An Osechi New Year's

When the end of the year rolls around, the Japanese restaurants are swamped, not only by

忘年会 (bonenkai, 'forget the year parties' for groups of co-workers), but also because they begin gearing up for the iron chef cooking marathon that is お節料理 (osechi ryori). Osechi is traditional Japanese cold food arranged in boxes, meant to last and be eaten from Jan 1st-3rd, thus giving Mom a break in the kitchen over the holiday when everyone is supposed to abstain from work. Families who actually do this are perhaps one in a thousand. Most families buy or perhaps prepare a couple of their favorite osechi dishes; the richer families order them from restaurants. I say richer because osechi is extraordinarily expensive. A cheap one-tier box can may be had from the bento place down the street for $100. A nice three-tiered box set will run $400-$1000 or more. Our three-tiered sets were $700.

Since the food has to last for three days, it's nearly all partially preserved; no fresh sashimi here. The food also usually has symbolic meaning. Some restaurants will start prep as early as October, gradually getting more and more intense until the night of either the 30th or 31st, depending on when the pickup date is for the osechi, and the cooks will pull a 24-36 hour shift straight (by which I mean, one, maybe two meals and no breaks at all) finishing, arranging, and wrapping the boxes. More details about the food later, right now I'm barely starting to recover from the ordeal.

蝦夷馬糞雲丹 (Hokkaido Sea Urchin)

Sea urchin and poop. What do they have in common, other than both of them being something the average American does not stick in their mouth?

雲丹 (uni, sea urchin ovaries) are one of the 'three great delicacies under the heavens' (天下の三大珍味), along with karasumi (salted dried mullet roe) and konowata (fermented sea slug intestines). From personal experience, I can tell you it's the best of the three. It can be used in sauces or steamed, then deep-fried, but that's for the inferior stuff. Really good uni, like everything nice in Japanese cuisine, should be eaten raw.

There are two main kinds of uni: 紫雲丹 (purple uni) and 馬糞雲丹 (horse poop uni). Purple uni has long, delicate spines and lighter-colored ovaries, and horse poop uni (named for it's shape) has darker orange ovaries with a finer texture and is the favored variety.

Uni usually comes pre-packaged lined up in little trays, but we got our hands on a box of live uni at the restaurant. It's the first time I've ever dealt with them in the original form. We cut the tops off and served them as-is with a spoon. The staff was given one to split. The liquid inside was like seawater but not bitter, and the ovaries were smooth and very mild, with a sweetness that hit you in the aftertaste. Truly excellent.

The Haunting

Like every hotel ever built, any restaurant worth it's salt comes with a ghost. There is always talk of 'happenings' after close, when only one or two people are left in the building: cold gusts of wind, the phone ringing with no one on the line over and over, doors slamming, footsteps and other unexplained sounds, etc. Numerous chefs will claim these experiences, and then there is always The Story That Proves It, told by an old-timer who usually doesn't put stock in these things and related in utter seriousness. I don't really believe in ghosts, but it is quite creepy to be in a building usually flooded with light and people, empty and dark, and it doesn't take much to get spooked.

This ghostly tradition crosses borders and cultures. I was let in on the tales the other night over the staff meal. Apparently there is a cold wind that gusts near the front door sometimes even when it isn't open, and the phone plays tricks sometimes. The Story That Proves It is when Fugu Senpai was in the restaurant alone, and the phone rang. He could hear the voice of a child even though he couldn't really understand what was being said. That day outside the restaurant a little girl was in an accident and died. All involved swear to it's truthfulness.

Happy Halloween!

Failure

With a job as exacting as kaiseki cuisine, there's going to be a lot of failure at first, and a fair bit even down the line. Chefs make mistakes, have bad ideas, and ruin food often. If it's the owner or the top chef doing something funky, it's overlooked, but us little guys get hauled over the coals frequently for screwing up, whether it was really our fault or not. I was recently subject to a full-on explosion when I didn't vinegar mackerel correctly and the flesh broke apart. Never mind that the fish was too fatty to take the salting and vinegar (salt will melt the fat and make fish with lots of fat disintegrate), it was my responsibility to turn out a class product regardless of the original materials. As my direct superior, Fugu Senpai got it twice as rough as me for not following my every move. I felt terrible about that; it's not as if he doesn't get ripped up by Soba Master every day without me contributing to his stress load.

The upshot of all this is that when you do obtain the stray phrase of approval (usually expressed along the lines of 'that's acceptable', or by not getting yelled at), it means so much more. Japanese kitchens are not there to built up future chefs, they are there to rip you to your bones, extract every mistake and weakness, and reform you in their image. It's a very rough life, but that's why Japanese food is the classiest in the world.

新蕎麦: Shin-Soba, New Soba

Everyone in Japan gets worked up about the 新米 (shin-kome; new rice), the first rice from the fall harvest. The rice sits on the shelves from that time on, gradually drying out and getting tougher, so the softer, sweeter new rice is much regarded.

Soba is the same. The new harvest has just come out, and the 'aroma' of the soba is stronger using the new grains. Soba, aka buckwheat, has usual pyramid-shaped seeds which are ground and made into a flour used to make the grey noodles. Our current supply comes from Hokkaido. Most soba is grown in mountainous regions where rice was hard to grow, and became the staple.

It took me a long time to appreciate these very slight differences between things like this year's and last year's soba or rice. When I first came to Japan, everything tasted blah. I couldn't understand it when people got all worked up over a fish fresher than usual or a bowl of noodles in a fishy broth only slightly different from any other fishy broth. Not having the culinary background of this country, I also did things that shocked the residents because I treated the food differently. For example, I have been known to sauté soba noodles. Don't ever tell that to a Japanese person.

I get the subtleties now, and American food tastes too heavy and sweet. But it's still with a faint air of amusement that I watch those around me get excited or outraged over food that wasn't even a part of my life until a few years ago. To quote my former co-chef, we're making food, not building bombs, people.

I still recommend the new soba, though.

Eyeballs

I know you've been wanting to see this ever since the squid post. Here are the eyeballs in person, along with the beaks and unwanted long sections of the tentacles. Eyeballs have been following me today- after completing this job, I politely refused the offer of eating as part of my dinner a fish eye rivaling the size of my palm. You're supposed to put the whole thing in your mouth, squish and drink up, and pull out the surrounding cartilage ring. Dude.

天ぷら: Tempura

Speciality tempura restaurants, only serving fried food, are of the elite. You sit at the counter in front of the fryer and wait for tidbits to be deposited on your dish. They can cost more than a normal kaiseki meal if you go to a good place, i.e. $100 USD or more. It's hard for an American to swallow that kind of bill for a method of cooking associated with chicken fingers, so the best place I ever went only racked me up about $35 bucks.

The deal with tempura is that you have to get the batter right. At this stage in the chain of command at my restaurant, I've progressed to fry cook (again, dammit, I've gone through this stage in America so many times), at least for the cheaper lunch sets. The position is a bit more elite in Japan, anyway. My nemesis has turned out to be 海老, aka shrimp. People in various countries expect a certain aesthetic from their food, whether they realize it or not. Americans usually expect their shrimp to be curled up, the way shrimp do naturally. Japanese expect theirs to be stretched out straight, with the tail fanned, and when deep fried, to have plenty of batter bitlets sticking out of it. These are called 花 (hana; flower), because it looks like the shrimp is 'blooming'.

I'm lucky that we're using pre-mixed tempura flour and not making it from scratch, or this would be even harder; as it is, we have to go through a lengthy process of making cuts in the bottom of each shrimp, where the tendon is, and pressing them out to make them flat. The batter must be the correct mix, not too thick or the tempura will turn out cakey and not too thin or you can see the shrimp's skin through the batter (another no-no). Even with all the prep, the shrimp tend to curl in the fryer so you have to watch that, and squirting extra batter on top to form the right amount and texture of hana is the most irritating and difficult part. The shrimp are always served back-forward, so if the shrimp turned in the fryer and the hana formed on the stomach, it means nothing and the presentation is still bad. I'm gradually getting better, but I wonder where all these visual rules came from?