Culinary Curiosity and the Truth about Kobe Beef

It is a truth near-universally acknowledged that a yuppie on vacation must be in want of a cooking class. Cooking classes provide precisely the sort of cocktail party anecdotes beloved by the typical yuppie.  For example: "When we took our cooking class in Sicily, our instructor  insisted we try raw cow jaw at the local market. Raw cow jaw, carved right off the head!  Even the flies and the strays wouldn't eat our scraps!"

(True story.)

Inside Taro's home.

If you travel much around Japan, you will soon learn how rare an achievement it is to be invited inside a Japanese home. Our Kyoto cooking class snagged us just such an invitation, though I have not yet turned it into a full-fledged cocktail party anecdote.

Like most Japanese homes, Taro's uses space efficiently and elegantly.  The kitchen is not much larger than those found in American studio apartments, but with thoughtful planning and his wife's mis en place, Taro can accommodate up to three couples at a time.  Indeed, from the recipes to the lesson design, Taro's was the most organized tourist cooking class we've yet taken.

Elegant efficiency.

But recipes are generally of secondary importance for yuppie-appropriate cooking classes in foreign locales. The primary purpose is a sort of cultural immersion, with perhaps the side effect of picking up a new technique or two along the way.

To illustrate, a sampling of my take-aways from Taro's class:

1. Dashi:  Almost all Japanese cooking is based on dashi, a broth made from boiling kombu (dried kelp, a kind of seaweed) and bonito (dried fish flakes).  And whatever isn't made with dashi (which, frankly, is not much) will probably include a sprinkle of bonito flakes anyway, just for good measure. This is why almost no Japanese dish is truly vegetarian, even though the cuisine is based primarily on vegetables.

Every kind of bonito imaginable (they were actively flaking the fish in the back).

Now, Jeff and I being overachievers, we have been teaching ourselves the basics of Japanese cooking for the last couple of years. We already keep kombu and bonito in the cupboards, just in case we need to whip up fresh dashi on a moment's notice.  But here's what I didn't know: if you boil kombu excessively, the resulting broth is unappealingly green, cloudy, and rather bitter.  It used to be that home cooks would re-use kombu: the first broth made would be set aside for heavier dishes where the dashi flavor would not predominate, and only the secondary broth made from the re-boiled kombu would be used for miso soup.

But who today has time to make multiple batches of dashi? An alternative solution: Taro heats his kombu slowly and turns off the burner as soon as the water comes to a boil, letting the kelp steep in the hot water. He then adds the bonito flakes and repeats the process.  Or you can do as most modern Japanese families do, and buy instant dashi powder (just like bouillon). 

2. Miso strainer:  Miso soup, that major staple of the Japanese diet, is in its most basic form just dashi with miso mixed in.  As a preliminary note, I had not realized the variety - and quality - of miso available in Japan; this stuff was really good. Taro gets his from the local street market, where the miso store ferments the miso in-house and sells it from barrels larger than I can wrap my arms around.

So here's the trick: You don't just dump miso into your dashi and stir it around - the miso soup will come out all lumpy and crunchy (at least if you're using traditional miso that has rice and barley mixed in).  All Japanese homes have a handy-dandy miso strainer: just scoop the miso into the strainer's narrow basket, lower it into the broth, and mash at it with your cooking chopsticks (or other suitable instrument). Ta-da! Beautiful, cloudy miso soup.

3. Tamago: The Japanese omelet is used for everything from side dishes to sushi. We even saw market stands in Tokyo that sold nothing but pre-made tamago.  What makes tamago more than just your average omelet? Like most other Japanese dishes, tamago is made with dashi.  Yes, that's right: Japanese omelets are not vegetarian.

Tamago gets its distinctive shape from being cooked in a tamago pan: not round like European omelet pans, but rectangular.  Much of our cooking class was spent trying to master the rather tricky operation of making a tamago. This defies easy transcription: luckily, Taro has a youtube video that details the process.

Not that it was a competition or anything, but Taro declared Jeff's tamago the best of three. Just saying.

4. Kobe Beef:  It does not exist in the U.S.  No, really, it does not exist in the U.S.  

Dinner is served.

More information about Taro's cooking class is available online.  Sign up well in advance, especially if you want to take a market tour. I also have to plug Taro's extensive personal recommendations of what to see, do and - most importantly - eat around Kyoto.  I cannot recommend his recommendations highly enough.