Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Fabulous Nishiki Street Market

We had some free time in Kyoto and, with two couples from the tour, I returned to one of my favorite places in Kyoto, the Nishiki Street food market. This is one of the most interesting and attractive food markets in the world, with many of the best artisanal products available in Kyoto on display, including pickles of all kind; rice crackers; tofu and yuba (tofu skin);  fu (wheat gluten); dried fish; fresh meat, fish, poultry nad vegetables; tea sweets; spices and fresh roasted tea. Many stores offer free samples, which we downed with pleasure.

Before we hit the food stores, we stopped at Aritsugu, the famous knife and kitchen ware store that has been in business for more than 400 years, where one of our tour members bought two knives. New knives are sharpened before they are packed and, if the purchaser desires, engraved, as seen below.

Santoku being engraved at Aritsugu

That mission having been accomplished, we entered into the heart of the market. Here are some of the most photogenic displays we encountered.

Edamame

Tea roaster

Rice crackers with soybeans, black beans and peanuts

Miso pickled eggplant

Baum küchen - layer cake made on a spit

Yuba and rice crackers

Gift package of fu

Pickled radishes

Nori (seaweed) concentrate

Dried baby fish

Young woman pounding mochi

And on and on . . .

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - A Great Home-cooked Meal

As the tour continued, we paid a visit to Tsujimura Shiro, a ceramic artist who is renowned outside of Japan as well as in his home country for his rustic Shigaraki tea bowls and usable vessels - vases, sake cups and pourers, etc. Tsujimura lives and works in the hills outside of Nara (the eighth-century capital of Japan) in a house that he built with his own hands, but also drives two Porsches and a Harley-Davidson.

Visiting Tsujimura is quite an experience first, for the opportunity to admire his work and second, for the fantastic rustic lunch prepared by his wife, an amazing cook, and laid out on the wood floor of the aforesaid house, where the potter works the in-floor hibachi to grill steak and other items. Tsujimura beams with happiness as his guests enjoy the feast, which ends with matcha (powdered green tea) served in his wonderful bowls.

Lunch at Tsujimura Shiro's. That's him working the grill.

Tsujimura preparing matcha

We left Tsujimura's well-fed and happy. Most of us had no dinner that night.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Omen Noodles

Not all food in Kyoto is gorgeous kaiseki cuisine. The city has the full range of Japanese food, from sushi to humble noodles, curry rice and burgers.

One of our favorite noodle places is Omen, with its main restaurant near the temples in the eastern part of the city and a branch downtown on Shijo-dori. The flat udon noodles are perfect, clean tasting and just slightly al dente. And the broth, to which customers add their own spices (from a choice of four proprietary blends) and freshly ground sesame seeds, is also excellent. The tour went to the charming main restaurant; after the tour J and I went to the Sanjo-dori branch as well.

Flat udon at Omen

Udon doesn't get much better than this.

[Omen has a highly regarded branch in New York's Soho, but it is a regular Japanese restaurant and the noodles did not capture the magic of the original when I went there, admittedly a number of years ago.]

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kyoto's Kanamean Ryokan

Our next stop was Kyoto, the capital of Japan for hundreds of years and the city where the traditions of Japan are best preserved to this day. Kyoto is my favorite tourist destination in the world, a city of magnificent temples and gardens, beautiful streets and areas that look much as they did hundreds of years ago and, not insignificantly, refined and elegant cuisine.

We stayed at the Kanamean Ryokan, a centrally located inn that has been in the same family for 140 years, or five generations. The accommodations are excellent, with old charm but modern conveniences, and the food is sensational. We had a traditional kaiseki dinner, consisting of seasonal dishes beautifully presented on elegant plates by significant artists. The food was authentically Japanese, but the menu was carefully constructed to avoid some of the tastes and textures that would be difficult for Westerners. The only false note was the surprise of gloppy potatoes at the bottom of what otherwise was a beautiful crème brûlée: a bad fusion idea.

I can do not better than to let the most picturesque dishes speak for themselves. I urge you to click on the images to appreciate the details in all their splendor.

Breakfast, too, was a treat, with an array of well-prepared dishes made with ingredients of impeccable quality and presented with Kyoto flair.

I highly recommend this ryokan, which has received a Michelin star for its excellent cuisine.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Nikko and the Niki Club

After Kasama, the tour visited two artists and the Ibaraki Ceramics Museum before arriving at the Niki Club, a chic modern spa hotel in the woods designed with elegant simplicity by Terence Conran in the early 1990s.

Niki Club main building

Niki Club villas

The food at the Niki Club is fusion, mostly Western with strong Japanese influence, beautifully presented. Here are a couple of examples.

Dinner at the Niki Club

Our excursion was to Nikko, a beautiful mountain town that is the home of the famous Toshogu Shrine, where we received special blessings, including a blessing of the tour itself, which proved to be very useful as we dodged three typhoons and an earthquake in the course of our itinerary.

Toshogu Shrine

Toshogu - blessing of the tour and its members

It's always good to have the gods on your side.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Kasama

Leaving Tokyo, the tour headed north towards Mashiko, an important pottery area and the place where the mingei (folk art) movement in the mid-twentieth century was centered. We visited a young ceramic artist, the Mashiko Messe ceramic museum and the Hamada Shoji museum (Hamada was the leader of the mingei movement).

After a busy day, we spenth the night at a typical onsen (hot spring inn), Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel.  This is not a luxury inn and does not generally cater to Westerners, but rather to office and youth groups having off-site retreats and to families taking short vacations in the country. Here we found gaudy lavender yukata (robes) and generally unimpressive accommodations, including colored plastic tatami mats. However, we also discovered really nice public baths and surprisingly good food (and that's what the onsen experience is really about) served on strangely colored dishes that seemed reflect the proprietors' odd aesthetic vision.

Our guide in lavender yukata

Dinner at Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel

Custard in weird dish

Breakfast at Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel

Wonderful cabbage dish at breakfast. How did they make this?

Mashikokan Satoyama Resort Hotel is the best place to stay in the area and, despite our initial misgivings, it turned out to be a nice first stop.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo III

The members of our tour gathered and had a day in Tokyo before setting out for ceramics regions to the northeast. For lunch we stopped at Honmura An, a well-known soba shop in Roppongi.  (There was a branch in New York for a number of years, which closed a few years ago when the man running it returned to Tokyo to take over the main restaurant when his father died.)

The soba was, of course, excellent, highlighting the nuttiness of the buckwheat from which it is made and with a slightly al dente texture. My only problem is that, for some reason, Honmura An cuts the noodles in half, rendering it impossible to hold the noodles 12-18 inches above the tray before dipping them in the accompanying sauce, the classic technique for eating cold soba.

More surprising, however, was the high quality of the other items at Honmura An: crispy tempura, beautiful salad and a whole series of excellent side dishes.

Shrimp head tempura at Honmura An

Mushroom tempura at Honmura An

Salad at Honmura An

A good way to start the tour.

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo II

Kamameshi at Shofukuro

Our next dining stop in Tokyo was at Shofukuro, a Kansai-style restaurant located in the new Tokyo Building, a new skyscraper opposite Tokyo station, courtesy of our friends Ted P and the lovely Reiko.

The meal was beautiful and showed off the refinement and seasonality of Kansai (Kyoto) cuisine. My favorite presentation was the kamameshi (soupy rice) covered with chrysanthemum petals and topped with a karikari umeboshi (crunchy pickled small plum). What could better reflect the middle of October?

Bobby Jay

Japan 2013 - Tokyo

My wife Joan, the leading dealer outside of Japan in contemporary Japanese ceramics, is leading another ceramics tour for some of her most avid clients. (See my numerous posts from November 2011 for a chronicle of her last tour.)

We are now in Tokyo preparing for the 2013 tour and visiting friends and Japanese art events and dealers. On our second night we were taken to Kuouesu, a counter-style restaurant whose owner-chef enjoys collecting fine ceramics and using them to present his refined food. As is typical of this type of restaurant, there were numerous courses, many of which highlighted autumnal foods and ingredients as well as showcasing the plates and vessels in which they were served.

Here are some examples:

More beautiful food to come as our trip unfolds.

Bobby Jay

One of the Best Meals I've Ever Cooked

We had dear friends for dinner last night, and one of the guests has complained that when he eats at fine restaurants, the food is too heavy and too much. So in his honor I made the following nearly all vegetarian meal (but with fish and a cake containing eggs and buttermilk). A huge success!

Hors d'oeuvres

Toasted baguette slices with Salvatore smoked ricotta and diced sun-dried tomatoes. My own idea.
Puff pastry bâtons filled with tapenade, inspired by Dorie Greenspan's Around My French Table.

Appetizer

Roasted butternut squash with sweet spices (fresh-ground allspice and smashed cardamom), limes and sliced jalapeño peppers, and yogurt-tahini sauce, slavishly following the recipe in Ottolenghi's brilliant Plenty. This was just sensational, with the interplay between the sweet cardamom and allspice, the sour limes and the spicy jalapeños mediated by the mild but nutty tahini-yogurt sauce.

Main

Striped bass with preserved lemon dressing and baby carrots, from Joe Isadoro (via Ina Garten), with squished potatoes from Laura Calder. Another winning new dish, with wonderful freshly caught Long Island bass filets from the Sunday morning greenmarket behind the Museum of Natural History.

Salad

Simple salad of local micro greens with a mild citrus dressing.

Dessert

Candied fennel lemon cake, from a 2009 Gourmet recipe, with homemade rosemary ice cream, both  standby favorites. The counterpoint between the licorice-y flavor of the fennel and the tartness of the lemon zest and juice leaves your head spinning but in a really nice, comforting way.

Everything came out perfectly, a nearly unprecedented feat for me. No leftover parsley or cilantro that I forgot to put in, nothing overcooked, etc. Lots of courses, but light enough for our friend and full-flavored enough for all of us.

Bobby Jay

Around Dorie Greenspan's French Table - A Great Place to Be

I have just finished reading Dorie Greenspan's masterpiece, Around My French Table: More than 300 Recipes from My Home to Yours. Published in 2010, this book gave rise to numerous blogs and web sites devoted to discussions of the recipes, and the experiences of the various writers in making them. The most notable of these is Fridays with Dorie, which recounts a four-year project to make all the recipes in the book.

Having read most of the major French cookbooks, including more than ten by my idol Jacques Pépin and five by Patricia Wells in addition to the Julia Child books that started it all, I believe that Dorie's is the best. It is thoughtful, comprehensive (although not encyclopedic), authentic, well-written and beautifully illustrated. It is full of great insights, tips and interesting gastronomic history in addition to a cornucopia of carefully selected and well-edited recipes.

While I do not aspire to make all 300+ recipes, I have made several already and plan to make many, many more. For example, her Mustard Batons, puff pastry sticks filled with Dijon mustard, have already become my go-to hors d'oeuvre. See my recent post on Celebrating the New Year for illustrations of the bâtons and the salmon rillettes mentioned below.

Dorie's Salmon Rillettes are a classic rendition of the dish, less butter than the version I learned at cooking school but still satisfying. (I had less success with her Cheez-it-ish Crackers, which came out nice and cheesy but too crumbly, although they were perfect the next day when sprinkled over the soup next mentioned.) Creamy Cauliflower Soup Sans Cream is an elegant homage to the vegetable. Sour Cherry Clafoutis is a classic version of this wonderful way to take advantage of the too-short season for this amazing fruit. Finally, M Jacques Armagnac Chicken is an amazingly simple, but, as promised, complex braised dish that Dorie picked up from Jacques Drouot of the famous Dôme brasserie.

There are lots more chicken dishes, and I plan to try them all. Also dozens of appealing appetizers, soups, vegetables, meat, fish, quiches and other egg dishes and a large array of classic desserts. Where the recipes presented are classics, Dorie sets forth imaginative variations in her bonnes idées set out in the margins. Where she deviates from the classic, which is most of the time, she often uses an accompanying bonne idée to tell the reader how to make the classic.

Here's an example, and one of the recipes I plan to try soon: a mustard tart with carrots and leeks, with the recipe for the more classic tomato mustard tart featured as a bonne idée.

"Gérard's Mustard Tart," from Around My French Table

While I am not going to join the cook-the-whole-book cult, I will definitely be using many recipes from this book. If you have room for only one book on French cooking -- and that would be a shame -- this is the one to get.

Bobby Jay

Tarte Tatin Revisited

I'm still not jaded when it comes to Tarte Tatin. Although it's not my favorite dessert, it's great for company because (i) everyone loves it, (ii) it's really impressive and (iii) it can be made ahead.

So I recently made one with what I thought was the official recipe, sanctioned by the Confrérie des Lichonneux de Tarte Tatin, a French society that is devoted to this delicacy (only in France: consider the AAAAA - Association Amicale des Amateurs d'Andouillette Authentique).

Here's the result, which was very lovely but a little watery: slightly under-caramelized.

I posted this on Facebook and had a surprising number of comments and questions. One asked for the recipe so I embarked on a search to make sure what I had used was in fact "official." It turned out that it was not, but rather a (very significantly simplified) adaptation published in the New York Times. That led me on a hunt for the real original, which in turn took me to French web sites. The Confrérie's web site does not have the official version, but I found a site that gives a recipe that purports to be the vraie chose.  Adventurous French-speakers can find this at Sabine . . . En Quête de Cuisine.

My quest was not over, however, as Sabine's recipe was in French and had a couple of steps too many. So I hunted until I found a reliable version from Dorie Greenspan that was published in Fine Cooking in 2010. Dorie's recipe is very similar, though in more detail, to the one I used, which is set forth below.

"OFFICIAL" TARTE TATIN

(Adapted from the Confrerie des Lichonneux de Tarte Tatin, via New York Times)

Ingredients		Directions
·       8 tablespoons butter, at room temperature ·       1 cup sugar ·       6 medium Gala or Golden Delicious apples, peeled, cored and cut into quarters ·       1 thin ( 1/8-inch) sheet puff pastry, cut into a circle 12 inches in diameter (I use regular pâte brisée).		1.     Spread butter evenly in a 10-inch tarte Tatin mold or heavy 10-inch nonstick ovenproof skillet. Spread sugar as evenly as possible on sides and bottom of pan. Beginning at edge of pan, arrange apples peeled side down in concentric circles, fitting apples closely together. 2.     Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place pan over high heat, and cook without stirring until sugar caramelizes and turns dark golden brown, 15 to 20 minutes. Remove from the heat, and press gently on the apples with a wooden spoon to help fill any spaces between them. Cover the apples with puff pastry, overlapping the rim of the pan. Bake until the pastry is golden brown, about 30 minutes. 3.     Remove tart from oven, and allow to rest for 5 minutes. Cover pan with a large plate, and quickly invert tart; remove pan. Serve hot or warm

Try one or more recipes for this classic, or send me your own!

Bobby Jay

En passant (6) . . . Peanut Butter and Chorizo; Salvatore Smoked Ricotta; Vitamix

. . . wherein I write about things that deserve to be mentioned but are not worthy of a full post.

1. PB&C?!

Peanut butter (preferably hot) on toasted Turkish bread with chorizo. Nothing I can say can make this sound better (or worse) than the enumeration of the agreement, together with the thousand words' worth of photo below. Search "peanut butter" above to find several posts on combining this great ingredient with unexpected ingredients.

Peanut butter & chorizo on toasted Turkish bread

2. Salvatore Smoked Ricotta

Salvatore Smoked Ricotta

This spectacularly smooth ricotta with a wisp of smoke is guaranteed to make you smile. I had it recently on a piece of toasted baguette topped with kernels from an ear of grilled corn that I bought at the Columbus Avenue fair: smoke with smoke. But it's great by itself. I bought it at Saxelby's, in the Essex Market, but have also seen it at Eataly. Here's a link to Salvatore's web site.

 3. Vitamix

Vitamix 7500

I finally splurged and got one, Model 7500 -- new, lower profile; 64-oz container; not programmable like the 750, but that did not seem to be worth the extra money. So far it's pretty spectacular. I made my famous corn soup today and, for the first time, I was able to get it all into the blender in one load

Bobby Jay