No Forks, No Spoons? No Problem: Japanese Cooking

This is an assignment from area studies, which is an interactive series on different aspects of Japanese culture. This is my response to my experience with Japanese cooking.

Japanese food had always been something that fascinated me. While I tend to eat a lot of rice at home, I only recently developed a taste for sushi and still cannot manage to enjoy a seaweed salad. Usually, it is not the flavor that deters me from eating Japanese food, but instead the texture. Learning to eat raw fish without the somewhat slimy feeling destroying the experience took me some time. Yet, with my tastes maturing, I was eager to learn to cook something in the Japanese style. Entering the kitchen full of Japanese mothers, I had no idea what to expect. I had only made my first attempt at cooking a few days before: hamburgers. Yet my inexperience did not seem to be a problem once the burners turned on. Tempura, which consists of vegetables and seafood coated with flour and then deep fried in hot oil, was our task for the day. Although I did not have much time to evaluate the process while I was participating in it, the thing that surprises me the most, looking back, was the simplicity of the recipe. We used bonito (dried fish) flakes to make the sauce that the tempura was to be dipped in afterwards, yet the rest of the meal was made from very few materials: uncooked vegetables and shrimp, water, flour, one egg, and a pot of hot oil. The simplistic nature of the products we were using astounded me. I am so used to watching my Italian friends throw spice after spice on top of their fish, and watching my other friends coat their meat in a thick gravy-like sauce that obscures much of the taste of meat. The tempura we were cooking were coated with only a thin batter of egg and flour, which was devoid of any spices or flavorings that would obscure the flavor of the vegetables and shrimp that it coated. Another thing that shocked me was the small number of cooking utensils used. Though knives were used for chopping and a strainer ladle for clearing out the excess batter from the oil, our main cooking tools were chopsticks. They were used for stirring the batter, placing the foods in the hot oil, and taking them out. I had never seen such long chopsticks before and was surprised at the ease with which the Japanese cooks were able to move large pieces of food. I struggled throughout the cooking phase with using the chopsticks, wondering if I would ever be good enough to use them in my own kitchen.

When we finally sat down to the meal, I found that, again, the only tools I had for eating were chopsticks. Even at the restaurants I have gone to here in Japan, there were spoons for soup, so I was unsure of how to eat it. Soon, I got my answer as an older Japanese woman at our table lifted her bowl to her mouth and slurped up the miso soup inside. I came to find out that not only is this the proper way one is to eat soup, but that the slurping noise is a compliment to the individual who prepared it. Yet after enjoying the food, I found that I was not quite satisfied, since I had a lot of questions about why tempura is so popular in both Japan and in the United States.

One of the things that made me question the popularity of tempura within Japan is that the Japanese believe food should be kept as fully unprepared as possible. So why is tempura, a dish that involves foods cooked in batter, so popular? I finally found my answer within my readings. The Japanese often choose foods as much based on texture as they do on taste. They even eat things that are tasteless in order to enjoy the texture of the food. I suddenly realized that this deep fried batter added a crunchy texture to foods that usually would have a different consistency. I also realized that, because we had not added any spices or seasonings to our batter, that the natural taste of the food was not lost, as the flour and egg batter did not have much of it’s own taste. So, to add batter to these foods changed the texture without changing the taste, giving the Japanese, who enjoy texture, a new type of way to eat an eggplant or a sweet potato. I suddenly understood why tempura could be so popular here. However, I was also interested to discover why tempura is one of the Japanese foods that Americans take to the most quickly. I began to think about my experience with Japanese foods in the United States. I realized that it was never the taste of the seaweed salads that I disliked, but rather the fact that it was very slimy. Thinking about other American foods, I could not quickly put my finger on anything else that had the same consistency as seaweed. Yet tempura, because it is deep fried, does have the same texture as many other foods in the U.S. Therefore, tempura is not quite so shocking to an inexperienced American palette. I began to wonder how fair I had been in my former evaluations of foreign foods.

In Japan, a country where texture plays just as important role in cooking as does the final taste of the food, I realized that no culinary experience could fairly consider one without at least thinking about the other. In tasting Japanese foods, the taste and texture should be experienced separately, as well as the final creation evaluated on overall eating experience. With that in mind, I realized that I could re-evaluate my experience of cooking tempura. All throughout the cooking process, the cooks were suggesting ways to tell if the tempura was ready, including leaving sticky pieces in the hot oil for longer, since the coating was not crispy, and taking out pieces when thumping on them with a chopstick produced a knocking sound that meant that the coating was hard enough. The exact point of removal did not mean that much to the overall taste of the tempura, but it did change the texture. Pieces removed too early were not as crispy, and pieces left in too long were overly crispy. I then realized that we, as cooks, had very little control over the actual taste of the final product. We were all using the exact same materials and recipe, yet one group coated their tempura more thickly and another coated theirs more thinly. So the final result was different textures with the same taste. Many cooks, especially ones in the U.S. may not think that cooking for several hours merely to change the texture of food is worth it, but in Japan, it is an art within itself.