ratio of water to ingredients: Allow for a minimum of 10 grams of kombu, and 10 to 15 grams of katsuobushi, per 1000 ml(1l) or 4 U.S. sized cups of water. If you’re making a kombu-only dashi, you’ll want to use at least 15 grams. If you don’t have a fairly precise scale, 10 grams of kombu is about a 4 inch square piece - which is the advice I’ve given you previously, and 19-15 grams of katsuobushi is a good handful. Here I used 15 grams of each. If you don’t get the amounts precise don’t worry; since these are all-natural ingredients, you can’t really use too much of it.

Here’s 15 grams of kombu. - about 1 1/2 4-inch / 10 cm squares.

And here’s 15 grams of katuobushi - a generous handful:

Set aside the katsuobushi. Put the kombu and water in a pan and leave it to soak for at least 30 minutes. You can leave it in the water for up to a day in the refrigerator, if you want to do the soaking step in advance.

If you want to track how the dashi progresses, take a small sip of the liquid after the kombu has been soaking in it for a while. You should taste just a hint of the sea already. The surface of the kombu will have turned a bit slippery.

Put the pan on the hob and turn up the heat. Bring it to a boil, then lower the heat.

If you are making a kombu-only dashi, keep the pan on a barely-there low simmer for 30 minutes. Check the water level and add a bit more if it seems to be evaporating too fast.

IF you are making a kombu-katsuobushi combination dashi, simmer the kombu for 10 minutes, then turn off the heat.

Again, if you want to track the progress of the dashi, taste it at the 5, 10 and (if you’re going for kombu-only dashi) the 30 minute stages. You’ll notice that the dashi is getting gradually stronger in flavor, tasting like the sea. You should notice the umami even at the 5 minute mark. Kombu-only dashi barely has any color.

To make a kombu-katsuobushi combo dashi: After 10 minutes of simmering, add the katsuobushi, and turn the heat off.

Let the pan sit for a few minutes (about 10 minutes) until the katsuobushi sinks to the bottom of the pan.

Strain off the liquid, using a fine-mesh sieve.

Don’t throw away the used kombu and katsuobushi! We’ll be using that in a later lesson, so put it in a plastic bag and store it in the freezer.

The dashi will have a pale golden color. Give it a taste - you’ll notice the katuobushi, but it won’t be unpleasantly ‘fishy’; it will be like a very light bouillon without the salt.

At this point the dashi can be used right away, or stored well covered for a few day in the refrigerator. You can also freeze it - putting it in ice cube trays is a handy way of doing this.

Tomorrow I’ll show you how to turn this dashi into two kinds of soup: clear soup called osumashi or osuimono, and misoshiru or miso soup.

While dashi made from natural ingredients tastes the best, it may be difficult of not impossible to get the raw ingredients like kombu seaweed and katsuobushi in some parts of the world. In that case using instant dashi stock granules is fine, and certainly better than using straight MSG or nothing at all. And to be brutal, most Japanese restaurants around the world do not make dashi from scratch; they use the granules, (Once you know the taste of ‘real’ dashi, you’ll soon be able to tell when a restaurant isn’t using it.)

A complaint I hear sometimes about dashi made from dashi granules is that it is ‘fishy’. While they do have some fish flavor (and the granules themselves, especially certain brands, can smell rather fishy) since they are made from katuobushi extract and such, I suspect that one problem is that people are using far too much of it. You only need to use about 1 teaspoon per 4 cups (1 liter) of water, or 1/4 teaspoon per cup.

Dashi, whether made from granules or from scratch, is not meant to be used on its own; it is meant to be a flavor enhancer, not the entire flavor. You add other ingredients like salt, soy sauce, sake and so on to the dashi to “complete” the flavors. So trying to make add enough dashi granules to water or other liquid to make it ‘strong’ will not turn out well at all.

When you use dashi granules start with a small amount, add the other flavors and then add a bit more if you think it really needs it. Tasting as you go along is the best way to cook something you’re unfamiliar with.

Dashi granules that come in pre-portioned packages like these are handy if you can’t remember the dosage. These little sealed packages tend to keep better too.

But again, if you can get the real ingredients, please try to make dashi the proper way at least once, so you can know what it’s supposed to taste like.

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Rapping about Pho Culture: Q&A with Alexei of Seattle’s Townfolk

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November 26, 2012Rapping about Pho Culture: Q&A with Alexei of Seattle’s Townfolk  

If you haven’talready, click and watch the music video. It was made by Iranian-American musicproducer Alexei (@sabzi) and his collaborators for TOWNFOLK, their experimental art endeavor being funded through Kickstarter. I got wind of itvia an email and then my niece Paulina, a college senior, wrote me about it onFacebook. 

The video isa smart and culturally spot-on survey of Vietnamese pho culture, particularly that of South Seattle when Alexei (a.k.a. Sabzi and Saba) lives. He's captured it all in a rap video, which has a certain Beck element of humor.

Aside from the music and video, Alexei and his pals went the extra stepof getting the language right. Their Kickstarter page has Vietnamese and video is subtitled in Vietnamese! Eithersomeone has amazing language skills or he/she got an older person to translateand type it up with all the diacritic marks in place. I was mightily impressed with the polished and thoughtful effort.

I passedTOWNFOLK’s Kickstarter link around via Twitter and Facebook but wanted to knowthe back story. How and why did Alexei do the video? That’s the reason for thisemail Q&A with Alexei: (Note: his are presented as is/as were received)

Why did the campaign namechange from Pho Life to Ph? 99? I thought the first was clever and modern.The second seems to speak more to the Viet-Am enclave/ghetto experience.

"Pho Life"originally was chosen simply as the title for the Kickstarter page. We didn'tthink much about it.

Personally, after seeingthe project take life and an identity in Internet discussion, I didn't feel thename did justice to the true nature of the piece as a whole.

The word "Life"appeared too broad and definitive, as if suggesting that the characters in thispiece were only about pho, or all of the identities and components thatinteracted with the project revolved entirely around just soup. 

We are all much more thanthat. Also, perhaps more importantly, adding the term "life" as asuffix to something rap-related has been a little overdone at this point. Played out!

Pho 99 fits better forvarious reasons. It's more subtle, isn't a broad generalization, anybody who'sa super pho fan has eaten at a place called Pho 22, 55, 66, 95, 96, 99 etc andknows how common a name like that can be.

"99" is thecatchiest of all these in our opinion.  Furthermore, it seems to stay"on brand" more than Life.

What is Townfolk's mission?

i think i'll be perpetuallydiscovering what that is.  first and foremost, it's a space to explore andtest ideas.  today i'll say that one thing the TOWNFOLK project does islook at these ideas from multiple angles. much like the answers i listed at thetop. i find it very difficult to give short and simple answers that i feel areinformed by so many different components that all deserve attention. TOWNFOLK is a workshop that gives me free range to go nuts. 

How did pho get to besubject for the Kickstarter campaign? What is the rationale behind thedifferent items that you developed for Pho 99?

it began here a cpl yearsago. the music video for"Fou Lee" by Blue Scholars (rap group i'm in) features a group of uscooking chicken adobo.  we considered doing a poster of all the rawingredients of chicken adobo as a piece of merchandise connected to thesong, but for some reason it didn't really come together.  shortlyafter this, over a pho lunch with some friends i realized the same conceptcould be applied to pho ingredients and would probably turn out great. and it did.

what followed was a wholelot of "wouldn't it be cool if we did THIS too?"

a second poster, buttons,stickers, music video, raps, Vietnamese subtitles etc.

Pho 99 poster options (illustrated and photographed) and chopsticks too!
Your pronunciation of Vietfood terms is great and the Vietnamese lyric translation is fabulous. How didthat all come together? Why did you include the Vietnamese lyrics?when i think of pho, ithink of soup… and it also makes me think of the neighborhood i live in,restaurants, concert posters, Vietnamese fonts/lettering on menus and signs, BanhMi sandwiches, the time a friend accidentally drank fish sauce thinking it wasapple juice, late nights at the billiards, coffee shops, thebakeries, friends, family, a food that historically comes from a partof the world i haven't yet had the privilege to visit and also makes me feel athome when i eat it. and that's just a few things.  i'm certainly not theonly one that feels that way in South Seattle. it's a part of who we are.

you could say this projectexplores some of those connections in a fresh way that's fun and looksgood. 

::cast&crew::

photography, assistant producer: @canhsolo (Canh Solo; Canh shot pics of all the ingredients for the poster, then Canh's dad made pho with the props)
illustrations: @MIS0HAPPY (Nina Nguyen)
video: @Harry_Clean (Harry Clean)
subtitles/translation: @joanne_nitsua (Joanne Nguyen-Austin)

You've already raised morethan your goal. What's next?

now that the goal's beenreached, we can make the posters!  after shipping the first round to allthe pledgers, the remaining product will be available for sale at TOWNFOLK  in January.

I’vesaid this many times before on VWK: You don’t have to be Asian to understand Asianfood and culture. What Alexei and TOWNFOLK are doing reflects thefluid movement across cultures happening now, in urban and suburban neighborhoods. There's little that's novel about their take on pho culture. It's done with respect,  creativity, and fun.

Btw, this set of buttons of Viet singer Tuan Anh (think: a cross between Liberace, Lady Gaga, and Michael Jackson) is part of the Pho 99 merchandise line-up:

TOWNFOLK's Pho 99 campaign goes on till December 4, 2012. Check it out on Kickstarter and if you're inclined, support this intersection of music, art and food.

Thoughts and reactions? Or tips on similar art and food projects? Please share your knowledge.

Related posts and links:

Beef Pho RecipeChicken Pho Recipe Pho Secrets and TechniquesHistory and evolution of pho in Vietnam and AmericaI Love Pho -- 2008 visual arts exhibit in AustraliaPosted in Asian Food Culture, Asian Food Hero, Essentials: Pho, Vietnamese Culture, Vietnamese Restaurants | Permalink

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Comments Rapping about Pho Culture: Q&A with Alexei of Seattle’s Townfolk  

If you haven’talready, click and watch the music video. It was made by Iranian-American musicproducer Alexei (@sabzi) and his collaborators for TOWNFOLK, their experimental art endeavor being funded through Kickstarter. I got wind of itvia an email and then my niece Paulina, a college senior, wrote me about it onFacebook. 

The video isa smart and culturally spot-on survey of Vietnamese pho culture, particularly that of South Seattle when Alexei (a.k.a. Sabzi and Saba) lives. He's captured it all in a rap video, which has a certain Beck element of humor.

Aside from the music and video, Alexei and his pals went the extra stepof getting the language right. Their Kickstarter page has Vietnamese and video is subtitled in Vietnamese! Eithersomeone has amazing language skills or he/she got an older person to translateand type it up with all the diacritic marks in place. I was mightily impressed with the polished and thoughtful effort.

I passedTOWNFOLK’s Kickstarter link around via Twitter and Facebook but wanted to knowthe back story. How and why did Alexei do the video? That’s the reason for thisemail Q&A with Alexei: (Note: his are presented as is/as were received)

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— Anne Mendelson, Taste & Travel

"The most gratifying part about cooking from Asian Tofu is that all the recipes work the way they’re written."
— T. Susan Chang, Boston Globe

Book info, reviews, radio & TV . . .2013 EventsHands-On Classes @LoveAppleFarms, Santa Cruz

Sat, Jan 27, 12-4pm:Asian Dumplings (CNY is Feb 13)
Sun, Feb 24, 12-4pm: DIY Asian Tofu ++
Sat, Mar 16, 12-4pm: Get Into the Viet Kitchen!

More soon on 2013 classes...

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All about dashi in The Japan Times

This month’s Japan Times food article is all about dashi. Dashi has been covered on this site many times, but I wanted to write about it for the Japan Times readers because it’s so fundamental to Japanese cooking. If you have any desire to make good Japanese food, you need to know how to make dashi. Fortunately, it’s not that difficult, using the right ingredients. The article also includes a recipe for a dipping sauce you can use with any kind of cold Japanese noodles.

As usual, my Japan Times articles are written for people who live in Japan. Most of the readers of Just Hungry don’t live in Japan, so it may be a bit difficult to get a hold of some of the ingredients I talk about. Just do what you can, really - ma-konbu may not be obtainable where you are, so just get the best quality you can afford. (Good kombu is quite thick and leathery.)

The same goes for katsuobushi, or shaved bonito flakes. The ideal may be to get a whole block of dried katuo, and a special grater.

But it’s a tedious business, and it can be hard to get a hold of the whole bonito or the grater. Pre-grated katsuobushi is perfectly acceptable. Just make sure you close up the bag tightly after each use (or transfer it to an airtight container) to keep it fresher longer.

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Totally off topic: About your small business site or blog, and getting it noticed - what not to do

This has nothing at all to do with Japan, or food, or anything else that I normally write about here. But I am putting it on this site in the off chance that it will be read by regular folk. That is, people who just happened to land here, looking for a recipe perhaps. It’s not for web designers or developers or people who built stuff for the web. And it’s certainly not for so-called “SEO experts”.

But I just couldn’t take it anymore.

(What is SEO, you ask? It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. We’ll get to that later.)

I am not an ‘SEO expert’, and I am no longer a web designer. So why listen to me?

I run two fairly successful blogs. They are both ‘niche’ blogs as they say in the website-creating world - they each concentrate on a fairly narrow topic. The one you are reading now, Just Hungry, mainly focuses on Japanese home cooking, though I do allow myself to stray from that topic a bit. It’s about 80% Japanese food and Japan-related stuff, 20% other things, mostly of a personal nature. My other blog, JustBento has an even narrower focus: compact portable meals, aka bento boxes. I suppose neither topic is going to gather a huge audience, but I am very happy with the number of visitors I get on both.

Both have great positions on Google searches, for the terms that people are likely to use when looking for what’s on them. If you search for ‘bento recipes’ for example, JustBento is at or near the top. If you search for ‘Japanese home cooking’ or ‘Japanese recipes’, the same applies for this site.

What’s more, I built both of the sites myself. I am my own web designer, developer and SEO person. While I do get a wee bit of help from my husband (aka The Guy) he’s not really a web person (he develops programs for other platforms, not browsers) so I do 99% of the brunt work. What’s more, in my previous life, before I became a full time writer, I was a web designer. Heck, my Amazon Author Profile page may be the only one that lists a cookbook and a CSS/Javascript book! (Those are website-building-techie things, just in case.) At heart, I’m still a web geek. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do.

I’m here to tell you, such links do not work. They do not work. If you hired a web designer or other ‘expert’ who told you they do work, they are lying to you, or they have no clue. There are no widely recognized, certified credentials needed to call onesself a ‘web designer’ or an ‘SEO expert’. If you are getting charged for dodgy practices that are supposed to raise your site’s visibility in the eyes of Google and other search engines, you may be getting ripped off.

Why don’t comment links work? For one thing, sites such as mine that hold all comments in a moderation queue will not even publish them. So no one will get to see them.

“But”, you may be saying, “there are plenty of other sites that do publish these comments”. Well, if a site’s comment section is neglected enough to allow all such links to pass through, your site link is probably mixed in with the ones for [insert popular medication name here] or fake [insert Swiss watch maker name here] watches and Hot [insert your favorite nationality/ethnicity/age here] Girls. It’s like moving your storefront into the seediest part of town. Would you want your lovely custom staircase company next to a peep show parlor?

But some sites do a half-hearted job of screening the most obvious links, mainly with automated screening solutions, so the medical/x-rated stuff gets dumped. So then, you might think your link will get noticed by the search engines. Wrong! All modern blogging and content management systems (most blogs and many other sites are built using one of these) have a system where links in comments are automatically tagged like so:

rel="nofollow"

What that little tag means to search engines is that the link in question should not be ‘voted up’, so to speak. Google rankings are largely based on how many incoming links there are to a site for a particular search term, so ‘link juice’ as its called, legitimate links from other sites to your, are very valuable. But if all your comment-links get tagged with that nofollow, it’s useless.

Morever, savvy internet users are absolutely sick and tired of internet spam, whether it’s in their email, their Twitter streams, or on the websites they read. So if they see your site linked to in such a manner, they are both very likely to even click on it, and to think much the worse of you.

I know that it’s very hard to get attention on the web, and how anxious you might be to get noticed. But there’s a wrong way and a right way. Don’t waste your time and money doing it the wrong way.

Do not write to an established blog (or other site) asking for a ‘linkback’ or ‘link exchange’. I hate those and most other blog owners do too. If we really like your site organically, we may link to you, but if you push it we will ignore you. (This may sound arrogant, but it’s the truth.) A recent tactic is asking if you can write a guest post for a site, in which you will include links to your site. You should check first to see if the site you’re writing to even accepts guest posts. (Mine do not, unless I put out a specific call for them - and the last time I did that was on JustBento about 3 years ago. Just Hungry has never had a guest post.) Morever, if your site’s subject matter is totally unrelated to the site you’re writing to, forget it. (A warning for new blog owners: be very wary of accepting such ‘guest post’ requests. The requester is only in it for the link juice.)

In closing, here’s just a very short list of the right ways to get more attention:

Make sure your site is clear about what it is selling/what the subject matter is. This information should be in text, and displayed prominently on your site. The most important page on your site is the home or front page. If you have a flashy Flash ‘entry page’ that has not been appropriately text-optimized, you are making your site harder to find. If your web designer proposes a Flash- or graphic-only entry page, fire them. (I’m talking to you, restaurant site owners!) A site that is frequently updated has a better chance to get search engine attention. If you have the time, incorporating a blog on your site, that you update regularly, can be a way to fairly painlessly keep your site fresh. Making comments on other blogs can work - but make sure you are making relevant comments not just there to plug your site/blog. Then, casually include a link to your site. If it looks like you know what you are talking about, and the subject matter of your site is somehow related the site where you’re commenting, chances are you will get more eyeballs on your site from that. Read Search Engine Watch and educate yourself.

So, that’s it for this special announcement. Now back to your regular programming in the next post!

Food Blog Alliance is a site by and for food bloggers, about the ins and outs of running a food theme blog. The articles are written by experienced food bloggers, some who have have had successful, even profitable, food blogs for years. There are plenty of tips there that pertain to general blogging too, so it’s well worth checking out. (I have a couple of articles there: Startup costs for a food blog is a bit outdated but still viable, and Welcome visitors to your blog with an About page is still pertinent.)

(A bit of history: Back when I was a working web designers, I used to use Just Hungry to test out various search engine theories and such. Some worked, some definitely did not. It was very educational to see how things worked in on a real, live site. But now that Just Hungry is an important part of my writing business, it’s no longer an SEO guinea pig.)

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Guest post for BlogHer about the making of Peanut Butter Pie Video

Thank you all, to each and every single one of you for watching the Peanut Butter Pie video dedicated to Jennie and Mikey.

We’re both so proud to be part of this online food community and you all helped us complete this video with your love and support.

Blogher asked me to write a post about why and how this video came to be. It was deeply healing for me to share this with you all. Please visit this piece over at blogher.

thank you a million times,

diane

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Obsessively obsessing about my kitchen

I’ve been back from Japan for about 3 weeks now. However, I haven’t exactly been able to settle back into a routine. My house - the one we bought last year, but have been unable to work on until recently for various reasons until now - is in the throes of a major renovation, and is uninhabitable. So, we’ve been living in a small one-bedroom apartment in Aix-en-Provence. A beautiful town, but still it’s not home.

Our house has been basically gutted on the ground floor - we are leaving work on the upper floor for another round (or until we have more funds). Along the way, the maçon (the builder), the plombier (plumber) and electricien have found plenty of unwelcome surprises. Now, this is definitely not another one of those rants that you see so often by expats in France (popularized by that book by some Brit about a year in Provence) complaining about French construction workers. Our builder and his assistant have been working their behinds off for us; the electrician has dealt patiently with our changing requests for outlets here and there; and the plumber has been plumbing away despite suffering a major cut on his hand (not at our house, but on another job). The builder is even going to work tomorrow, July 14th, even though it’s a national holiday (Bastille Day), so that we can move in as early as possible. Now that’s dedication. (He’s doing it also because he wants to get as much work done before he goes on vacance. But still! Would an American builder work on July 4th?)

The shell of the house, built in the mid-19th century, is rock solid - in some ways literally so, since the foundations are rock. The basement is basically a cafe built into the rock. However, the work done fairly recently, by the former owner (who was himself a maçon, but apparently not that good) was pretty sloppy. So there was time wasted fixing those things. But the end is near….and we hope to move in soon.

This is the very first house that I have been involved in from the start. Previously, I’ve either lived in rented places, or in places that have been around and finished before I moved in, like our previous place in Switzerland. I liked that house well enough…but it wasn’t mine, if you know what I mean. This house is going to be Me as much as I can help it. Especially the kitchen.

This is the current state of the kitchen. It’s a shell! But it’s getting there, slowly.

I originally wanted to knock through one wall to connect a tiny room that was used as a bedroom to the main living space, to make one big kitchen area. But the wall turned out to be a load-bearing one, and when you’re talking about an almost 200 year old stone built former warehouse, that’s a lot of load. So the wall had to stay. That back room (with a new doorway) is now my pantry. It’s an odd shaped room with a diagonal wall - another loadbearing one but it will do.

This is the view from the opposite side, into the dining room area. We’re going to open up a big hole in that wall in the back to install a triple-pane porte de fenetre - after all, a French house deserves to have a French window, doesn’t it? It will eventually lead out into a terrace area. Right now the terrace area is a rubble pit. (The new wooden door leaning on the wall is fitted into the laundry room.)

I’m thinking about the whole house too, of course, but the kitchen is taking up most of my brain. What countertop material? How to arrange the cabinets? What kind of storage, and how much of it, do I need? Besides, I’ve been without a real kitchen of my own for more than 2 years now. 2 years of dealing with tiny, underpowered cookers in holiday rental homes and makeshift tabletop cookers! (And my mother’s kitchen in Japan…but it’s my mom’s kitchen, not mine.) I’m kitchen deprived.

I still have loads of Japan posts to write, but right now I am obsessed with the kitchen. I keep on thinking about it night and day. If you cook, maybe you share my passion for creating the Right Kitchen for you? If so, I hope you’ll indulge me as I write about my obsession on occasion here and our kitchen slowly progresses! ^_^;

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Aerobics | All about fat loss and <b>Asian food</b> pyramid

A balanced diet is essential not only for health but also for permanent fat loss. The Asian diet pyramid is the traditional Asian diet. World diet is generally influenced by several factors such as agriculture, the availability of specific types of food, climate and cultural diversity. However, the Asian diet is different from other plans, and special attention for several reasons. While the rest of the world, especially the United States and Europe, suffer from various chronic diseases like diabetes, some cancers and heart disease, these disorders are almost unknown in Asia.

It is scientifically proven that diets based on plants, such as Asia and the Mediterranean diet plans offer protection against degenerative diseases and chronic diseases so prevalent in Western countries. The same natural diet is also attributed to the long life of Asian peoples.

The traditional Asian diet is closely linked to long-standing customs and religious practices. Asia plans weight loss foods are great metabolism booster. The regime has been associated with Japan, China and Korea. However, in reality, also includes Indonesia, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Mongolia, Myanmar and Nepal.
Due to the Asian food from a wide geographical representation, each of these regions and territories has its own cooking techniques and flavors. Rice, who has acquired a quasi-sacred status, is the foundation of Asian cuisine.

Because of the prevalence of obesity in Western societies has been a growing obsession with respect Booster metabolism, diet plans to lose weight and thin women. Now, he focuses on the right type of foods, you can start to lose belly fat with very little effort. That's because healthy foods, natural plant supports many details for you. Is the need to count calories or worry if you were too. With the regime in Asia is "almost impossible to eat too. That's because natural foods to meet the body and when you give your body what it really want, want to stop overeating.

It is true that the only Asian diet, you can lose lots of weight in a few months or less. However, to turn your body into super fat burning machine, you must add an exercise regime for your program. The type of exercise you're talking about here is not the environment of aerobic exercise. We are "talking about short burst of short duration and high intensity exercise training with weights.

Experts agree that the combination of high intensity cardio workout intensity high weight is the best way to lose body fat and get a flat stomach. Not only save time by combining these exercises in a training session, but leaves the metabolic rate into high gear. This combination is a super-metabolism booster which opens your body full capacity to burn fat.

For more information on diets super fat loss and fat burning workouts, visit the Asian Diet Revolution.

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6/365 ...some facts about you

1. Do you drink coffee, if so how?
2. Your favorite radio station/channel?
3. Why are you take photographs?
4. In which country do you live?
5. What you'd like to have seen once in your life?
6. What is your favorite food?

these are my...
1. strong and black
2. http://www.swr3.de/ and Chronix radio
3. I like it when people smile when they see my pictures
4. in the smallest regions in Germany called Saarland
5. Greenland, Alaska and whales, and take pictures of it (out there) , of course ;-)
6. Asian food and spare ribs ;-)

Thanks for your views & faves! And your comments are always welcome! ;-)

Follow me
| Facebook | Twitter |

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Toshikoshi Soba (year-end soba) article in The Japan Times, plus a bit about my niece and nephew

I’ve had an article with recipe in The Japan Times every month since August. Writing for them is a bit different than writing for my blogs; I try to focus more on the story behind the food, and I also write for English speaking people living in Japan, who are the main audience for the paper. It’s an interesting challenge every month! Anyway, for this month I have an article about Toshikoshi soba, or year-end soba. It goes into a lot more of the historical background and origins of the custom of eating soba noodles on New Year’s Eve than my old toshikoshi soba post from back in 2003. The recipe is also a bit different; instead of using pre-made kaeshi or storebought mentsuyu, I give instructions for making the soup totally from scratch using konbu seaweed, bonito flakes, soy sauce, mirin and sugar. Again I’m assuming that most of the readers have ready access to these ingredients, as well as the kamaboko topping. Anyway, I hope you’ll take a look!

I’ve used my favorite eating-model again for the top photo accompanying the article, my 9 year old niece Lena. (I’ve spelled her name phonetically as “Rena” on these pages before, but she apparently favors the spelling “Lena”. Her name in kanji is ??.) I love my nephew Lyoh, her older brother, just as much of course, but he tends to pull awful/funny faces when I point the lens at him, as boys will do. Lena-chan is a great model; she loves to pose for the camera when she’s aware of it, and when she’s not she has the most adorable, intent look on her face. Here she is eating some sushi. She’s checking under the fish for wasabi, since she doesn’t like it.

Lena and Lyoh are both great kids, though I may be biased as their aunt. They are quite rambunctious and can start a wrestling match in the back seat of their dad’s SUV at the drop of a hat, but they’re definitely not kids that their parents are afraid to take out to a restaurant at any time. Even when they were younger, they knew how to behave themselves. Here’s Lena-chan eating soba again when she was just 6 years old, with my mother looking on fondly. Even when she was little, she had great table manners.

I spent a weekend with my sister, her husband and the kids at Hakone, a popular resort area at the foot of Mount Fuji, in November. We ate out a lot of course, and wherever we went the kids behaved themselves impeccably. When we went to a kaiten-zushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurant, Lyoh even ordered some special items directly to the waitress just like his dad. (Tip: if you want to be ensured of freshly made sushi at a kaiten-zushi place rather than sushi that may have been around the track several times, just put your order in for something directly.) I don’t think they are necessarily unusual - most kids in restaurants are quite well behaved, especially in Japan. But I was reminded of how jarring kids in restaurants can be the other day when I was at a cafe, where a set of parents were ignoring the fact that their kids were running around rampant. It happens in all countries, and I really think it’s all up to how the parents react. Lyoh happens to have ADD and some other problems, so he can get a bit agitated sometimes, but when that happens one of his parents talk him down quietly so that he breathes and calms down.

I love this photo of the kids that I took at Tokyo Disney. It really shows their personalities. Lena-chan is trying to pose cutely for the camera, and there’s Lyoh-kun totally ignoring it and jumping up and down, full of beans.

Another fun thing about my niece and nephew is that they both prefer washoku or Japanese food most of the time over Western food. Sure, they do beg for a Makku (Japanese slang for McDonald’s) visit sometimes as all kids do, but not that much. When we went out for breakfast at a diner-type place, the adults all ordered “morning sets” with toast, eggs, and so on, but the kids both ordered traditional Japanese style sets with rice, miso soup, pickles and fish or chicken. When I took them to Tokyo Disney back in the spring, they grew tired of eating things like Mickey Mouse shaped pastries, so their mother went out to get them some bentos, which they tucked into happily. Lena is especially fond of Japanese food. Here she’s eating some mitarashi dango.

I really miss seeing the kids at this time of year, so please excuse my rambling on about them. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you and yours!

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The Truth About Swine Flu: Surviving the Pandemic

High Conversion Sales Copy! 70% Commission on $33.00!! Comprehensive Guide to Swine Flu including its history, how it kills, and how to treat and/or survive the virus as well as additional health information to treat and prevent the infection naturally.

Check it out!

The Truth About Food! The Causes Of Food Addiction

Brand new non-diet, diet book destined to be a best seller! Kirsten Plotkin reveals her fascinating discovery of weight-loss/wellness from personal struggles battling her weight and borderline Type2 Diabetes.

Check it out!