better, rather than
Sep. 15th, 2007 01:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
solarbirdOne of the things I'm still missing pretty severely is the food - really everywhere, not just Yokohama and Tokyo. I expected all the Japanese food to be better, of course, and it was - for example, the cluster of restaurants at the train station had a sushi-train restaurant which served sushi of quality much better than that of cheap-but-good sushi here. It wasn't I ♥, but it was within range given the limited palette, and, of course, that was cheap sushi. Meanwhile, the cooked fish lacked some taste that I really dislike in cooked fish throughout North America, and while it still wasn't my favourite thing in the world, it was something I was perfectly happy to eat.
I didn't really expect the western food also to be better, as a rule. The sandwich and fries I had at Anna Miller? Really good. Good cold cuts, good bread, an unexpected but very good mayonnaise relish that I've no idea how to duplicate that was tasty without being heavy like I usually find mayonnaise to be. It came with french fries. They were solid but light and tasty, despite being deep-fried.
That became a recurring theme, really; a lot of American foods, particularly cheaper American foods, are heavy with fats and grease. While actual meats served in Japan tended to be very fatty cuts - particularly the night I tried 牛どて鍋, which is, hum, a country beef single-pot pie-like dish - you never found much of anything heavy with oil or grease (or, I suppose butter), like all fast foods, most sandwiches, french fries, and so on. I liked that a lot.
Actually, let me just me come out and say it: food was all but uniformly better than here. In a lot of cases, dramatically. Quality of ingredients showed. Everywhere but the first stop when we joined up with the Thundering Hoarde tour already in progress was at least really good. That first lunch with the group was a very western lunch aimed at reassuring a very western group of tourists, and it was mediocre, but even the tour food improved quickly. And more specifically, even the western-oriented tour food - which shrank in proportion as time went on - improved just as quickly.
I don't quite know how to drive this home with clarity. How about this: we stopped at a rest station - a combination rest stop and truck stop - on the highway between tour visits one day. I got a curry from the short-order counter, and it was good. Rest stop curry - actively good.
(Oh, there was another exception: one night we needed Food Now, and Paul and Anna dove in to an egg, italian sausage, rocket, and anchovy pizza, which I avoided for the spaghetti. I chose poorly. Amusingly, I was able to recreate what I think they were going for last night. It came out nice.)
Even things like candy-bar chocolates are better. Counter chocolates are generically of better quality than you get here without going to specialty shops. One of the reasons for the Pocky phenomenon, I rather suspect, is that the chocolate is simply much better than you get in, say, a Snickers bar, and people are reacting to that. Apparently some people think it's dark chocolate - it's not, at least, not in the standard box. But it's got a lot more flavour per volume than people expect, so they think it must be dark. iirc, "Men's Pocky" actually is dark chocolate, if you're curious.
Similarly, soft-serve ice cream - you know, the swirly kind you think of as fun in the summer but not really a good example of the art? It's just good ice cream in Japan. Very good, in fact. I particularly liked the sesame that Mariko introduced to me (so tasty!), but plain vanilla? Also very good. I was pleased to discover today that Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream bars are, in fact, of reasonably comparable quality to the soft serve vanilla - not quite as good, frankly, there's a bit of a hollowness to the taste that I can't figure out, and the chocolate shell isn't everything I'd like it to be, but it's still good. This means I'll have at least some ice creams that I can buy at a counter which aren't a big letdown. Of course, the selection is far less than I had in Japan in, say, in an ordinary ice cream vending machine, but what can you do? At least there's something.
I'm going to have to get serious about learning the art of bento. I can usually stomach airline food, but I seriously and honestly could not eat what United put in front of me on the flight home. It was appalling. But I don't think it was any worse than what I scarfed down on the way there.
Fundamentally, the way that American culture prefers "more" over "good" shows up exquisitely in food. Despite the fact that American food has improved dramatically over the last 50 years, it's still kinda crap. Fatty, sloppy, oversweetened crap, made as cheaply as possible and served by the bucketload, as though to pigs.
This quality emphasis doesn't mean limited choices, by the way. I ran into far more variety there than here. Some of it was scary variety, like HELLO JELLYFISH but! Variety.
Japan is already famous for its vending machines, of course. I don't need to go on about that too much. But in case you're not aware: they are, of course, AWESOME. (Sorry, return of t3h c4pz.) Even in a single smallish drink machine in an alley, you're looking at 20 options - soda, teas, lemon drinks, waters, coffee, vitamin waters, juices, electrolyte waters (like the well-known Pocari Sweat, which I was drinking already before I went over on vacation - it's like Gatorade, sweet, but not sickly sweet, I really like it) - often in two sizes, and the cans have lids you can put back on so you can save some for later. Also, the machines generally seem to come in clusters of three or so, without a lot of repeats.
This is as opposed to a US soda machine, with its four slots filled with Coke or Pepsi, and four other options. Maybe.
Pleasantly, I've found I can get C.C. Lemon at Uwajimaya. I got hooked on that stuff in Yokohama, and it's everywhere. Also, mmmm, tasty. This is particularly good because I tried a lemon drink at QFC a couple of days ago - an all-organic "alternative" kind of drink - and like all kinds of other things now, it mostly tasted like sugar water. I could taste lemon in it, but it was kind of drowned out by the sugar rush. So I poured it out. (They didn't have any Limonata or I'd have tried that. I still plan to try it again. Hopefully that's still good.)
So anyway. Food in Japan: overwhelmingly better. Not universally, but overwhelmingly; Japanese food, western foods, whatever. Better.
But then, on the other hand, they do also have things like this:
Admiral Cheesehead's Orange Fleet Opens Namjatown
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spazzkat's picture)
Nobody's perfect. -_^
I didn't really expect the western food also to be better, as a rule. The sandwich and fries I had at Anna Miller? Really good. Good cold cuts, good bread, an unexpected but very good mayonnaise relish that I've no idea how to duplicate that was tasty without being heavy like I usually find mayonnaise to be. It came with french fries. They were solid but light and tasty, despite being deep-fried.
That became a recurring theme, really; a lot of American foods, particularly cheaper American foods, are heavy with fats and grease. While actual meats served in Japan tended to be very fatty cuts - particularly the night I tried 牛どて鍋, which is, hum, a country beef single-pot pie-like dish - you never found much of anything heavy with oil or grease (or, I suppose butter), like all fast foods, most sandwiches, french fries, and so on. I liked that a lot.
Actually, let me just me come out and say it: food was all but uniformly better than here. In a lot of cases, dramatically. Quality of ingredients showed. Everywhere but the first stop when we joined up with the Thundering Hoarde tour already in progress was at least really good. That first lunch with the group was a very western lunch aimed at reassuring a very western group of tourists, and it was mediocre, but even the tour food improved quickly. And more specifically, even the western-oriented tour food - which shrank in proportion as time went on - improved just as quickly.
I don't quite know how to drive this home with clarity. How about this: we stopped at a rest station - a combination rest stop and truck stop - on the highway between tour visits one day. I got a curry from the short-order counter, and it was good. Rest stop curry - actively good.
(Oh, there was another exception: one night we needed Food Now, and Paul and Anna dove in to an egg, italian sausage, rocket, and anchovy pizza, which I avoided for the spaghetti. I chose poorly. Amusingly, I was able to recreate what I think they were going for last night. It came out nice.)
Even things like candy-bar chocolates are better. Counter chocolates are generically of better quality than you get here without going to specialty shops. One of the reasons for the Pocky phenomenon, I rather suspect, is that the chocolate is simply much better than you get in, say, a Snickers bar, and people are reacting to that. Apparently some people think it's dark chocolate - it's not, at least, not in the standard box. But it's got a lot more flavour per volume than people expect, so they think it must be dark. iirc, "Men's Pocky" actually is dark chocolate, if you're curious.
Similarly, soft-serve ice cream - you know, the swirly kind you think of as fun in the summer but not really a good example of the art? It's just good ice cream in Japan. Very good, in fact. I particularly liked the sesame that Mariko introduced to me (so tasty!), but plain vanilla? Also very good. I was pleased to discover today that Haagen-Dazs vanilla ice cream bars are, in fact, of reasonably comparable quality to the soft serve vanilla - not quite as good, frankly, there's a bit of a hollowness to the taste that I can't figure out, and the chocolate shell isn't everything I'd like it to be, but it's still good. This means I'll have at least some ice creams that I can buy at a counter which aren't a big letdown. Of course, the selection is far less than I had in Japan in, say, in an ordinary ice cream vending machine, but what can you do? At least there's something.
I'm going to have to get serious about learning the art of bento. I can usually stomach airline food, but I seriously and honestly could not eat what United put in front of me on the flight home. It was appalling. But I don't think it was any worse than what I scarfed down on the way there.
Fundamentally, the way that American culture prefers "more" over "good" shows up exquisitely in food. Despite the fact that American food has improved dramatically over the last 50 years, it's still kinda crap. Fatty, sloppy, oversweetened crap, made as cheaply as possible and served by the bucketload, as though to pigs.
This quality emphasis doesn't mean limited choices, by the way. I ran into far more variety there than here. Some of it was scary variety, like HELLO JELLYFISH but! Variety.
Japan is already famous for its vending machines, of course. I don't need to go on about that too much. But in case you're not aware: they are, of course, AWESOME. (Sorry, return of t3h c4pz.) Even in a single smallish drink machine in an alley, you're looking at 20 options - soda, teas, lemon drinks, waters, coffee, vitamin waters, juices, electrolyte waters (like the well-known Pocari Sweat, which I was drinking already before I went over on vacation - it's like Gatorade, sweet, but not sickly sweet, I really like it) - often in two sizes, and the cans have lids you can put back on so you can save some for later. Also, the machines generally seem to come in clusters of three or so, without a lot of repeats.
This is as opposed to a US soda machine, with its four slots filled with Coke or Pepsi, and four other options. Maybe.
Pleasantly, I've found I can get C.C. Lemon at Uwajimaya. I got hooked on that stuff in Yokohama, and it's everywhere. Also, mmmm, tasty. This is particularly good because I tried a lemon drink at QFC a couple of days ago - an all-organic "alternative" kind of drink - and like all kinds of other things now, it mostly tasted like sugar water. I could taste lemon in it, but it was kind of drowned out by the sugar rush. So I poured it out. (They didn't have any Limonata or I'd have tried that. I still plan to try it again. Hopefully that's still good.)
So anyway. Food in Japan: overwhelmingly better. Not universally, but overwhelmingly; Japanese food, western foods, whatever. Better.
But then, on the other hand, they do also have things like this:
Admiral Cheesehead's Orange Fleet Opens Namjatown
(
spazzkat's picture)Nobody's perfect. -_^
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-15 08:15 pm (UTC)American food starts with factory farmed ingredients. These meats, produce, grains, etc. have been bred for disease and pest resistance, shelf life, transportability, pretty much anything except the flavour and texture that actually affect the eating experience. Nutritional value takes a hit, too.
These low quality ingredients are then typically processed in various ways to further increase transportability and shelf life, generally stripping out even more of the flavour and nutritional value.
What we have left is pretty much some 50s SF author's generic nutrition substance: a bland and joyless chunk of calories. So various artificial flavours are added, along with flavour enhancers like MSG and various other forms of sodium. The manufacturers are also required by law to replace some of the vitamins and minerals that were stripped out in the processing, and encouraged to add a few more.
Fats are cheap and provide an approximation of the satisfying fullness feeling of more expensive proteins. In addition, they hold and transfer flavours well, so it's easier to use flavouring additives to mask the fact that the heavy processing took out most of what little flavour there was in the first place. Finally, many of the vitamins and minerals that were added are easier to digest if they come in a fat-rich medium.
I believe that sugar, mostly in the form of corn syrup, was originally added partly as a preservative, but I'm not sure on that. In any case, most factory farmed produce has lost much of its natural sugars as part of the breeding for hardiness, and just doesn't taste right without that, so it started getting replaced with corn syrup. Over the years, the quantities used have gradually increased to pretty much ridiculous levels, and Americans have largely become conditioned to liking their food extremely sweet by pretty much anyone else's standards. In small amounts, sugar is also a flavour enhancer, so it sneaks into a lot of stuff there as well.
A couple of specific points:
If you're starting with good meat, the fatty cuts are much more tender and flavourful, but added fat from other sources does little to help a low quality starting point.
On that same note, fried foods are very tricky. If the fat that you're using is within a very narrow window, it comes out great. Outside of that window, you either get something overdone on the outside and raw in the middle (too hot), or the grease has time to soak into the food before it cooks properly (too cool). The kicker: each time food is lowered into the fat, it sucks up some of the heat, and cools the fryer down a little. If you don't wait for the fat to come back up to temp before dropping in the next batch, it's not hot enough and you get greasy food. Most American places put too much emphasis on quick turnaround time on orders to be able to take that time for the oil to heat back up again, so it all gets really greasy. Most places probably don't bother to calibrate their thermometers properly either, which will screw up the whole thing as well.
American Breads almost always have lots of added gluten, which is an easy way to get a light fluffy bread without needing a long rise. Unfortunately, this also keeps the bread from developing much in the way of flavour, and, after eating, it collapses into a lump of starch that sits like a lead weight in your stomach.
That's what I can think of right now. It's a bit disjointed, because I've been up for way too long, but it should all be pretty accurate. If I can remember more later I'll add another comment or something. Also, I might be going out to my mom's place to visit for a while this weekend. If I do, I'll ask her to look it over and see what I forgot.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-15 08:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 08:40 am (UTC)You forgot size. The first time I read an American recipe that said "quarter and core the strawberries, I was all WTF??? Core a strawberry?
I also have a friend who lived in the backwoods of Canada, and who always cooked avocado, since those she got to find in stores were always unripe and hard as rock.
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 08:58 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 02:00 pm (UTC)This explains why my homemade sourdough bread is so popular...
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 02:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 04:30 pm (UTC)Whee! Free-range yeasts! ;-)
no subject
Date: 2007-09-16 04:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-17 05:14 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-09-17 01:23 pm (UTC)