2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-05-24 11:20
Unlike what we believe in Italy, the Japanese food it is not made up of a few elements, always the same. sushi, sashimi, Tempura and little else.
And what, then, are the guidelines of the Japanese diet?
Mainly the simplicity, freshness and goodness of the ingredients.
Let's take the soba: they are pasta made from flour and water seasoned with a broth that at first may seem bland to us Italians. Same thing for the udon, noodle prepared with whole wheat flour.
One of the dishes that all Japanese like is white rice mixed with raw egg and soy sauce (tamago kake gohan), all eaten with nori seaweed.
A traditional meal often ends with white rice drowned in a cup of tea (ochazuke), which has a primordial but very intense flavor. Always as long as the ingredients are excellent.
But obviously the main recipes of Japanese cuisine do not end there. In successive waves, foreign cuisine arrived in these islands with immense success.
Tempura it is an evolution of the frying brought by the Portuguese missionaries, like some sweets that are still produced especially in the west (konpeito).
Beef is rare, limited to the infamous (for the price) Kobe beef, which drinks beer and is massaged to achieve better fat distribution.
Then came other Western dishes such as stew, curry (from England), breaded and fried pork cutlet and even pasta. In the postwar period, meat consumption also increased thanks to Korean-style burgers, steaks, and grills.
All these dishes have been revisited and adapted over time, like the ramen, Chinese noodles in broth which in Japan have reached a level of development that is sometimes fanatic.
The result is that the Japanese are now free to choose from an impressive variety of foods: there are not a few millennials who prefer pasta to rice and who eat Western dishes every day.
Italian cuisine is very popular and is in turn reworked and interpreted. Carpaccio is a coveted dish, not so much meat-based as we do, the Japanese find it delicious if prepared with octopus, sea bass, red snapper or tuna.
The Japanese pastry starting from the teachings of the French or German masters continues to churn out delights by mixing ingredients and kinds. As in the case of the Anglo-Saxon cheesecake here prepared in a slightly different way.
A curious aspect is that these novelties are not developed and consumed only by an elite, but everyone gets excited and wants to try the things they do not know.
The result of this reworking is not how one might fear the disappearance of tradition but, on the contrary, its strength, given that the Japanese gastronomic culture is based on the mixing of different cuisines and the adoption of new ingredients.
Wasn't that the same for Italian cuisine in the past?