Eating in Japan

November 10, 2016, In: Eating Travelling

You’ve been waiting for weeks and finally here it is: the post dedicated to Japanese cuisine.

Unfortunately, the Japanese cuisine has so many facets that it would be impossible to reveal them all with a single article. So today we’ll start with the breakfast.

The flavors of the food, in my opinion, reflect the culture and local production. A typical Western breakfast can be divided into two categories: Anglo-Saxon and Mediterranean. In the first one we have meats, eggs, sausages, bread and so on. In the Mediterranean one instead sweet flavors predominate: milk and dairy products, jams, croissants and pastries.

Both reflect the local production: meat and dairy products derived from livestock as well as the baked goods come from wheat.

In Japan, things are not different, but in place of wheat there is the rice, and instead of the farms we have fishing.

So here it outlines a typical Japanese breakfast: rice and fish. Sweet flavors are almost never present except sometimes in slightly sweetened tofu puddings (tofu is tasteless). The coffee is replaced by green tea (strictly without sugar or milk, that there is not any).

All this is almost always accompanied by small portions of preserved vegetables. The consumption of fresh vegetables is very limited, it is impossible to find salads (or then we do not know how to look for, because in the fields there are many). Probably to have them throughout the year, the vegetables are preserved in vinegar, soy or similar. Despite this, the vegetables do not have strong flavors, but rather they are agreeable to the taste and give nuances of flavor to the neutral base of white rice.

Main course, if you can call it, there is the fish, usually grilled. As side dish very often there is the Japanese omelette. Without forgetting the inevitable miso soup: from the base form with just broth and a bit of seaweeds to the full glory with tofu, onion, and even the fish heads.