Cooking With Oishinbo, Part One: Overview (By Derik A. Badman)
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All this week, our own Derik A. Badman (also of MadInkBeard.com fame) will be cooking food from the culinary manga series Oishinbo, as a sort of alternate means of reviewing the book. Today: an overview of the entire meal. Tomorrow: Miso soup!
When manga first starting appearing in English, I was pretty indiscriminate about what I read. At one time or another, I read at least an issue (when they were "issues") of all the early releases from Eclipse, Viz, Dark Horse, and others. Since then, my manga reading has become much more rarified. The amount of manga published in English targeted at a mature reader (without being "adult") is limited. Viz's Signature series is one line I keep my eye on for new and interesting series. For example, I was intrigued when I first heard about Oishinbo, a long running food manga written by Tetsu Kariya and drawn by Akira Hanasaki.
I'm not much of a foodie. If left to my own devices I could eat the same dish over and over again, which I did when I lived alone. I used to make large pots of rice and bean burritos and eat that every night for days at a time. My wife, though, is much more interested in food. We've got a whole shelf of food books, and the Food Network is often on the television. Frequently, our Friday nights with friends are as much about the cooking as anything else. So, over the years, food has taken on an increasing prominence and interest in my life. That is, moreso than the existing influence of the politics of my diet. I've been a vegetarian for over 13 years and was a vegan for a few of those years. I got used to paying attention to what I was eating when I went out, but didn't give much thought otherwise. Finding a vegetarian or vegan dish in itself was often the only (and occasionally difficult, though less and less over time) goal.
A food based manga, though, was an intermingling of interests, old and new, so I started reading Oishinbo, and the three volumes I've read (first, third, and fifth, this is not a series you need to read in order) have not disappointed. The series is mostly episodic stories about a journalist named Yamaoka and his companion (co-worker then wife) Kurita. One major ongoing plotline involves their attempts to make the "Ultimate Menu" for their newspaper. A frequent source of conflict is Yamaoka's completely estranged father who is a gourmet and working on a "Supreme Menu" for a rival newspaper. Yamaoka is convinced his father caused his mother's death by being too picky about her cooking, so every time they see each other they glare angrily. Other plotlines tend to involve convincing people how great some sort of food is or using food to solve problems (in this manga, food can solve a surprising number of problems). In one story the son of a colleague is taught to like eggplant, because, for obscure reasons, if he doesn't eat eggplant he won't get elected as class presient, while in another episode an estranged couple gets back together over asparagus dishes. There are plenty of other supporting characters who make appearances, but the real guest stars are the various foodstuffs and dishes. Hanasaki draws the food with extra realistic detail, in comparison with the conventionally rendered characters, to show us how important it is.
Oishinbo is not a manga of recipes, rather it is an education in and propaganda for, primarily, Japanese food (though perhaps other styles of food are featured in the hundred plus volumes I haven't seen). Cooking is prominently focused, discussed, and shown, but not with any attention to teaching the reader how to replicate the dish. To use a television metaphor, it's more Top Chef, less Rachel Ray. Each volume in the Viz series has a recipe or two at the front of the book, featuring dishes from one of the stories, but they only represent a small portion of the dishes shown throughout the work.
Joey Manley, editor of Graphic Novel Review, asked me to attempt a meal based on food found in this series. I had to select dishes, find recipes, shop, cook, and eat, then write about it. My attempts at making Japanese food have been very limited. I always felt a little intimidated by new or unknown ingredients I wasn't sure where to get. I took up making miso soup a number of years ago and ate it regularly for meals. More recently friends showed my wife and I how to make our own sushi rolls (maki), which we now make pretty frequently. I decided against sushi for this project, since it is already a familiar process.
One thing that has always attracted me to certain Japanese cultural products (novels, films, poetry, drawings) is not the sense of over-the-top zaniness that attracts so many, but the use of simplicity and minimalism, the weight given to a few simple lines (be they words or ink). This aspect is missing in much of the manga that makes its way to English translation (which is often so excessive visually and emotionally), though it is apparent in works such as Kiriko Nananan's Blue or Hitoshi Ashinano's Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou. I decided to make dishes that were simple, small plates, using few ingredients, but hopefully highlighting those few ingredients. I selected a few dishes found in Oishinbo: Vegetables: A la Carte
The menu:
Tomato and Avocado sashimi (from our local Japanese restaurant)
Miso soup with turnips (from Oishinbo: Vegetables)
Ohitashi (from Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine)
Hijiki with tofu and carrots (from Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine)
Onigiri (not from Oishinbo, well not one that's published yet)
Mochi (ditto)
Sake (from Oishinbo: Sake, kind of)
After selecting the dishes I had to find recipes. Many of the recipes, and information I used about ingredients, came from Just Hungry and its sister site Just Bento which are both written by Makiko Itoh, a Japanese woman who lives abroad and thus writes with an eye towards non-Japanese readers/cooks. All the recipes came from that site except the Miso soup which is a combination of recipes from that site, Epicurious, and Oishinbo itself.
I divided up my ingredient list into categories for items I could probably get at Whole Foods and those I'd probably need to get from the Asian grocery. Lucky for me, there's a large Asian supermarket only a few minutes away from my house. I recruited my friend Ian to accompany me for the shopping (and to help with cooking). He's got some experience making Japanese food (he's one who showed us how to make maki) and, like me, he really likes sake, which was our first shopping goal.
Liquor laws in Pennsylvania are rather more restrictive than in many states. Non-beer alcohol is all sold in state stores called "Wine & Spirits Shoppes," a situation which tends to homogenize the options. But as time progresses, we have seen improvements (only in recent years have some of the stores started opening on Sundays!), and one of the local Shoppes is a "premium" store that offers an actual selection of sake. We headed there first to pick up a few bottles. I learned a lot about sake from reading Oishinbo's Sake volume, much of which is useless knowledge in a place where my options are often limited to a choice between three bottles. In this case, we lucked out a bit. Our trip to the Shoppe netted a few treats. Crazy Milk sake is of the nigori variety, which means its unfiltered. A white residue sits at the bottom of the bottle, which you shake up before opening, mixing the sediment with the liquid. Aisanan sake is a Jyunmai, which means no alcohol or additives are put into the sake. This addition of extra alcohol to the already alcoholic drink is something I learned about from Oishinbo. I was also surprised to see a bottle of shochu (a new addition to the store), a harder Japanese alcohol (it's 50 proof, more than sake, though still less than vodka, gin, and the like) which had its own chapter in Oishinbo: Sake, where the protagonists must convince a drunken writer that Japan does have good spirits.
A drunken writer screaming about Japan's lack of great literature in relation to its lack of spirits, from Oishinbo: Sake page 34
Stocked up with sake (and anxious to crack open a bottle) we headed to the local Whole Foods for produce (turnip, spinach, scallion, avocado, tomato) and a few other items. Our Whole Foods has been there a long time and as its popularity has grown it has become ever more cramped and unpleasant to visit. Even the express line was not so express, but we made it out in one piece. Just up the road from Whole Foods is Assi, a large Asian grocery. I've never been in it before, so it was a new experience. I used to occasionally go to another Asian grocery and always found it a strange experience because: the food stuffs was often very difficult to decipher; I always ended up stumbling upon some kind of smelly dead creature in ice; and I was always conspicuously in the minority, which, as a white male living in suburban Pennsylvania, is a rarity for me. Being in the minority is admittedly, not necessarily a bad thing, it's an experience I should probably have more of, but combined with the other two reasons, made my shopping trips rare and unusual events.
Assi was rather different than that other Asian market. This place was big and I managed to avoid the meat and fish section completely. They also did a good job in having English on either the packaging (little stickers with names and nutritional information) or the shelf labels. And I was surprised to see how ethnically diverse the customers were in the store, more diverse than in Whole Foods, that's for sure. The main items we needed from Assi were three different types of sea vegetable: kombu, wakame, and hijiki. The whole aisle of different forms of sea vegetables was overwhelming at first, but they were easy to decipher when we looked closer. On the way out, we also grabbed a few types of mochi ice cream from the freezer case. Similar to Whole Foods, our check-out line seemed rife with problems, which made for an extra long wait.
Ingredients in hand, Ian and I headed back to my house to cook. To start off on the right foot, we cracked open the shochu and had some on the rocks. Dryer than sake and more subtle, it has a bit more kick going down, but it's not so harsh like vodka or gin that I couldn't just drink it with a little ice and nothing else.
When originally planning the meal, I discovered, as I wrote my shopping list, that every dish I had planned was either white or green, with the sole exception of the carrots in the hijiki dish. We decided to add a tomato sashimi as an extra element of color. This is something my wife and I had recently at our favorite Japanese restaurant. Basically, you thinly slice tomatoes, lay them out on a plate, and drizzle some kind of dressing over them. Ian made a dressing of miso, soy sauce, and mirin (sweet rice wine) for the tomatoes. He also handled the avocado sashimi, which was prepared in the same way.
One of the first chapters in volume one of Oishinbo involves Yamaoka making dashi, a traditional Japanese broth. He impressing a whole kitchen (and his father, for whom he is unknowingly cooking) with his methods and skill. For the miso soup and the hijiki dish we needed a pot of dashi. Most often made with water, kombu (long dense sheets of kelp), and dried tuna flakes called katsuobushi, I made a vegetarian version using more than the normal amount of kombu and no katsuobushi. The kombu is soaked in water for about 45 minutes; then the water is brought up to a boil. The heat is turned off, and the kombu is removed. The kombu starts off as rather thin, long strips of green kelp with some white powder on them (apparently, where a lot of the flavor is). By the time I removed it from the now complete dashi, the kombu had doubled in size and bore more than a striking resemblance to a piece of green vinyl. That was a little weird, but thankfully, we weren't eating the kombu, it was just used to flavor the water in making dashi. I'm sure my dashi was considerably less subtle than Yamaoka's as he only swipes the kombu through the water (sounds too subtle).
Yamaoka swipes the kombu into water while making dashi from Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine page 23.
The hijiki, another form of sea vegetable, was in dried form and looked a lot like spaghetti, except very dark green, softer, and more vegetative. Soaked in a large bowl of water, it increases greatly in size (a single handful became more like three or four handfuls). Also needing to be soaked was dried wakame, our third sea vegetable, which started out as small green flakes, looking much like some kind of dried herb. Soaked in water, the half cup my recipe called for quickly increased to an almost absurd size. I had to move it from a bowl to a pot as it reconstituted into thin, green, rectangular leaves.
Ian and I moved onto the Aisansan Jyunmai sake, sweeter than the shochu with a yellowish color, and started chopping vegetables and preparing rice. Japanese sushi rice, which we'd be using for the onigiri, requires rinsing: basically covering it in water, swishing it around, and then draining. You do this a few times before letting it sit for a few minutes. I loaded up the rice cooker (what a great invention!) with rice and water and turned it on. Rice in the cooker, unlike rice on the stove, doesn't require any attention. You can just turn it on and wait for the beep. One episode of Oishinbo finds a man picking out all the rice that was broken or of a different size before cooking it. I'm not such a gourmet as to attempt that. I'll settle for imperfect rice.
After getting the rice started, I started steaming the spinach for the ohitashi, just throwing a package of spinach into the steamer basket over a pot of boiling water. Meanwhile, Ian chopped up the turnip and scallion for the miso soup. I told him to cut the turnip into thin strips, thinking the turnip would otherwise take too long to cook. That proved to be a misconception. I chopped up baked firm tofu (darker on the outside, lighter on the inside) and carrots into strips, for the hijiki dish.
The ohitashi was the third dish (after the tomato and avocado sashimi) to come together. It appears in a single panel in volume 1 of Oishinbo along with the hijiki dish I decided to make. Both are just part of a meal where one of the secondary characters learns how to eat nori properly (a skill he later uses to great success in impressing a potential business partner). I had no idea what either words meant, but the manga's copious end notes got me interested enough to try them. To make the ohitashi, steamed spinach is shocked in cold water, then drained. The idea is to squeeze out the liquid from the spinach and form it into dense logs. A lot of water comes out of spinach, and forming it into a log is not all that easy. It's also shocking how drastically a large package of spinach shrinks when steamed and pressed together (lots of vegetables changing volume in this meal). I ended up steaming and pressing another round of spinach with half a bag from the fridge so we would have enough ohitashi for four people. The dressing for the spinach is a simple mix of mirin and soy sauce which is poured over the sliced logs. Follow up with a sprinkling of sesame seeds (I substituted these for the recipe's bonito (fish) flakes).
With the dashi ready to go and the kombu removed, I put together the miso soup. I removed some of the dashi to use with the hijiki, and then threw the turnips and wakame into the pot, leaving the pot to simmer. Later, just before you're ready to eat it, you add the miso paste and scallions. In Oishinbo the miso soup with turnips is featured in story where Yamaoka and his father are having a food competition to make the best turnip dish. In it, the miso soup is made with a special kind of dark miso that has an earthy flavor, which is supposed to fit well with the flavor of the turnips. I had to settle for normal red miso as the best available option.
Ian made all the onigiri (rice balls). When the rice was finished cooking, he put it into a casserole dish, seasoned it with some rice wine vinegar, and cooled it (the casserole dish helps spread out the rice so it cools faster). Our recipe suggested using a tea cup and plastic wrap to help form the balls. The plastic wrap goes in the cup, a little water, then salt, is added before you fill the cup with rice. You use your finger to make a hole in the rice and put in your filling. The recipe suggest salty fillings, so we used some dill pickle (homemade from a nearby farm), some spicy tofu, and umeboshi. Umeboshi, a traditional filling for onigiri, is an ume fruit, which when pickled is shockingly sour and salty. They get called "plums" but are not actual plums. Once you've put your filling in, you cover it up with rice, then, keeping the rice inside the plastic wrap, form the whole thing into a triangular shape. A piece of nori, dried flat seaweed sheets most commonly used for rolling sushi, is then wrapped across the bottom as a kind of handle. Ian made about eight onigiri with the rice we had.
The hijiki dish was fairly simple to cook. Sesame oil went in a skillet with the hijiki, carrot, and tofu. You toss that around a bit and then add the saved dashi, some soy, and a little mirin. It cooks until the ingredients are tender. The timing of all this was a bit off: we ended up eating a good but of it, sashimi, ohitashi, and some of the rice balls, while standing around the kitchen. But we managed to sit down when the miso soup and hijiki were ready. We had four diners: Ian, me, and both our wives.
Miso soup with turnips as pictured in Oishinbo: Vegetables, page 37
I don't think the food was a great success. The miso soup (sorry, I forgot to take a picture of it) turned out pretty well, except the turnip had cooked too long. It broke up and seemed to get lost. If I learned anything from Oishinbo it was to respect the key ingredients, and alas, I had wanted the turnip to be a clear part of the soup. Such was not the case here.
 Avocado sashimi |  Tomato sashimi |
The sashimi was simple but nice. With just raw vegetables and a simple dressing, you really focus on the vegetable itself. I love avocado, so I will eat them just about any way. We use cherry tomatoes for the sashimi, but it might have been better with some really nice sweet heirloom tomatoes.
 Hijiki with fried tofu and carrots. |  Hijiki and Ohitashi as pictured in Oishinbo: Japanese Cuisine, page 197. |
The hijiki dish was odd. Cooked, the hijiki didn't have a whole lot of flavor on its own and very much had the size, shape, and consistency of spaghetti. The carrots were nicely cooked neither mushy nor crunchy. The dish was boring more than anything else. It needed some kind of extra sauce or seasoning. A spicy sauce would have worked well, I bet.
Ohitashi
The ohitashi was also a bit boring. Pressing the spinach into rolls didn't really make a difference with the spinach. It just tasted like spinach, which I really like, but it wasn't anything special even with the dressing.
Onigiri (rice balls).
The onigiri were interesting. The ratio of rice to filling seemed too much in favor of the rice, though that is understandable, since onigiri is a simple and cheap food.
Cooking done, we drank some of the Nigori sake, which was really delicious. The sweetness and texture made for a delightfully milky drink that I will definitely be drinking again (and already have since then).
Various mochi ice creams.
We digested and watched the Phillies game a bit (in hindsight, also appropriate with a Japanese meal) before I broke out the mochi ice cream. Mochi is a Japanese rice cake made from pounded glutinous sticky rice. The dessert is small golf ball/cupcake shaped items of ice cream wrapped in the mochi. I was not about to try making this on my own, but it seemed like the appropriate dessert for the meal (plus, I love getting mochi when we go out to Japanese restaurants). We had three flavors of mochi: green tea, red bean, and coffee. Two very traditional, one less so. All were quite good. Green tea and red bean are both interesting and unexpected dessert flavors, neither of which I can really explain. Red bean is always sweeter than I expect it to be. The mochi that surrounds the ice cream is dense and doughy, requiring more attention than the ice cream within. I love the stuff: ice cream bites!
All in all, not the most successful of meals, but certainly not a disaster. As my wife noted, it wasn't the ingredients she really likes in Japanese food. Some of these were dishes a little different than the sushi, dumplings, edamame, or tempura we'd normally have. I liked making use of all the different sea vegetables, though I wasn't particularly thrilled by any of them. I've been wanting to make onigiri for a long time, and my excitement probably raised my expectations too much. I might try them again with a greater ratio of filling to rice.
Thinking back on it now, I think I focused too much on the process and neglected to pay as much attention to the eating itself. Maybe there were subtleties I missed, expecting too much of a wow factor and, when there wasn't one, being let down. Maybe, like with sushi, I need to try more and get used to it, and, probably, try some of these things as prepared by people who actually know what they are doing. I'm certainly no gourmet, not like the characters in Oishinbo. I'm also not one to get that worked up about my food… well, maybe the sake.
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