offbeat

iSnack 2.0 (Vegemite 2.0) and other bad product names

maki — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:39:19 +0200

Emerging briefly from the fray: Long time readers of Just Hungry may know that I am a huge fan of mysterious dark brown yeast extract products such as Marmite. (See my exhaustive comparison of Marmite, Vegemite and Cenovis.)

As a fan, this story in today’s morning news regarding the name for a new, ‘milder’ Vegemite (apparently they just mixed some cream cheese with original Vegemite …how, uhm, original) almost made me spit up my morning tea. I mean, the name is just begging to be mocked:

Apparently, the iSnack 2.0 name caused such an uproar in Australia that it has been scrapped, deservedly. Of course, the skeptic in me wonders if this was really a stupid executive decision or a devious marketing ploy. It does remind me of the New Coke brouhaha of the mid-80s, about which similar skepticism still lingers.

What other silly food marketing or naming decisions can you think of?

Poverty, rice, and Air Yakiniku

maki — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 13:42:44 +0200

I know I am very late in talking about Air Yakiniku (エア焼肉), which is already over the hill as far as fads go, but here’s my take on it anyway. Unless you don’t know what Air Yakiniku is, it’s a Japanese virtual game that simulates the making eating of yakiniku (table-grilled meat, usually though not always referring to Korean style table-top ‘barbeque’). Here’s the mock-serious how-to video:

Basically, you play the game by making ready a real bowl of rice and a saucer of yakiniku sauce (which is in the same family of sauces as Bulldog/tonkatsu/okonomiyaki sauce in case you’re wondering). The video instructs you to pre-mix some of that sauce into the rice before you start. You then pretend to grill juicy pieces of meat until they’re done on-screen. When your virtual meat piece is done, you pretend to pop it in your mouth, then rapidly put some of that sauce/rice mix into your (real) mouth and close your eyes. It promises to give you the feeling of eating real yakiniku, without the expense!

Yes I know, those wacky Japanese eh. And it is stupid and funny. (And possibly some kind of viral ad campaign - more about that later.) It is humor with a good dose of sarcasm and a tinge of tragedy to it though. In Japan, there’s a long tradition of depicting a meal of penury as being a plain bowl of rice, and nothing else. It’s the equivalent of bread and water in European culture. If you are lucky, you might be able to afford some soy sauce or something to flavor your rice with (if you’re really lucky you can afford to mix in a raw egg). But if you can only afford a plain, unflavored bowl of rice, you can pretend that you have more food by looking at a picture or some delicious food or something sour and saliva-inducing like umeboshi, or even just imagining it in your mind. The Hans Christien Andersen story The Little Match Girl is probably the most popular one of his fairytales in Japan.

So Air Yakiniku is a continuation of this kind of satiric humor. It’s published by a company called Recruit, who operate, among many other things, major job search portal sites, a job-search/employment magazine, and more. The Japanese economy has been just as hard as other economies, which has resulted in many people who are Recruit’s audience, especially temp/contract workers (haken shain 派遣社員), who are mostly in their 40s and younger, losing their jobs. Many temp agencies have gone out of business in recent months, some leaving their contractors unpaid. It’s a pretty dire time, especially since Japan never really shook off the malaise of the bubble economy of the late ’80s. So, while Air Yakiniku is weird and funny, it’s also quite cruel. But I guess you could say that about the most memorable comedy, and may account for its popularity, especially in Japan where that mix of wacked out humor and deep pathos is part of the national psyche.

Notes

The 4 choices of meat on offer in Air Yakiniku are kalbi (beef short rib, served on or off the bone, popular in Korean barbeque); tan (tongue), horumon (offal - see this post for more about horumon), and “Wow what a load of beef! a big beef steak. (So this New York Times blog post is pretty much wrong.)
Beef, even if it’s not wagyuu, is very expensive in Japan, especially the good cuts, so yakiniku is considered to be a real treat.
Even sadder than a plain bowl of rice is no rice at all. During World War II (which is still called The Great Pacific War by some older people) there was a huge rice shortage. Imported rice, which most often was not the type Japanese people were familiar with (see Looking at Rice) was reviled and called gaimai (foreign rice). Other grains like barley, wheat and millet were mixed with rice, and those also became associated with poverty. “Good” Japanese rice was sold on the black market. Nowadays of course those alternate grains are touted about being healthy alternatives to white rice, and people eat non-Japanese style rice with Indian or Thai food, but there is still that lingering stigma attached to those ‘inferior’ grains.

Until fairly recently, rice prices were strictly regulated in Japan by the government to protect farmers, so it was rather expensive compared to other carbohydrate foods. My stepfather, who’s in his early ’60s, remembers his mother resorting to flour based carbs like udon noodles and suiton (Japanese gnocchi) when money got tight. He still dislikes udon for that reason.)
What makes the fact that Recruit is behind Air Yakiniku even more ironic is the fact that the company was involved (eh, allegedly) in the biggest post-war insider trading and bribing scandal in Japan in 1988, just about the time the economy was also going down the toilet.

The earlobe in Japanese cooking

maki — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 12:39:37 +0200

During a bout of procrastination, I came across this post on Serious Eats about making udon from an translated-to-English Japanese cookbook classic, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji. You know this is a classic, since the original forward for it was written by M.F.K. Fisher! Anyway, the author of the Serious Eats post gets quite excited about the instructions in the recipe (which apparently calls for egg yolks…more about this later) saying to knead the dough until it’s the texture of an earlobe.

Actually, the earlobe (mimitabu 耳たぶ) is used quite commonly in Japanese cooking. What? you say? Well…here’s how.

As a gauge of texture. Touch your earlobe now. It’s soft and yielding, but firm and bouncy, right? (That is unless you have a very bony earlobe…) This is the correct texture for a lot of doughs. So, to see if your dough, whether it’s for noodles or buns or mitarashi dango or yatsuhashi. Therefore, many Japanese recipes call for dough to be kneaded until it’s mimitabu kurai no katasa (耳たぶくらいの堅さ; about the hardness/texture of an earlobe)　or mimitabu kurai no yawarakasa (耳たぶくらいの柔らかさ; about the softness of an earlobe).
To cool burnt fingers. The earlobe is supposed to be the coolest part of the human body. So, when Japanese people accidentally touch something hot while cooking, they instinctively touch their earlobe to cool it down fast. To me, it really does work! Give it a try next time you have an ouch! moment in the kitchen. (It doesn’t work with knife cuts, of course.) Of course you should correctly cool burnt fingers in cold water, after the earlobe grab.

So…(channelling the original Iron Chef)…next time you’re in the kitchen, remember this: Your earlobe is part of your cooking arsenal!

(About the egg yolk in the noodle dough: The only reason why I can think of to add egg yolk is for the lecithin, which can make the noodles a bit more slippery. But to me, that is not real teuchi udon (handmade udon, 手打ちうどん）: that’s egg noodles, which are…just different. I’m not too unhappy with my current udon recipe and technique, but can’t wait to get my aunt, who is the acknowledged master of teuchi udon, to show me how to make proper, slippery, chewy udon when I go to Japan in a few months.)

[earlobe photo by quinn.anya on flickr.]

Cherry tomatoes

maki — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 07:39:24 +0200

I am drawn to the vegetable stall at the market by the bright red cherry tomatoes, that look as though they are backlit. The man behind the stall hands me a plastic bag so that I can pick out my own. He may be in his 30s, perhaps his 40s; it’s a bit hard to tell, since his skin is deeply lined by the sun and he has a air of fatique, even boredom. At his side, dealing with customers with a faded, polite voice that matches her flowery dress, is a woman, presumably his wife.

While I’m picking out my tomatoes, I glance up to see a beautiful young woman, perhaps in her late 20s. Her brown hair is pulled back in a casual yet elegant chignon, her sunglasses are Chanel. Her features are sharp and delicate. She’s the stereotype of an elegant young Parisienne, except that this is a small village in Provence.

The man behind the stall lights up like his tomatoes. Ignoring all the other customers, he devotes all of his attention to the young woman. He hands her produce, one by one. He waxes eloquently. He waves his hands around. I stand there, my filled bag of tomatoes in hand, trying to catch his attention so that I can pay and move on, to no avail. The young woman shuffles around the stall, clearly nonplussed by his attention, concentrating on finishing her purchase. Her equally pretty blonde friend looks on with an amused smile on her face. This kind of thing probably happens a lot to them.

The queue of other customers increases. We shuffle over to the wife, since she’s the only one taking our money. The man is now leaning forward, holding out one of the cherry tomatoes to the young woman. My comprehension of French is not that good, but even I can hear the tone of seduction in his voice. The young woman refuses the tomato, laughing politely, her body language clearly saying, “Get me out of here now”. By now, almost everyone around the stall is discreetly observing this little drama and smirking.

I finally get to the wife and hand her my bag of tomatoes to weigh. I glance at her face. Under her mask of polite nonchalance I can see her weary anger. Probably not the first time for such a situation.

The transaction is completed with the usual exchange of polite words. As I turn to leave, I see the young woman and her friend hurrying away from the stall. I glance back discreetly; the man is looking after them longingly, as his stone faced wife weighs the bags of another customer.

I send Happy Earth Day greetings to you all with pictures of virile vegetables

maki — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 21:03:12 +0200

Spring onions! Look at those virile roots.

Fresh, still-moist garlic!

Artichokes! Oh my, what artichokes!

What better way to celebrate Earth Day than with local, organically grown vegetables?

American kitchens: Why cups, and not weight? Where's the kitchen scale?

maki — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 22:21:58 +0200

(This post has nothing to do with Frugal Month. It does have something to do with my recent obsessing about kitchens though.)

I like the cooking videos on the New York Times web site quite a lot. I especially like the ones from Apartment 4B, starring Jill Santopietro in her tiny kitchen. She’s adorable, and the recipes look workable.

But as I was watching this latest video, where she makes a pizza in that tiny kitchen, I was shaking my head in disbelief many times.

Well first, go and watch it if you haven’t yet. I’ll wait.

(Waits.)

Seen it? Ok, this is what’s bothering me.

She recommends ‘fluffing the flour up’, before scooping-and-leveling it out with your standard measuring cup.
She then makes the pizza dough with a gigantic Kitchen Aid mixer.

So basically, this girl who has a kitchen barely big enough to turn around in, has a giant mixer, yet has no kitchen scale. I guess there’s some sort of rationale behind the fluffing up the flour step, but - isn’t it more important to have an accurate amount of flour in the dough? What if you fluff more one day than you do another, and your dough doesn’t turn out the same?

Which leads to a question that’s been bugging me for a long time. Why don’t American cooks like to weigh their ingredients?

Now, while I did spend a number of years living in the States, I essentially learned the fundamentals of cooking in Japan, with some England and Switzerland thrown in there. (This is mainly because when I lived in New York, I either was too broke to cook much beyond the basics, or (later on) I had a crazy 100 hour a week type of job which left me little time or energy for cooking. If I’d had a food blog back then, it would have been about the wonders of NYC takeout.) Anyway, the point is, I learned to cook with this basic understanding: For complete accuracy, you need to weigh out ingredients, especially for baking.

But every single American cookbook or recipe site has measurements in cups and spoons. This makes sense for liquid ingredients. And most recipes are forgiving enough so that a few grams or ounces more or less don’t make a big difference. But if you have a complicated recipe for cake or something that you want to be able to replicate reliably, in my mind cups don’t really make a lot of sense. Commercial recipes, which must be reliably reproduceable, don’t do cup measurements.

I do write out most of the the recipes on my sites with cup measurements (as well as ounces and grams) for U.S. readers. I have memorized archaic U.S. only measurements like a stick of butter = 8 Tbs. of butter = 4 ounces of butter. Still, I don’t really see that it’s totally logical.

A fairly fancy kitchen scale doesn’t cost more than $50 or so, $100 at most. That humongous KitchenAid in the video probably cost what - $400? $500? More? I did not have a very big kitchen in the house we just sold, so I couldn’t find the space for a mixer, but I only needed a tiny narrow shelf to house a good kitchen scale.

So, my U.S. based readers - what’s your opinion? Why do Americans love cup measurements, and not weight measurements? Do you have a kitchen scale? Do you use it? (Do you have a KitchenAid or other big gadget, and bake often, but no scale?)

(Disclaimer: I have nothing at all against KitchenAid. My sister has one, it’s beautiful. I admire it when I visit her.)

(Oh, and one more thing that bugged me about that video, though it’s not unique in this: Carmelize onions?? Make them smell like Carmel, California? Isn’t it caramelize??)

Kitchens out of the past

maki — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 00:54:35 +0100

I know, I haven’t updated here in some time. Why, you may ask, am I updating Just Bento but not Just Hungry? Well, I had actually stockpiled up some bento posts before the Big Move and Nomadic Period commenced, and also arranged for some guest posts. My plan was for Just Bento to go on semi-autopilot (which it has), and for Just Hungry to be updated with food-related things about my travels. But it hasn’t quite worked out the way I wanted to on that front, due to getting really sick the first week on the road, then just being very busy.

But anyway, here I am. As I wrote before, I have now moved out of the house in the suburbs of Zürich where I had lived off and on for some years, and I’m now roaming around looking for the new place to call home. At this point we are about 60-70% leaning towards ‘somewhere in France’ (to be determined where). So last week, we started looking at some houses for real.

Now, we are mainly looking at houses that need some work done to them, since we figure that we’ll get more for our money that way. Besides, we never totally like someone else’s taste in decor anyway, so we might as well start off with an empty shell or something.

Of the houses we’ve seen so far, the kitchens in two of them were particulary memorable. (Actually, most of the other houses didn’t even have kitchens.) First up is this one, in a 1920s house in a town in the Vaucluse (a region in the northern part of Provence).

I’m sure the range is not from the 1920s - I’m guessing it’s circa 1970s. It’s tiny, and fitted into the beautiful, huge fireplace. My first thought was, wow what a waste to stick a cooker in that fireplace! But I guess it makes sense, for ventilation purposes? (No, I don’t get the birdcage either. It was sure pretty though.)

Here’s a closeup look. The chocolate brown cabinet thing is the tiny refrigerator - the other appliances (not shown, in a wall closet) matched. That fireplace…so gorgeous.

The other side of the fireplace. I am not sure if those cabinets were used as worktops. Maybe the occupant used a kitchen table for working. In any case, it’s a kitchen that is so different from our modern concept of what a kitchen should have. But despite the lack of ‘worktop space’, I am sure that the meals produced there were delicious regardless.

Now here is another kitchen that left a deep impression on me. It’s circa 1970s, un-renovated I think, and in perfect condition. It’s a symphony of browns!

Another view. The stainless steel handles, the mustardly-yellow tiles…the teak! Nothing says ’70s like teak. And mustard-yellow.

I’m pretty sure the appliances are not circa 1970s, but the plastic coffee pot does fit very well in here.

Their vacuum cleaner seems to be from the same era as the kitchen. I wonder if it works?

And the pantry down the hallway. It too was spotless. I do love the concept of a separate pantry.

It’s really fascinating to see for real how fashions in kitchens really do change so much over the years. Nowadays I guess we want lots and lots of working space, tons of cabinets, granite worktops, neutral colors, chrome and sleekness. I’m not sure we’d buy either of these houses, since it almost seems a shame to rip out the period kitchens (and other reasons). But it was so interesting, even educational, to have seen them in any case. We’re going to see more houses in the upcoming weeks, and more kitchens. I can’t wait.

Moffles

maki — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 15:59:00 +0100

As I’ve been slowly making my way through our stuff and deciding what to keep and pack, what to try to sell, and what to just throw away, I encountered the neglected electric waffle/panini maker in the depths of a kitchen cabinet. I can’t even remember the last time I used it. I do remember that we got it for free, via a buyer’s incentive scheme sort of like frequent flyer miles, run by one of our local supermarket chains (it’s Coop Supercard, for people living in Switzerland). I think I’ve used it about 5, 6 times tops, all but one of those times to make panini. I’m just not a waffle person I guess.

So, as I pondered whether I was going to get rid of the waffle maker at the garage sale coming up next week or just dump it, an idea popped into my head. Why not try to make moffles with it? Moffles　(pronounced moffuru) are a Japanese invention, which have been popular for a couple of years. They are basically mochi cakes cooked in a waffle-maker like contraption called, of course, a moffle maker.

Apparently the moffle was the brainchild of an employee of an electric appliance maker who was giving an instore demo of a regular waffle maker. She overheard a customer saying “If you could use that thing for cooking mochi, it might actually be useful” or words to that effect. Back at the office, she tried cooking mochi in the waffle iron and found it surprisingly easy. Thus, the moffle was born.

So, here is how I went about making moffles in a regular electric waffle maker. (A moffle maker has shallower, round dimples rather than the deep square ones in a waffle maker.) Incidentally, my waffle maker is from Tefal. It’s a clamshell type, has a simple dial-timer, detachable plates for making waffles or panini, and annoyingly switches on as soon as it’s plugged in.

Recipe: Moffle or moffuru （モッフル）

First, brush the surface of the waffle iron plates with a little melted butter or oil as they heat up. The mochi can stick a bit (especially on the square edges of the waffle plate) and this is to prevent that as well as to add a bit of flavor.

Place one square mochi cake on each plate.

Now lower the lid and press gently. The lid will not close, due to the thickness of the mochi, but as you keep pressing gently the mochi will soften and spread, becoming thinner, until you can close the lid completely. As soon as you can, set the timer to 2 minutes or so, more if you want it really crispy and a bit toasted on the outside.

And when the time’s up: Voilà, moffles!

Moffles are often filled with something savory or sweet. Here I’ve kept it simple and put some sliced cheese on one of the moffles.

I then put the other moffle on top, and closed the waffle maker lid again for about a minute or so. This produces a grilled cheese moffle sandwich. This is how it looks like when it’s done…

Here’s a plate of grilled cheese moffle, cut into quarters. The yellowness of the cheese can be seen through the translucent white moffle.

To make thinner, smaller and crispier moffles, you can slice a mochi cake horizontally in half (you can do this easily with a just-opened fresh mochi cake, using a sharp knife. In Japan, thinly sliced mochi called shabu-shabu mochi are often used). Once you can close the lid, which should be just about immediately, set the timer to 2 minutes.

You can eat the moffles singly with just a little soy sauce instead of filling them. I like them best like this I think. They should go well with anything that goes with regular grilled mochi cakes, like kinako (toasted ground soybean powder) mixed with sugar, or grated daikon radish and soy sauce.

You can also treat them as you would regular waffles, and put on syrup, melted butter, chocolate sauce, etc. as you prefer. However, they are not like flour-and-egg waffles - they are like thin mochi cakes, crispy-chewy on the outside, gooey on the inside, and bland. If you like mochi, you’ll love moffles. And of course they are gluten-free, since they’re made of pounded rice.

They are not low in calories, but they are very filling. One cheese filled moffle using 2 mochi cakes and 30g of cheese is about 400 calories, but half of one is plenty for a snack. They must be eaten freshly cooked and hot, since they turn hard when cool. They are not suitable for bentos.

The best thing is that they cook up so fast, and are very filling - great for snacks. I think I will keep the waffle maker after all.

I'm moving! I'm moving! But where to go?

maki — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 19:31:28 +0100

I just thought I’d give an update as to what’s up with me these days. I’ve talked about this a bit here and there, but the house that was on sale since sometime mid-last year finally sold a few weeks ago, and I am formally moving out of the house I have inhabited off and on, mostly on, for about 10 years on the 26th. (This is why there hasn’t really been a lot of serious cooking around here lately.)

Now, I do not know yet where I am going to be moving. You might think this is a bit nuts, but I am in a very fortunate situation in that at this point the nature of my work, most of which can be done via online communication, allows me to live almost anywhere there is a high speed internet connection. So I do not have to stay in the Zürich area, or even in Switzerland. This freedom of choice has me in a mild state of panic and a deep state of confusion though. Where do I go? Where do I go? I keep on flipping through real estate ads in wildly different areas of the world, figuring out what is affordable. Invariably, I’m thinking like a food-obsessed person though.

Where in the world (where I have the right to live, or could easily get a working visa) should I go that will make my tastebuds happy and the cook inside me satisfied?

Anyway, let’s pretend that there are no tiresome restrictions like visas and such. If eating well were the only criteria, where in the world would you move to?

Of course in reality, I do have to consider things like visas, bureaucracy, stability of governments, availability of affordable healthcare and such, not to mention a pretty tight budget for the move. But for the moment I’m just letting my imagination run free here. In March I’m off to a particular favorite corner of the world to see if living there is realistic…

Left-handed eating taboos

maki — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 15:15:07 +0100

One of the biggest thrills for me this past week, on connection to the inauguration of the 44th President of the United States, was not his closing of Guantanamo Bay or the restriction on lobbying in Washington, or the very fact that an African-American (heck, any non-white) individual was now the Leader Of The Free World. It was the discovery that President Obama is a lefty.

(Photo by scriptingnews)

Apparently this is not that unusual - five out of the seven previous U.S. Presidents have been left-handed (the rogue righties being Carter and Bush the Younger). As a lefty myself though, I felt a special kinship with the new President when I saw him signing a document in that typical crooked-wrist aiming-from-the-top way we have.

Something said in the comments for the previous Chopstick Etiquette post reminded me of the fact that, while I am a natural lefty and do things with my left hand most of the time, I use my chopsticks in my right hand. This is not a natural thing - when I was little, correcting the handedness of kids was a done thing, especially when it came to chopsticks. I still remember my grandfather (who was a rather imperious figure when he was healthy) complaining that my lefthanded chopstick use was 見苦しい (migurushii) - unpleasant to behold. The implication was that my mother wasn’t teaching me correct manners (躾　shitsuke, which means to discipline or teach manners). So now I do use my chopsticks in my right hand - indeed, I can’t use chopsticks in my natural left hand at all.

The Washington Post article also mentions that Mr. Obama “uses his right hand for certain tasks, including hand-to-mouth (eating a sandwich or pizza)”, connecting it with the fact that in Indonesia, where Mr. Obama spent some years while growing up, touching certain things with your left hand is still considered quite rude.

Nowadays, left-handed children are no longer routinely disciplined to use chopsticks in their right hands, but the idea that it’s somehow rude or migurushii to do so still persists to an extent. On this page from Yahoo! Japan, the person says that while s/he doesn’t think anything of left-handed chopstick users, her friend thinks it’s a sign that “the person was not brought up properly”.

One good thing that came out of my early other-handed training: I can knit ambidexterously, so I don’t have to flip my piece over. I can always look at the front while I’m knitting! Other than that though, I don’t see any good out of my forced training. I still can’t really use chopsticks correctly, whichever hand I use. Maybe I should try to practice some with my left hand.

Now, I wonder which hand President Obama uses for chopsticks…did his white mother or grandmother try to change him while he was growing up in Hawai’i?

What kind of left-handed prohibitions exist in your culture?