It would have been hard for the ORAZ team to imagine sukiyaki before coming to Japan and even harder to imagine our experience in Japan without it.
Eating a homecooked sukiyaki meal with a Japanese family for the first time was a genuine revelation. It was a flavour we’d simply never experienced before and elevated food into a new stratosphere of relevance in our lives. If we ask you to take a moment to imagine a new colour, you’ll have some idea of how impossible that is. Well imagining a new flavour is in the same ball park.
Factoid: Sukiyaki (すき焼き) belongs to the nabemono family of foods. “Nabe” refers to the large pot in which such dishes are cooked, like hotpots or casseroles.
The beef itself is a vital ingredient but differs so widly from our only experiences of cow flesh in other countries that we weren’t even aware that it could be this good. Omi-beef retails at hundreds of dollars for a few pounds of flesh (no more, no less) and is therefore often saved for special occasions like a visit from a foreigner. As per the rumours, the cows are fed on beer, massaged, given hummers and Tivo and generally treated like royalty. Right up until the moment they’re slaughtered. Insert guillotine metaphor here. As such the beef is incredibly tender but more importantly its sold pre-sliced into small, razor thin strips.
Factoid: The heavenly base of sukiyaki is made largely from soy sauce, sugar and mirin.
Within minutes of dunking the ephemerally thin strips of what tastes like unicorn buttock into the rich, dark savoury broth that forms the birthing pool of sukiyaki, the omi-beef has turned from red to brown and is ready for tasting. It genuinely melts in the mouths, oozing sukiyaki soup base as it does so and requires almost no chewing.
Factoid: Before being eaten the sukiyaki is dipped into the diner’s own, personal bowl of raw, beaten eggs. The eggs become half cooked as the meal progresses, lending a delicious creamy slant to the beef flavour.
It is this quality that sets it aside from all the beef the Of Rice and Zen team has ever eaten abroad; it is cooked for a period of time so brief that our mothers would have had puppies and kittens having fits if they’d seen us eat it. The Japanese are sensitive to murdering food with overcooking and are not afraid of anything raw or close.
Factoid: Sukiyaki also contains a seared form of tofu, negi (a type of scallion that resembles a long spring onion), leafy vegetable such as Chinese cabbage and shungiku (Garland chrysanthemum leaves), mushrooms such as shiitake and enokitake, jelly noodles made from konnyaku (aka “Devil’s Tongue”, a plant of the genus amorphophallus whose corms are used to create a starchy flour and jelly which has the appearance of being translucent jelly mixed with ash and is used for its texture more than for its largely absent flavour, although it’s often called a wonder food because it is rich is dietary fibre and low in calories)
Like nabe and other dishes that involve simmering a pot of meat and vegetables in Japan, sukiyaki is a seasonal dish usually saved for the cold winter months and end of year parties. Food is considered both regional and seasonal and is by and large saved for the location and time of year with which it is synonymous by the convention-loving Japanese. There is also a prescribed way of eating such dishes and of holding your chopsticks as you do so.
Factoid: A common Japanese myth about the origin of sukiyaki states that a medieval nobleman visited a peasant and commanded him to cook up the game he had caught. Believing his cooking utensils were unsuitable for the nobleman, the peasant cleaned up his spade (suki) and broiled (yaki) the meat on it. “Myth” is of course another word for “bollocks”.
Learning the conventional use of condiments, the accepted amount of said condiment to use, the size of a typical serving, the time of year a dish is commonly eaten and the locations at which one generally partakes in “local foods” are all important factors when it comes to “blending” in Japanese culture. As has been said many times, being fluent in a language requires being fluent in a culture too. So why not pull up a chair and start eating your way to fluency?
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