Recipes & Articles

I read somewhere that at one time, Japanese consumed a hundred bowls of miso soup a month, on average. A whole lot of soup! But for good reason, because miso is truly a remarkable food:

Hollywood has its paparazzi. So, apparently, does food. I took the shot above at last week's Tokyo Taste event in Japan, where a ruck of photographers rushed to snap dishes prepared by famous chefs. What a sight.

One nondescript conference room. Sixteen bottles of sake. A half dozen of the best sake-tasting palates in New York. Henry Sidel, who runs Joto Sake, pulled together this group last week to evaluate a bunch of brews he recently brought back from Japan. He invited me to join in and observe.

A hearty congratulations to my friends Rick and Hiroko (that's her in picture) on the one year anniversary of their wonderful shop Sakaya, the only store on the East Coast dedicated to premium, small-batch, artisanal sake and shochu. In honor of their milestone -- and to help us all find a great some sake -- I asked them to recommend a few of their favorite bottles of nihonshu for the holidays.

This month, Gourmet is running my story about Tohoku, a breathtaking region that sits atop the main island of Honshu.

Visiting Kyoto last week, Tadashi and I rendezvoused with Chef Hisao Nakahigashi at 7 a.m., hopping in his van and setting off for the valleys and mountains north of the city, where he heads every day to forage for wild greens and collect vegetables from family farmers.

While varieties of Japanese <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wagyu">wagyu</a> beef are now familiar in America (Kobe being the best known), traveling through Japan I've been surprised to learn about the different breeds of jidori -- heirloom "local chicken" raised across the country.

While in Sapporo, Tadashi and I took a detour from our regional hot pot hunt to check out a famed local dish: the city's signature miso ramen.

At 4:30 am on a Tuesday morning, Tadashi and I stepped into a cavernous hall almost three football fields long, filled with hundreds of busy people and stacks of styrofoam boxes, thousands of them, each coddling a pristine fish.

Chef Tadashi Ono and I just returned from a hot pot-infused dash across Japan to research our cookbook, racing from snowy Sapporo to the deep south of Kyushu.

Here's some of what I found at the Katsuura morning market, an hour and a half outside Tokyo: Just caught horse mackerel, anchovy, bonito, tuna, orange-colored kinme and metallic-skinned sanma shaped like the blade of a knife. Three foot wild yellowtail (buri) and young wild yellowtail (warasa) resting in tubs of slushy ice.

At a recent master class for chefs at New York's James Beard Foundation (organized by the Gohan Foundation -- thanks to both for the invite), Chef Toshio Suzuki of Sushi Zen introduced Japanese vinegar and talked about its uses. He covered a lot of fascinating ground but to me the highlight was his treatment of mackerel. Simple but so subtle and delicious.