Rice, Noodle, Fish Quotes

“Like any great and good country, Japan has a culture of gathering- weddings, holidays, seasonal celebrations- with food at the core. In the fall, harvest celebrations mark the changing of the guard with roasted chestnuts, sweet potatoes, and skewers of grilled gingko nuts. As the cherry blossoms bloom, festive picnics called hanami usher in the spring with elaborate spreads of miso salmon, mountain vegetables, colorful bento, and fresh mochi turned pink with sakura petals.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“If you blink, you might miss it. You might miss the wet floor at the threshold, symbolically cleansing you before the meal begins. You might overlook the flower arrangement in the corner, a spare expression of the passing season. You might miss the scroll on the wall drawn with a single unbroken line, signaling the infinite continuity of nature. You might not detect the gentle current of young ginger rippling through the dashi, the extra sheet of Hokkaido kelp in the soup, the mochi that is made to look like a cherry blossom at midnight.
You might miss the water.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture. Japan’s most famous shokunin these days is Jiro Ono, immortalized in the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but you will encounter his level of relentless focus across the entire food industry.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“This isn’t hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter—feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Contrary to popular belief, sushi isn’t about freshness; it’s about timing. Not just having your rice the proper temperature, but also having your fish the perfect age. Serve fish too soon out of the water and the muscles will be tight and the flavor underdeveloped. Wait too long and the protein turns to mush.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it really fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles—microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Chikako and Ben's lives are inexorably linked linked to an ever-expanding list of seasonal tasks. In summer, they work through the garden bounty, drying and pickling the fruits and vegetables at peak ripeness. Fall brings chestnuts to pick, chili paste to make, mushrooms to hunt. Come winter, Noto's seas are flush with the finest sea creatures, which means pickling fish for hinezushi and salting squid guts for ishiri. In the spring, after picking mountain vegetables and harvesting seaweed, they plant the garden and begin the cycle that will feed them, their family, and their guests in the year ahead.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“To understand how seriously the people of Noto take the concept of waste, consider the fugu dilemma. Japanese blowfish, best known for its high toxicity, has been a staple of Noto cuisine for hundreds of years. During the late Meiji and early Edo periods, local cooks in Noto began to address a growing concern with fugu fabrication; namely, how to make use of the fish's deadly ovaries. Pregnant with enough poison to kill up to twenty people, the ovaries- like the toxic liver- had always been disposed of, but the cooks of Noto finally had enough of the waste and set out to crack the code of the toxic reproductive organs. Thus ensued a long, perilous period of experimentation. Locals rubbed ovaries in salt, then in nukamiso, a paste made from rice bran, and left them to ferment. Taste-testing the not-quite-detoxified fugu ovary was a lethal but necessary part of the process, and many years and many lives later, they arrived at a recipe that transformed the ovaries from a deadly disposable into an intensely flavored staple. Today pickled fugu ovaries remain one of Noto's most treasured delicacies.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Rice paddies climb the hillsides in wet, verdant staircases, dense woodlands trade space with geometric farmscapes, tiny Shinto shrines sprout like mushrooms in Noto forests. Villages seem to materialize from nowhere- wedged into valleys, perched atop hills, finessed into coastal corners. Pull over, climb out of your car, breathe deep for a taste of the finest air that will ever enter your lungs: green as a high mountain, salty and sweet, with just a whisper of decay in the finish.
Noto gained its reputation as the Kingdom of Fermentation because of this air. For most of its history, Noto was cut off from the rest of Japan, forced into a subsistence model that in many ways endures today. That was possible not only because of the bounty of Noto's fertile environment of trees, grasslands, fresh water, and sea, but because the air is rich with humidity that encourages the growth of healthy bacteria, the building blocks of fermentation.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“It's 10:00 a.m., time for the second round of baking of the day. After feeding the fire with chunks of maple, he loads the bread and pastries according to cooking time: first the fat country rounds, then long, skinny loaves dense with nuts and dried fruit, and finally a dozen purple crescent moons: raspberry croissants pocked with chunks of white chocolate.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“The clearest signs of Hakodate's current greatness, though, can be found clustered around its central train station, in the morning market, where blocks and blocks of pristine seafood explode onto the sidewalks like an edible aquarium, showcasing the might of the Japanese fishing industry.
Hokkaido is ground zero for the world's high-end sushi culture. The cold waters off the island have long been home to Japan's A-list of seafood: hairy crab, salmon, scallops, squid, and, of course, uni. The word "Hokkaido" attached to any of these creatures commands a premium at market, one that the finest sushi chefs around the world are all too happy to pay.
Most of the Hokkaido haul is shipped off to the Tsukiji market in Tokyo, where it's auctioned and scattered piece by piece around Japan and the big cities of the world. But the island keeps a small portion of the good stuff for itself, most of which seems to be concentrated in a two-hundred-meter stretch in Hakodate.
Everything here glistens with that sparkly sea essence, and nearly everything is meant to be consumed in the moment. Live sea urchins, piled high in hillocks of purple spikes, are split with scissors and scraped out raw with chopsticks. Scallops are blowtorched in their shells until their edges char and their sweet liquor concentrates. Somewhere, surely, a young fishmonger will spoon salmon roe directly into your mouth for the right price.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“I first came to Hokkaido for two reasons: miso ramen and uni, the island's most famous foods and two items on my short list for Last Supper constituents. The only thing they share in common, besides a home, is the intense fits of joy they deliver: the former made from an unholy mix of pork-bone broth, thick miso paste, and wok-crisped pork belly (with the optional addition of a slab of melting Hokkaido butter), the latter arguably the sexiest food on earth, yolk-orange tongues of raw sea urchin roe with a habit-forming blend of fat and umami, sweetness and brine. Fall for uni at your own peril; like heroin and high-stakes poker, it's an expensive addiction that's tough to kick.
But my dead-simple plan- to binge on both and catch the first flight back to Tokyo- has been upended by a steam locomotive and Whole Foods foliage, and suddenly Hokkaido seems much bigger than an urchin and a bowl of soup. No one told me about the rolling farmlands, the Fuji-like volcanoes, the stunning national parks, one stacked on top of the other. Nobody said there would be wine. And cheese. And bread.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“But this isn't standard Japanese picnic fare: not a grain of rice or a pickled plum in sight. Instead, they fill the varnished wooden tables with thick slices of crusty bread, wedges of weeping cheese, batons of hard salamis, and slices of cured ham. To drink, bottles of local white wine, covered in condensation, and high-alcohol microbews rich in hops and local iconography.
From the coastline we begin our slow, dramatic ascent into the mountains of Hokkaido. The colors bleed from broccoli to banana to butternut to beet as we climb, inching ever closer to the heart of autumn. My neighbors, an increasingly jovial group of thirtysomethings with a few words of English to spare, pass me a glass of wine and a plate of cheese, and I begin to feel the fog dissipate.
We stop at a small train station in the foothills outside of Ginzan, and my entire car suddenly empties. A husband-and-wife team has set up a small stand on the train platform, selling warm apple hand pies made with layers of flaky pastry and apples from their orchard just outside of town. I buy one, take a bite, then immediately buy there more.
Back on the train, young uniformed women flood the cars with samples of Hokkaido ice cream. The group behind me breaks out in song, a ballad, I'm later told, dedicated to the beauty of the season. Everywhere we go, from the golden fields of empty cornstalks to the dense forest thickets to the rushing rivers that carve up this land like the fat of a Wagyu steak, groups of camouflaged photographers lie in wait, tripods and shutter releases ready, hoping to capture the perfect photo of the SL Niseko steaming its way through the hills of Hokkaido.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“As Japan recovered from the post-war depression, okonomiyaki became the cornerstone of Hiroshima's nascent restaurant culture. And with new variables- noodles, protein, fishy powders- added to the equation, it became an increasingly fungible concept. Half a century later it still defies easy description. Okonomi means "whatever you like," yaki means "grill," but smashed together they do little to paint a clear picture. Invariably, writers, cooks, and oko officials revert to analogies: some call it a cabbage crepe; others a savory pancake or an omelet. Guidebooks, unhelpfully, refer to it as Japanese pizza, though okonomiyaki looks and tastes nothing like pizza. Otafuku, for its part, does little to clarify the situation, comparing okonomiyaki in turn to Turkish pide, Indian chapati, and Mexican tacos.
There are two overarching categories of okonomiyaki Hiroshima style, with a layer of noodles and a heavy cabbage presence, and Osaka or Kansai style, made with a base of eggs, flour, dashi, and grated nagaimo, sticky mountain yam. More than the ingredients themselves, the difference lies in the structure: whereas okonomiyaki in Hiroshima is carefully layered, a savory circle with five or six distinct layers, the ingredients in Osaka-style okonomiyaki are mixed together before cooking. The latter is so simple to cook that many restaurants let you do it yourself on table side teppans. Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki, on the other hand, is complicated enough that even the cooks who dedicate their lives to its construction still don't get it right most of the time. (Some people consider monjayaki, a runny mass of meat and vegetables popularized in Tokyo's Tsukishima district, to be part of the okonomiyaki family, but if so, it's no more than a distant cousin.)
Otafuku entered the picture in 1938 as a rice vinegar manufacturer. Their original factory near Yokogawa Station burned down in the nuclear attack, but in 1946 they started making vinegar again. In 1950 Otafuku began production of Worcestershire sauce, but local cooks complained that it was too spicy and too thin, that it didn't cling to okonomiyaki, which was becoming the nutritional staple of Hiroshima life. So Otafuku used fruit- originally orange and peach, later Middle Eastern dates- to thicken and sweeten the sauce, and added the now-iconic Otafuku label with the six virtues that the chubby-cheeked lady of Otafuku, a traditional character from Japanese folklore, is supposed to represent, including a little nose for modesty, big ears for good listening, and a large forehead for wisdom.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“It starts with a thwack, the sharp crack of hard plastic against a hot metal surface. When the ladle rolls over, it deposits a pale-yellow puddle of batter onto the griddle. A gentle sizzle, as the back of the ladle sparkles a mixture of eggs, flour, water, and milk across the silver surface. A crepe takes shape.
Next comes cabbage, chopped thin- but not too thin- and stacked six inches high, lightly packed so hot air can flow freely and wilt the mountain down to a molehill. Crowning the cabbage comes a flurry of tastes and textures: ivory bean sprouts, golden pebbles of fried tempura batter, a few shakes of salt, and, for an extra umami punch, a drift of dried bonito powder. Finally, three strips of streaky pork belly, just enough to umbrella the cabbage in fat, plus a bit more batter to hold the whole thing together. With two metal spatulas and a gentle rocking of the wrists, the mass is inverted. The pork fat melts on contact, and the cabbage shrinks in the steam trapped under the crepe.
Then things get serious. Thin wheat soba noodles, still dripping with hot water, hit the teppan, dancing like garden hoses across its hot surface, absorbing the heat of the griddle until they crisp into a bird's nest to house the cabbage and crepe. An egg with two orange yolks sizzles beside the soba, waiting for its place on top of this magnificent heap.
Everything comes together: cabbage and crepe at the base, bean sprouts and pork belly in the center, soba and fried egg parked on top, a geologic construction of carbs and crunch, protein and chew, all framed with the black and white of thickened Worcestershire and a zigzag of mayonnaise.
This is okonomiyaki, the second most famous thing that ever happened to Hiroshima.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Kamimura has been whispering all week of a sacred twenty-four-hour ramen spot located on a two-lane highway in Kurume where truckers go for the taste of true ramen. The shop is massive by ramen standards, big enough to fit a few trucks along with those drivers, and in the midafternoon a loose assortment of castaways and road warriors sit slurping their noodles. Near the entrance a thick, sweaty cauldron boils so aggressively that a haze of pork fat hangs over the kitchen like waterfall mist.
While few are audacious enough to claim ramen is healthy, tonkotsu enthusiasts love to point out that the collagen in pork bones is great for the skin. "Look at their faces!" says Kamimura. "They're almost seventy years old and not a wrinkle! That's the collagen. Where there is tonkotsu, there is rarely a wrinkle."
He's right: the woman wears a faded purple bandana and sad, sunken eyes, but even then she doesn't look a day over fifty. She's stirring a massive cauldron of broth, and I ask her how long it's been simmering for.
"Sixty years," she says flatly.
This isn't hyperbole, not exactly. Kurume treats tonkotsu like a French country baker treats a sourdough starter- feeding it, regenerating, keeping some small fraction of the original soup alive in perpetuity. Old bones out, new bones in, but the base never changes. The mother of all ramen.
Maruboshi Ramen opened in 1958, and you can taste every one of those years in the simple bowl they serve. There is no fancy tare, no double broth, no secret spice or unexpected toppings: just pork bones, noodles, and three generations of constant simmering.
The flavor is pig in its purest form, a milky broth with no aromatics or condiments to mitigate the purity of its porcine essence.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Irie serves me three ramens, including a bowl made with a rich dashi and head-on shrimp and another studded with spicy ground pork and wilted spinach and lashed with chili oil. Both are exceptionally delicious, sophisticated creations, but it's his interpretation of tonkotsu that leaves me muttering softly to myself. The noodles are firm and chewy, the roast pork is striped with soft deposits of warm fat, and the toppings- white curls of shredded spring onion, chewy strips of bamboo, a perfect square of toasted seaweed- are skillfully applied. Here it is the combination of tare, the culmination of years of careful tinkering, and broth, made from whole pig heads and knots of ginger, that defies the laws of tonkotsu: a soup with the savory, meaty intensity of a broth made from a thousand pigs that's light enough to leave you wanting more. And more. And more.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Fukuoka, more than any other city in Japan, is responsible for ramen's rocket-ship trajectory, and the ensuing shift in Japan's cultural identity abroad. Between Hide-Chan, Ichiran, and Ippudo- three of the biggest ramen chains in the world- they've brought the soup to corners of the globe that still thought ramen meant a bag of dried noodles and a dehydrated spice packet. But while Ichiran and Ippudo are purveyors of classic tonkotsu, undoubtedly the defining ramen of the modern era, Hideto has a decidedly different belief about ramen and its mutability.
"There are no boundaries for ramen, no rules," he says. "It's all freestyle."
As we talk at his original Hide-Chan location in the Kego area of Fukuoka, a new bowl arrives on the table, a prototype for his borderless ramen philosophy. A coffee filter is filled with katsuobushi, smoked skipjack tuna flakes, and balanced over a bowl with a pair of chopsticks. Hideto pours chicken stock through the filter, which soaks up the katsuobushi and emerges into the bowl as clear as a consommé. He adds rice noodles and sawtooth coriander then slides it over to me.
Compared with other Hide-Chan creations, though, this one shows remarkable restraint. While I sip the soup, Hideto pulls out his cell phone and plays a video of him layering hot pork cheeks and cold noodles into a hollowed-out porcelain skull, then dumping a cocktail shaker filled with chili oil, shrimp oil, truffle oil, and dashi over the top. Other creations include spicy arrabbiata ramen with pancetta and roasted tomatoes, foie gras ramen with orange jam and blueberry miso, and black ramen made with bamboo ash dipped into a mix of miso and onions caramelized for forty-five days.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“In theory, toppings can include almost anything, but 95 percent of the ramen you consume in Japan will be topped with chashu, Chinese-style roasted pork. In a perfect world, that means luscious slices of marinated belly or shoulder, carefully basted over a low temperature until the fat has rendered and the meat collapses with a hard stare. Beyond the pork, the only other sure bet in a bowl of ramen is negi, thinly sliced green onion, little islands of allium sting in a sea of richness. Pickled bamboo shoots (menma), sheets of nori, bean sprouts, fish cake, raw garlic, and soy-soaked eggs are common constituents, but of course there is a whole world of outlier ingredients that make it into more esoteric bowls, which we'll get into later.
While shape and size will vary depending on region and style, ramen noodles all share one thing in common: alkaline salts. Called kansui in Japanese, alkaline salts are what give the noodles a yellow tint and allow them to stand up to the blistering heat of the soup without degrading into a gummy mass. In fact, in the sprawling ecosystem of noodle soups, it may be the alkaline noodle alone that unites the ramen universe: "If it doesn't have kansui, it's not ramen," Kamimura says.
Noodles and toppings are paramount in the ramen formula, but the broth is undoubtedly the soul of the bowl, there to unite the disparate tastes and textures at work in the dish. This is where a ramen chef makes his name. Broth can be made from an encyclopedia of flora and fauna: chicken, pork, fish, mushrooms, root vegetables, herbs, spices. Ramen broth isn't about nuance; it's about impact, which is why making most soup involves high heat, long cooking times, and giant heaps of chicken bones, pork bones, or both.
Tare is the flavor base that anchors each bowl, that special potion- usually just an ounce or two of concentrated liquid- that bends ramen into one camp or another. In Sapporo, tare is made with miso. In Tokyo, soy sauce takes the lead. At enterprising ramen joints, you'll find tare made with up to two dozen ingredients, an apothecary's stash of dried fish and fungus and esoteric add-ons. The objective of tare is essentially the core objective of Japanese food itself: to pack as much umami as possible into every bite.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“To be a ramen writer of Kamimura's stature, you need to live in a ramen town, and there is unquestionably no town in Japan more dedicated to ramen than Fukuoka. This city of 1.5 million along the northern coast of Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands, is home to two thousand ramen shops, representing Japan's densest concentration of noodle-soup emporiums. While bowls of ramen are like snowflakes in Japan, Fukuoka is known as the cradle of tonkotsu, a pork-bone broth made milky white by the deposits of fat and collagen extracted during days of aggressive boiling. It is not simply a specialty of the city, it is the city, a distillation of all its qualities and calluses.
Indeed, tell any Japanese that you've been to Fukuoka and invariably the first question will be: "How was the tonkotsu?”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“We start with a next-generation miso soup: Kyoto's famous sweet white miso whisked with dashi made from lobster shells, with large chunks of tender claw meat and wilted spinach bobbing on the soup's surface.
The son takes a cube of topflight Wagyu off the grill, charred on the outside, rare in the center, and swaddles it with green onions and a scoop of melting sea urchin- a surf-and-turf to end all others.
The father lays down a gorgeous ceramic plate with a poem painted on its surface. "From the sixteenth century," he tells us, then goes about constructing the dish with his son, piece by piece: First, a chunk of tilefish wrapped around a grilled matsutake mushroom stem. Then a thick triangle of grilled mushroom cap, plus another grilled stem the size of a D-sized battery, topped with mushroom miso. A pickled ginger shoot, a few tender soybeans, and the crowning touch, the tilefish skin, separated from its body and fried into a ripple wave of crunch.
The rice course arrives in a small bamboo steamer. The young chef works quickly. He slices curtains of tuna belly from a massive, fat-streaked block, dips it briefly in house-made soy sauce, then lays it on the rice. Over the top he spoons a sauce of seaweed and crushed sesame seeds just as the tuna fat begins to melt into the grains below.
A round of tempura comes next: a harvest moon of creamy pumpkin, a gold nugget of blowfish capped with a translucent daikon sauce, and finally a soft, custardy chunk of salmon liver, intensely fatty with a bitter edge, a flavor that I've never tasted before.
The last savory course comes in a large ice block carved into the shape of a bowl. Inside, a nest of soba noodles tinted green with powdered matcha floating in a dashi charged with citrus and topped with a false quail egg, the white fashioned from grated daikon.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Rice is sacred to the Japanese people," he says. "We eat it at every meal, yet we never get tired of it." He points out that the word for rice in Japanese, gohan, is the same as the word for meal.
When he finally lifts the lid of the first rice cooker, releasing a dramatic gasp of starchy steam, the entire restaurant looks ready to wave their white napkins in exuberant applause.
The rice is served with a single anchovy painstakingly smoked over a charcoal fire. Below the rice, a nest of lightly grilled matsutake mushrooms; on top, an orange slice of compressed fish roe. Together, an intense wave of umami to fortify the tender grains of rice.
Next comes okoge, the crispy rice from the bottom of the pan, served with crunchy flakes of sea salt and oil made from the outside kernel of the rice, spiked with spicy sansho pepper. For the finale, an island of crisp rice with wild herbs and broth from the cooked rice, a moving rendition of chazuke, Japanese rice-and-tea soup. It's a husk-to-heart exposé on rice, striking in both its simplicity and its soul-warming deliciousness- the standard by which all rice I ever eat will be judged.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“With each new course, he offers up little bites of the ethos that drives his cooking, the tastes and the words playing off each other like a kaiseki echo chamber.
Ark shell, a bulging, bright orange clam peeking out of its dark shell, barely cooked, dusted with seaweed salt.
"To add things is easy; to take them away is the challenge."
Bamboo, cut into wedges, boiled in mountain water and served in a wide, shallow bowl with nothing but the cooking liquid.
"How can we make the ingredient taste more like itself?With heat, with water, with knifework."
Tempura: a single large clam, cloaked in a pale, soft batter with more chew than crunch. The clam snaps under gentle pressure, releasing a warm ocean of umami.
"I want to make a message to the guest: this is the best possible way to cook this ingredient."
A meaty fillet of eel wrapped around a thumb of burdock root, glazed with soy and mirin, grilled until crispy: a three-bite explosion that leaves you desperate for more.
"The meal must go up and down, following strong flavors with subtle flavors, setting the right tone for the diner."
And it does, rising and falling, ebbing and flowing, until the last frothy drop of matcha is gone, signaling the end of the meal.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special- ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement- but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets to try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles- microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement.
The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“What to eat? You've crossed a dozen time zones to get here and you want to make every meal count. Do you start at an izakaya, a Japanese pub, and eat raw fish and grilled chicken parts and fried tofu, all washed down with a river of cold sake? Do you seek out the familiar nourishment of noodles- ramen, udon, soba- and let the warmth and beauty of this cuisine slip gloriously past your lips? Or maybe you wade into the vast unknown, throw yourself entirely into the world of unfamiliar flavors: a bowl of salt-roasted eel, a mound of sticky fermented soybeans, a nine-course kaiseki feast.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“There are succulent loins of fatty pork fried in scales of thin bread crumbs and served with bowls of thickened Worcestershire and dabs of fiery mustard. Giant pots of curry, dark and brooding as a sudden summer storm, where apples and onions and huge hunks of meat are simmered into submission over hours. Or days. There is okonomiyaki, the great geologic mass of carbs and cabbage and pork fat that would feel more at home on a stoner's coffee table than a Japanese tatami mat.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“If Parts Unknown and its many imitators have taught us anything, it’s that we’re living in the Golden Age of Gastrotourism. The same people who once traveled to Rome to stare at statues now go to twirl bucatini on their forks and filter balls of burrata onto their Instagram accounts.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“Prepare yourself: First, strip down. No bathing suits, no underwear. Cover tattoos (often banned because of their connection to yakuza). Scrub yourself head to toe. Now you’re ready to soak it all up.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“First of all, it’s the size. New York City has some 30,000 restaurants; Tokyo, 300,000. (Take a moment to let that sink in, please.)”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture

“For dinner, he serves dishes such as raw local fish accented with touches like fresh basil and balsamic vinegar; roasted pumpkin soup laced with ishiri; fat, chewy handmade spaghetti with tender rings of squid on a puddle of ink enhanced with another few drops of fish sauce. It's what Italian food would be if Italy were a windswept peninsula in the Far East.
If dinner is Ben's personal take on Noto ingredients, breakfast still belongs to his in-laws. It's an elaborate a.m. feast, fierce in flavor, rich in history, dense with centuries of knowledge passed from one generation to the next: soft tofu dressed with homemade soy and yuzu chili paste; soup made with homemade miso and simmered fish bones; shiso leaves fermented kimchi-style, with chilies and ishiri; kaibe, rice mixed with ishiri and fresh baby squid, pressed into patties and grilled slowly over a charcoal fire; yellowtail fermented for six months, called the blue cheese of the sea for its lactic funk. The mix of plates will change from one morning to the next but will invariably include a small chunk of konka saba, mackerel fermented for up to five years, depending on the day you visit. Even when it's broken into tiny pieces and sprinkled over rice, the years of fermentation will pulse through your body like an electric current.”
― Matt Goulding, Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture