Denim on Eat: Simple food that could sterilize a stomach

In my years of living in Tokyo, my stomach has gotten somewhat sterilized. And that is a huge inconvenience every time I have a home vacation where my stomach violently objects to my top cravings. Once, I ate some Laksa (a spicy coconut-based seafood noodle dish) and by the next day, I was down with a bad stomach which ailed me for a week and a sore throat that took time to heal. That was precious stomach space wasted where I could have safely eaten something like chee cheong fun instead.

So I have learnt to strategize my intake. Upon touchdown, I have to start the food hunt slowly. A lotus-paste bao here, a yong tau foo there. Nothing spicy, nothing wok-fried. Then after the stomach is accustomed to that small section of local flavors then I can move on to expand on my repertoire. It is a slow and deliberate process but one that I dare not risk skipping should the stomach give up and resign me to my plain crackers and milo drink.

Having learnt how my stomach has turned foreign has attuned me to the differences in the food here. Basically, there is very little oil used in their everyday cooking. Putting the tonkatsu (deep-fried pork cutlet) and tempura aside as they are fanfare you enjoy in restaurants, the food is usually flavored sweetly by a combination of soya sauce and mirin. This is unusual for a Singapore-trained palate. I remember grimacing at the sweetness of food at the beginning. This is like having dessert for your main course! I'd once remarked.

Shogayaki (Sweet ginger sauté pork)

Over time, I realized that the flavoring actually helps enhance and brings out the sweetness in the natural flavor of foods in vegetables or meat. Another key to why it works could also lie in the freshness of the ingredients used. As much as it sounds insane to pay nearly double for half a portion of the vegetables you can get in Singapore, the price for domestic groceries is well accounted for by the level of freshness they promise. Whereas in Singapore, one would have to sort out the good and the bad bits of the bunch of greens, in Tokyo, I find myself being able to toss the whole packet in most of the time. Their standard variety, in terms of vegetables and fish, cannot compete with the imported array Singaporeans enjoy but if you want to cook like a Japanese, you will learn to adjust your food with the season.

Vegetables at a local store

For example, when it is near Autumn, the Sanma (pacific saury), which is what Japanese term a blue fish, gets perfectly plumped with unsaturated fatty acids. When grilled with just a dash of salt on its surface, it becomes a dish in itself. The oil naturally emitted by the fish is sweet and tasty. It is simple and the only hassle is the cleaning of the grill after. And that is why most Japanese kitchens, however small, come with a grill. It doubles up as a great toaster as I was taught once.

Grilled Sanma

The Japanese grill, deserves a quick side mention at this point. Unlike the West where it is used for a huge BBQ cook out, the typical grill here is rectangular and something larger than an A4 size. The steel grid sits neatly on top of a pan where you are to put water into so that oil or any excess sauce from your food is caught and diffused for an easier clean-up after. The fire starts aflame on top of the food which is the reverse of the Western BBQ grill. It makes grilling so convenient for someone who has never started a BBQ pit in my life!

My home grill

Thus, being a lazy one-dish meal person, apart from grilling fish, my other favorite ingredient to cook with is negi. Negi (leek), next to daikon (white radish), is a huge staple in Japanese foods. If a manga artist were to sketch a housewife pedaling home on her bicycle, he would most absolutely have a long negi sticking out of her grocery basket. From the same family of onions, it has a sweet yet aromatic taste to it. The white stem is consumed whereas the green part is best used to flavor stews. It goes with pork, chicken even salmon or simply tofu. Another bonus is that unlike the onion, it doesn't sting my eyes when cut. So when I need a quick cook, I whip out my baton of negi, chop it up, toss it around with my sliced pork, splatter some drops of soya sauce and mirin, and I have a somewhat decent dish to eat with my instant noodles or instant pack of rice.

Negi!!!

The Japanese have a lot of pride in their produce and rightly so. I was once told that why their fruits are so oversized and incredibly sweet is that they prune the fruit trees so that there is no overcrowding on the tree. Think of the tree as a parent. If there are too many kids you have to nurture, you simply cannot give 100% to each and every kid at the same time. So by having fewer ‘kids’, you can yield sweeter plumper offsprings. And that explains why the fruit here are expensive as one pays for the labor of pruning and selecting each fruit, on top of the standard farmer practice elsewhere in the world. In addition, there is a careful grading of fruits where they are ranked in sweetness so you can choose if you want to pay less for an average fruit or more for an awesome fruit. For example, as the apple is in season, they have a label which tells you that a number 10 is sweet and 11 is just the right balance of sweetness but if you want to go for 12 which is obviously sweeter, it advises that it may be TOO sweet. That is very Japanese indeed- the subtle difference of the beauty of a fruit being just right.

So I think if my stomach were an apple, I should give it a 10. It is sweet in that it has learnt to digest and appreciate all the wonders of Japanese food but it is one grade away from being just right- to balance the pow-wow flavors of my Laksa.