Authentic Japanese food, Central Oregon has it

Published 5:37 am Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Eating ethnic cuisine can lead a diner to wonder: How authentic is this food?

Unless you’ve spent time in the country where the food originated or you’re from that country, it’s hard to know.

Japanese food, which has become increasingly popular, is one such example. This reporter’s recent trip to Tokyo, Japan, was an opportunity to do a side-by-side comparison of bento boxes, sushi, okonomiyaki (a Japanese vegetable pancake), Japanese curry and ramen.

Bento boxes

Yukiko McLaughlin, owner of Bend-O-Bento, picked up a small colorful book inside her restaurant in southeast Bend. She flipped to the middle: “Like this!” she said, pointing to a photo of a small ball of rice shaped like a cat’s face with a mushroom cap used for the nose and whiskers made from seaweed (nori).

McLaughlin, who is from Tokyo, was explaining a trend that has caught on among young mothers in Japan who have started to fill bento boxes for their kindergartners with foods shaped like animals, Disney princesses or Pokemon characters.

Bento boxes, also known as Japanese lunch boxes, consist of a main dish, a vegetable dish, a side dish and a side of rice. “The leftover dinner is going to be the next day’s lunch,” she said. “That’s the basic idea of the bento.”

McLaughlin explains that in Japan, if she cooked a chicken cutlet dinner, the next day she would use the leftover chicken cutlet as the main dish for her child’s bento box for lunch. Potato and macaroni salads are frequently included in bento boxes. “The Japanese way is to always use a little carrot and a salted, squeezed out cucumber (in a potato or macaroni salad)” McLaughlin said.

Bentos are very popular in Japan and traditionally a lunchtime meal, especially for weekday workers and kindergarten children (older students are usually provided lunch at school).

“If I were in Japan and working for a company, then every day I would probably get some kind of bento,” McLaughlin said. They can be found in convenience stores like Japan’s ubiquitous chain of 7-Eleven stores or food vendors inside the train station. Here in Central Oregon bento boxes are sold at a few restaurants, including Bend-O-Bento, Mio Sushi, Shinsei Sushi and Oishi.

The bento box available at Bend-O-Bento includes panko-fried chicken, a side of bean thread noodles, a cucumber salad and power rice (a mixture of brown rice and organic black forbidden rice topped with edamame).

Sushi and sashimi

There’s a misconception that sushi and sashimi dominate Japanese food. The fact is in Tokyo it makes up a fraction of the food options available, much like America’s pizza or hamburger.

Also, despite what many believe, the quality of sushi and sashimi is not solely based on the freshness of the fish.

“When I say the quality of the fish, I’m talking about the texture of it, the flavor of it and not necessarily the age of it,” said Joe Kim, chef and owner of Ajii and 5 Fusion and Sushi Bar. As a preteen and teen, Kim spent summers working in his father’s Japanese restaurants and, at age 14, he learned how to make sushi.

Some fish can be immediately flash frozen on the boat after caught and then preserved for the next two to four weeks. The amount of time the fish is preserved ages the meat and brings out a more honest flavor. This is the same way beef’s flavor is affected as it ages.

“Some sushi chefs believe aging tuna up to a month is great, but for most Americans it starts to develop what Americans think of as a fishy flavor. In Japan they think of it as a depth of flavor, and so it’s just a different style of sushi,” said Kim.

While many of us stick with sake (salmon) and maguro (tuna) rolls, we are fortunate to have several high quality sushi restaurants serving a wide variety of sushi items, some of which encourage their customers to explore new foods and try things otherwise intimidating. “We’ll do something that they’re comfortable and familiar with and then pair it with something that they’re not, and they’ll go, ‘OK, I’ll try it’” said Kim. “The menu has developed over the years to push people to try something different.”

Tamago, ikura (salmon roe), tako (octopus) and ika (squid) are very popular sushi pieces in Tokyo and are on the menus at 5 Fusion and Sushi Bar, Mio Sushi, Juno and Kanpai Sushi and Sake Bar.

Asian pancakes

Simplified, the okonomiyaki is a Japanese vegetable pancake, served as a home-cooked meal or as a type of street food. The mountain yam, a vegetable native to Japan, is the key ingredient of okonomiyaki. “That’s what gives it that moist center, it’s fully cooked but it’s the textural difference between the crispy outside and the moist, warm center that Japanese people like,” Kim said. Okonomiyaki is sometimes cooked in restaurants on a pan on an open-faced grill where customers can watch their food being made.

The pancake’s ingredients include potatoes, cabbage, carrots, mountain yam, onion and celery. It is topped with mayonnaise and a teriyaki sauce.

Although most of the ingredients are vegetables, the accompanying sauces make it a rich and filling dish. It’s like a vegetable-filled savory latke or potato pancake.

Kim serves an okonomiyaki at Ajii with a base made of flour, mountain yam and egg. “The ingredients vary region to region so everybody kind of has their own version,” Kim said. “The style that we do is Osaka style, so it’s more of a dough base.”

Ajii’s okonomiyaki is filled with onion, cabbage, bean sprouts, carrots, kale and bacon and topped with kewpie sauce, nori and bonito. Kimchi, chicken or steak can be added to the dish for an extra cost.

Japanese curry

Japanese curry is a popular dish throughout Tokyo. Curry was introduced to the Japanese by the British Army when India was a British colony. However the popularity of the dish didn’t catch on until the latter half of the 20th century. “I was born in 1963, and when I was a kid, the curry was always there,” McLaughlin said. “We’d have curry as a dinner dish.”

There are a few different ways that curry is served in Japan: with rice, with noodles and inside a pastry. Japanese curries can be compared to a mild, Indian brown curry.

“Sometimes people think that curry means it’s like a Thai curry, which is so spicy, but my curry is very mild; even kids can eat it,” McLaughlin said.

Bend-O-Bento serves a chicken curry with carrots, potatoes, onions and garlic on top of white rice or power rice.

Ramen

Tonkotsu ramen served in Kyoto consists of an oily pork broth with thin, straight noodles and toppings including pork belly, scallions and bamboo shoots.

According to Kim, the farm-to-table approach, popular in Central Oregon, is the traditional way of eating and living in the island nation. “Japan has always been that way in that you’re eating what’s around you,” he said.

Kim explains how the food that is prepared differs depending on the region in Japan. Ramen originated in Yokohama, a port city where a shio broth with a chicken or vegetable base was used. Farther inland, there were pig farms and pork was more prominent so pig bones were used to flavor the broths, known as tonkotsu. “The tonkotsu, the pork broth, is something you’ll see more in western Japan, and the lighter broth you’ll see in eastern Japan and in northern Japan you’ll see crab stocks,” Kim said.

Ajii serves an Osaka ramen with tonkotsu broth, noodles, bean sprouts, scallions spinach, a par-cooked egg, pork sirloin and pork belly.

The ramen served at the bar of a restaurant in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, comes with a raw egg, scallions, garlic, shredded nori, chili flakes and ground beef atop a bed of maze soba noodles. Once mixed the raw egg becomes a dressing for the ramen with the remaining ingredients used to add spice and flavor. The noodles are thick and creamy with a kick of spice.

Kanpai Sushi and Sake Bar serves a similar ramen with slow roasted pork belly, a braised pork cheek, a poached egg, scallions, carrots, shitake mushrooms and nori.

— Reporter: 541-383-0351, mcrowe@bendbulletin.com