What is Japanese Cuisine?
Japanese cuisine is sustained by the rich variety of ingredients available from fertile seas and land. Japanese people are attuned to nature and keenly aware of their reliance on its bounty.
They express gratitude for the blessings of nature with the customary expressions “Itadakimasu”- I gratefully receive the blessings of this food – before eating and “Gochisosama” – I have partaken of the feast – after eating. Japanese cuisine is also a canvas for the beauty of nature. Distinct changes accompany the four seasons, and enjoyment of those changes provides the underlying motifs for Japanese arts, crafts and literature. In cuisine as well, reoccurring patterns and references, like the plum and cherry blossoms of spring, express attention to the beauty of the seasons.
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1.The Types of Rice and Their Diverse Role
One of the appealing qualities of Japanese food is that it is healthy. – Japanese cuisine, which developed in tandem with a respect for nature, is centered around rice as a staple food. In the case of the fine kaiseki food served in restaurants, sake – alcohol made from rice – often takes the place of cooked rice, but for ordinary household meals rice and soup are the basic dishes, eaten together with side dishes and pickles. There are two main kinds of rise: so-called uruchimai or non-glutinous rice and mochi-gome or glutinous rice, and it is uruchimai that is used for making sake, vinegar, and miso, as well as the cooked rice eaten at meals. Mochi-gome is an indispensable food that is used for mochi and sweets, and for steaming with red adzuki beans to make the auspicious “red rice” (sekihan) for celebratory occasions.
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2.The Foundation of Japanese Cuisine: Umami and Dashi
The basic flavour of Japanese food is umami. Umami has been shown to be the “fifth taste,” distinct from the four scientifically identified tastes of sweetness, sourness, saltiness, and bitterness. In order to accentuate the umami in ingredients, the Japanese succeeded some 500 years ago in mastering techniques for making dashi so that only the umami elements from kombu and dried bonito flakes are released. Around 200 to 300 years ago, a great many cookbooks were published, and most of them stressed the importance of using good dashi and recorded the methods for making it. This deep attachment to dashi led to Japanese scientist Ikeda Kikunae’s 1908 discovery of monosodium glutamate (MSG), which is the umami element in kombu. Broth made from katsuobushi bonito flakes and kombu remains the basic flavouring for Japanese food, but it is difficult to make properly without using the soft water prevalent in Japan.
© photograph Kuma Masashi
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3.Pure Water: A Key to Tastiness
Water in Japan drains from mountain regions over comparatively short distances before flowing into the sea, so hard water resulting from seepage through rock is scarce and most water is soft and quite free of impurities. Water commands a very important position in Japanese cuisine, as evidenced by preparation techniques that use large quantities of water such as soaking to remove bitterness (sarasu) or rinsing to tighten fibre (shimeru). Foods like tofu and vegetables like daikon may contain more than 90 percent water, also demonstrating the extent to which Japanese food depends on abundant supplies of good, fresh water.
This is an extract from digital book of Introduction to Japanese cuisine.
