Facebook
Twitter
Youtube
Learn Japanese Food Culture
Foodstory moved to downtown LA Loft building to start offering cooking classes as well as more Japanese food tasting events.
As we’re still exploring on programs to provide fun & educational Japanese food events, we’ll be focusing on small group events. Max. 6 to 10 people depends on the event. We offer you a very reasonable event price for the time being. However, please be patient with us if things didn’t go smooth & give us tons of feedback to make our program better.
Read more on Moved to DTLA Loft…
My grandfather makes Tofu from scratch. I really mean from ‘scratch’: He first started growing soy beans in his yard. Then he started making Soy Milk several times a week using his own soy beans. Before I knew it, he started making Tofu. It sounds like a lot of work. However in Japan, you can buy an automated machine to make soy milk from dried soy beans and then turn soy milk into Tofu. My grandfather is very well equipped.
As I live in the US, there are not many varieties of good Tofu. Not every Japanese market carries good ones like Meijiya Tofu. However, I can get pretty good soy milk in Asian Markets so I decided to make my own tofu from soy milk! Now I just had to figure out how to make it. There are several ways and my friend forwarded me an old LA Times article on “Do it Yourself Tofu”. After examining the options and reading many Japanese food blogs, I decided to make zaru-tofu. It is probably the easiest to make for the first timer as you don’t need any special tools. Zaru is the name for an old type of Japanese strainer. I don’t have a zaru but I do have a regular strainer. Everyone does, right?
Read more on Making of Tofu -By Clay Pot and Oven…
This is a recipe I’ve been thinking to try out since it’s on the first page of a famous Japanese soup cookbook. Yoshiko Tatsumi is the author and she is in her mid 80s. It is because she is my grandmother’s age, I keep thinking she must know good tips for Japanese cooking.
She sure did! If you’re Japanese, you know Ume-Kobu Cha, Sour plum Kombu Tea – often sold as a powder form with MSG. This Ume-Kobu Cha or Kobu-Cha is used for cooking – sometimes as a substitute for soup stock. But I never knew how to make them from scratch. However by making this Tatsumi’s Brown Rice Soup, I learned how the Japanese used to make them from scratch. It’s a shame that my mother’s generation chose Ajinomoto (Japanese MSG) over simple hearty soup just to save time.
Read more on Genmai Soup / Brown Rice Soup…
Tuna from Spain. All part of tuna was served.
Did you know that there is a Japanese Food Festival held every year in LA? Yes, there is! In fact, this past weekend was the 12th year of this food fest in Downtown LA. This year I felt very lucky to get acquainted with two Akira-sans: Mr. Akira Yuhara from Miyako Hybrid Hotel and Mr. Akira Hirose from Maison Akira. Both of them are members of JRA, the Japanese Restaurant Association which organizes this festival. As I’m striving to establish my business around Japanese food educational events, learning about JRA and their festival was a great introduction to Japanese Food Culture in Los Angeles.
Read more on JRA Japanese Food Festival…
At the last ‘Travel with Sushi’ event, someone raised the question, “ Is IKURA a Japanese or a Russian word?”
I actually didn’t know that Ikura was also a Russian word. The Japanese learned how to cure salmon roe from the Russians during the Taisho period [1912-1926]. Ikura means roe in Russian. Caviar is black Ikura while salmon roe is called red Ikura in Russian. However, what’s popularly eaten in Japan as Ikura and what Russian people call red Ikura are not exactly the same. In Japan, Ikura are the eggs from white salmon whereas in Russia, they’re eggs from pink salmon.
Read more on IKURA -What Japan learned from Russia…
Sometime I have preconceived notions about certain foods such as thinking that broccoli always had to be cooked. It was at an office party where I first saw raw broccoli being served with dipping sauce. I learned that broccoli is edible without steaming or stir frying although I still prefer cooking it. In Japan, people usually cook their vegetables and eating fresh raw vegetables as a salad was not introduced until after the 1950s. My grandmother’s generation isn’t generally a big fan of fresh salad as they didn’t grow up eating it. In fact, my grandparents only liked mushed potato salad.
Read more on Raw Pumpkin Salad…
I finished hosting two inaugural ‘Travel with Sushi’ events to launch my new venture. As I gathered feedback from all the participants, I felt so energized hearing such positive reviews. All the participants said they would recommend ‘Travel with Sushi’ to their friends. So happy to hear that!!
I’ve been trying to figure out the best event format so I conducted the events two different ways. At the first event, I talked about a specific generation of sushi and then served sushi from that particular era. Although a few people found this slightly distracting and preferred separating the storytelling part from the dining experience, the majority of people preferred eating sushi that corresponded to each historical era right after learning about it. That’s what I learned after the second event as I separated history presentation from serving sushi. They liked learning more about a particular dish before bringing it to their mouths. I will definitely incorporate these ideas. Since I created menu cards with descriptions of all the sushi, I omitted some part of the verbal explanations.
Read more on Travel with Sushi at Kleverdog…
Last Sunday, I organized my favorite event, an open interview with a Japanese chef. This time, I had invited Chef Akira Hirose as a guest speaker. He is the owner and chef of Maison Akira in Pasadena. As I like to focus on stories and conversation, we scheduled our event right after his regular Champagne brunch hour on Sunday. With access to the dessert buffet from brunch, we had an amazing array of desserts!
I usually make a list of questions to break the ice. However, for Chef Akira, I didn’t have to worry about anything. He was a natural speaker. As soon as I introduced him, he enthusiastically started sharing his story from his childhood to the point he opened his restaurant in Pasadena.
Read more on Sweet’n Talk at Maison Akira…
Yoko Isassi
