Authentic Teriyaki Burgers!!

“Teriyaki Burger” by tsukacyi

Every Japanese burger shop has a teriyaki burger in its menu, and it is one of the most popular burgers here in Japan.

A teriyaki burger normally has a chicken or beef patty with teriyaki sauce, mayonnaise and lettuce in of course a buns.

Many people in other countries get surprised to find mayonnaise on teriyaki sauce but Japanese mayonnaise is bit vinegary, so it tastes great with sweet teriyaki sauce.

At MOS BURGER, the fast-food restaurant that sold the very first teriyaki burger in the world, they serve rice buns, which are crispy,  kind of chewy textured and perfect for teriyaki burgers!

Do you want to eat teriyaki burgers now?

Well, you don’t have to go to a Japanese burger shop, you can make it at home!

All  you need is buns, a beef patty, thick teriyaki sauce, some mayonnaise and lettuce.

Bon appetit!!

From Japanstyle2010

http://www.japanstyle.info/

Tsukiji fish market 築地市場

Tsukiji fish market 築地市場

Did you know Tokyo holds the biggest fish market in the world?

Yes the Tsukiji fish market is the biggest whole sale fish and seafood market in the world.

The market is located near the Tsukijishijo Station on the Toei Oedo line and Tsukiji Station on the Tokyo Metro Hibiya line (that’s my home line). I love this market, if you are a sushi fan its heaven. You can eat delishously fresh sushi’s of any kind and witness the live auctions if you’re an early bird.

There are two sections at Tsukiji market: the Jonai shijo and the Jogai shijo
In the Jonai shijo section you will find all the whole sealers, this is where the action takes place in the morning and when I say morning it’s early around 5h30 am because that’s when the auctions starts. The actions normally stop around 8h00 am but the market is open till 3h00pm. I must say, if you can go there around 5h30 6h00 you will witness and live a quite nice experiance.There is approximately 1000 wholesale dealers so i let you imagine the action that this section of the market can pack up during the early morning!

The second section of the Tsukiji market is the Jogai shijo. In this section you will find some wholesale and retail shops. In these shop you can find of course fish and seafood but also find Japanese kitchen tools, restaurant supplies and groceries. For the sushi lover in you this section is also home of many Japanese restaurant many of which that serves sushi.

For all of you intrepid early birds, that are willing to visit this market I would like to give you some little rules of conduct at the market. Why rules super simple the wholesale section of Tsukiji Market is where business is conducted and it is really really important for visitors not to interfere with those sales or activities. In 2008 the market, especially the famous tuna action was close to the public because of bad behavior form visitors. If you want to enjoy this wonderful sight of Tokyo here are those rules:

You should visit the tuna auction between 5:00am and 6:15am
Don’t use your flash during the auction if your taking a photo
Do not enter restricted areas
Don’t obstruct traffic or the operations
Do not bring large bags or suitcases
Do not wear high-heel or sandals!
Don’t smoke in the market
And of course don’t touch the fish!

A  little History about the Market and the fish industry in Tokyo

Tokugawa Ieyasu was the one to establish the first fish market in Tokyo. Since he was the shogun he wanted a stable source of fish and seafood for the Edo castle. He there for invited fisherman’s from Osaka to Edo so they could provide fresh food for the castle. All the fish that was not taken at the Edo castle was sold near the famous Nihonbashi bridge. So the first Tokyo fish market was created, it was called Uogashi, many more markets were created along the rivers and canals near Nihonbashi. The Tsukiji market was then created in 1935. The condition as for why it was created were not so pleasant, in September 1923 Japan was struck by a devastating earthquake refered as the Great Kanto earthquake. This event destroyed most of Tokyo including the Uogashi fish market.

I hoe you enjoyed this post. Feel free to comment.
Yugo

A really nice Japanese food blog!

A really nice Japanese food blog!

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She is a sweet girl from Kyoto passionate about Japanese food. Her name is Mai and she has a really really nice blog about Japanese food. On her blog you can find very detail traditional Japanese recipes. I must say it is a must see blog!

Here is her twitter @JapanFoodAddict

And here is her blog

Japanese Food Addict

be sure to go visit her website

The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

The Shin-Yokohama Ramen Museum

Japan is a country filled with ramen fans, ramen connoisseurs, and certifiable ramen maniacs, the city of Yokohama has opened an entire museum devoted to the ubiquitous Chinese noodle. More than just an ordinary museum, it’s also part historical theme park and part hyper-specialized restaurant mall. And, unlike your usual dusty museum, it stays open till 11pm to accommodate hungry concertgoers returning from the nearby Yokohama Arena.

Once you’re past the entrance turnstiles, the first floor is devoted to numerous museum exhibits and a well-stocked souvenir shop. Clearly the museum’s organizers racked their brains to come up with every imaginable ramen-related display they could think of, and the results are here to see — ramen-making utensils, ramen bowls (over 300), ramen shop matchbooks, chopstick wrappers, curtains and aprons. The historical development of instant ramen is painstakingly chronicled, and the invention of cup ramen (the kind where you pour boiling water directly into a styrofoam cup) is celebrated as the dramatic technological achievement it most certainly was. Instant ramen packets from around the world adorn the walls, and overhead TV monitors broadcast a continuous stream of ramen commercials from the past 25 years. Ramen history buffs will be delighted (and the rest of us merely mystified) by a replica of the first ramen dish ever eaten by a 17th-century samurai named Mito Komon. Two life-size dioramas show the operation of an instant ramen factory, and since this is a modern museum (it opened in March 1994), there are also banks of interactive video panels. Ramen-themed video games are provided for younger visitors; the one I saw seemed to involve eating as many noodles as quickly as possible (yet more proof of the bad influence video games have on the young). But the fun is only beginning, since the remainder of the museum (on two underground levels) is a miniature historical theme park. The date is 1958, and the place is shitamachi, a typically bustling working-class neighborhood crowded with tiny shops, houses and restaurants. The time is just 40 years ago, but it’s definitely a different era, just before the rapid modernization that changed the face of Japanese cities.

As a theme park, “Ramen Town” is not quite Disneyland, but it includes several nostalgic attractions — vendors selling cotton candy and old-fashioned pastries, weathered storefronts and fifties-era billboards. Behind the storefronts are a time-capsule candy shop, two old-style bars dispensing regional brands of sake, and the main attraction — eight ramen shops from around Japan, each serving its own distinctive variety of noodles. This is ramen for serious connoisseurs, with the eight shops chosen carefully from among the tens of thousands of stores throughout the country. The major ramen capitals — Sapporo, Hakata, Kumamoto and Kitakata — are all represented, along with four legendary shops from the Tokyo/Yokohama area. The two Kyushu shops (Hakata and Kumamoto) serve their noodles in a salty whitish broth, made by slow-cooking pork and chicken bones. The Sapporo shop serves its ramen in a miso-flavored soup, a Hokkaido specialty, while the rest of the shops feature soy sauce-based soups made with various combinations of pork and chicken bones and seafood. Each shop has its own distinctive noodles and its own selection of toppings, ranging from the standard chaa-shuu (roast pork) and bean sprouts to kikurage (“wood ear”) and garlic chips.

After you’ve had your fill of ramen, sake, and numbingly sweet old-fashioned candies, you’re ready for the souvenir shop back on the ground floor. Take-out packages of noodles from each of the shops are available, along with goods sporting the Ramen Museum’s logo (a squiggly spiral line representing a slice of naruto fishcake). Logo merchandise includes plates, pencil holders, tote bags and much more; there are also postcards, cookbooks, and a full range of chopsticks for sale.

The museum is located in Shin-Yokohama about 45 minutes from Tokyo, 3 minutes from JR Shin-Yokohama station. The museum is really affordable around 300yen (3$) for an adult and around 100yen for children.

Ramen ラーメン

Ramen ラーメン

Hummmm!! I must tell you all from all types of Japanese food ramen must be my favorite.

Ramen is a Japanese noodle dish that came from China. It is served in a meat or fish-based broth, often flavored with soy sauce or miso, and uses toppings such as sliced pork,dried seaweed Nori, kamaboko, green onions and even corn. Almost every locality in Japan has its own variation of ramen, from the tonkotsu ramen of Kyūshū to the miso ramen of Hokkaidō and for me one of the best ramen is in Mombetsu in Hokkaido.

Before the 1950s, ramen was called shina soba 支那そば.By 1900, restaurants serving Chinese cuisine from Canton and Shanghai offered a simple ramen dish of noodles a few toppings, and a broth flavored with salt and pork bones. Many Chinese also pulled portable food stalls, selling ramen and gyōza dumplings to workers. By the mid 1900s, these stalls used a type of musical horn called a charumera , from the Portuguese charamela to advertise their presence, a practice some vendors still retain via a loudspeaker and a looped recording. By the early Shōwa period, ramen had become a popular dish when eating out. After the seconde world war, the U.S. imported cheap flour that swept the Japanese market. At the same time, Japanese troops had returned from China and continental East Asia. Many of these returnees had become familiar with Chinese cuisine and subsequently set up Chinese restaurants across Japan. Eating ramen, while popular, was still a special occasion that required going out. In the 1980s, ramen became a Japanese cultural icon and was studied from many perspectives. At the same time, local varieties of ramen were hitting the national market and could even be ordered by their regional names. A ramen museum opened in Yokohama in 1994.( I will make a post about this museum really soon!)

If I’m talking about ramen I cant go with out talking about instant ramen!They were invented in 1958 by Momofuku Ando, the founder and chairman of Nissin Foods.

Named the greatest Japanese invention of the 20th century in a Japanese poll, instant ramen allowed anyone to make this dish simply by adding boiling water. Now these days you can find them in every Japanese super market in all sorts of flavours. Maybe to forieners the most popular brand of instant noodles is the Cup Noodle brand. In 1970, Nissin formed the subsidiary Nissin Foods (USA) Co. Inc, to sell instant noodles to the U.S.  Instant noodles did save my life and budget the first year i lived in Japan. But I would not recommended making them your daily meal hihihihi.

Now these days Ramen is a popular dish in Japan that you can mostly enjoy eating every where. Personally I love really spicy food and there is one type of ramen that i can live with out!! It’s called TanTan men or if you go to a real chinese restaurant in Japan you could ask for Dandan mien. This ramen type is really spicy and as some mince beef in it. You have to try it if you’re a fan of hot food.

Tan tan men

Where ever you are in Japan you will have the chance to try local ramen speciality at a really low price that will make you taste buds go crazy!

Tempura 天麩羅 or Tonkatsu 豚カツ !?

Tempura 天麩羅 or Tonkatsu 豚カツ !?

Where is Tempura from? Most people would answer Japan with out hesitation. They would be wrong! What is Tonkatsu?

Tempura 天麩羅

In middle of the sixteenth century, the Portuguese landed on Japanese shores. In addition to establishing trade, trying to convert the Japanese to Catholicism, the Portuguese introduced tempura, the technique of dipping fish and vegetables into a batter and frying them. This is one example of Japanese food evolution by incorporating foreign influences.Tempura comes from the Latin word tempora, which refers to Ember Days or quattuor tempora. Ember Days refer to the days when Catholics avoid meat and instead eat fish or vegetables. Tokugawa Ieyasu, founder and first shogun of the Tokugawa shogunate of Japan, loved tempura so much that he apparently died after eating too much of it. Could you imagine that—dying from overeating? But of cours it’s not a proven historical fact. Still a funny anecdote.

Personally I love tempura, it’s a considerably light fried food.  On of the best places to eat tempura in my opinion, is around the Senso-ji 浅草寺 temple in the Tokyo district of Asakusa. Impressively tempura is one of the only Japanese dish that you can eat anywhere in America that would taste like in Japan. Of course some sushi restaurants maybe but it is still a debatable subject. In Japan a good Tempura meal run around 12 to 25$ more would be too much.

Tonkatsu 豚カツ

Tonkatsu is another Japanese fried dish, mostly called katsu amongst Japanese. Katsu’ roots are not as old as Tempura but still hold a big place in the Japanese food diet. It was invented in the late 19th century as a Japanese version of European cuisine. Katsu is breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet sliced into bite-sized pieces, generally served with shredded cabbage, rice and miso soup. The meat is usually salted, peppered, dredged lightly in flour, dipped into beaten egg and then coated with panko (breadcrumbs) before being deep fried. Tonkatsu has Japanized over the years, today it is usually served with rice, miso soup and tsukemono in the style of washoku (traditional Japanese food) and eaten with chopsticks. Tonkatsu is also popular as a sandwich filling. These days’ tonkatsu may be made by sandwiching an ingredient like cheese or shiso leaf between the meat, and then breading and frying. Tempura is a light fried dish, but it brother katsu is really heavy in the sumo weigh category. But it is a really desishious dish, now served in a fully traditional Japanese way.

The best Tonkatsu I ever had was in Sapporo as crazy as it sounds. But you can eat and enjoy a good Tonkatsu meal anywhere in Japan for around 15$. Plus normally in most katsu restaurant you can all allyou can eat rice, miso and cabbage.

New category

Today I’m lunching a new category on Japanese culinary art’s

I will be talking about different Japanese dishes and there places in Japanese history. I know it’s a risky subject since everyone has different tastes but i will do my best to come up with good post that would suites everybody’s taste.

Hope you enjoy