Japanese ingredients: Myoga or Myouga

This I have seen a friend bringing back to Singapore from her trip to Japan. We put it into our Chinese New Year raw fish salad (yu sang). It's a milder version of what we have here in South East Asia, the torch ginger bud, which flavors a lot of our seafood and salad dishes beautifully.

2 years ago I could buy 2 small myoga seedlings, and tried to grow them in my garden, but they didn't survive the winter. Other people seem to have same problems in Germany, but I also have heard about people growing it successful.
I never have seen any on sale here, we have right now only fresh yamaimo(or nagaimo) and green shiso leaves(online shopping).
Do you have tips for growing myoga?

My parents live in Westchester which is about 30 miles north of New York City. They grow both natsu and aki myouga and it's definitely not tropical weather here. The summers are warm, but I wouldn't say it's very humid. The fall here can be quite cool and the aki myouga are just fine. They have had them for years and they grow in abundance like weeds.

Wow never even heard of these. They do look quite enjoyable though so i have to try them once :)

Unfortunately there aren't many Japanese stores around so I can't find Myouga. But if I ever find some seedlings online or something similar to them I know that I'll make sure that everyone in my family is sick of them. ^.~

I grow it on my balcony near Orléans (center of France), and it grows very well!

My mother has it growing in her garden. She is now in a nursing home and can not tell me how to transplant them. What is the best way for me to transplant them to my garden?

One of my favorites. I've been enjoying them lately in cucumber salads with sesame dressing (much like the one pictured above!) But I live in Japan, so I've never tried to grow them myself. I hope your attempt to do so works out!

When I was a kid, my japanese dad once made a myouga salad, I can't remember exactly but it was either cut in half or it was not cut at all. It tasted horrible and since then, myouga was one of the few things I couldn't eat.

Then, some years later I was in Japan and went to a soba noodles shop where they served cold soba with thinly sliced myouga. It was delicious!

So, in my opinion, the key to appreciate myouga is to slice it thinly.

By the way, you can easily find myouga in São Paulo - Brazil in japanese stores.

They always (or at least very often) have them at the Mitsuwa market outside of Chicago.

I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to plant myoga. I live in NY and was wondering if I could also plant here as I love them but can't find it easily here, just at the Japanese Grocery store which is pretty far from where I live... Do I need to buy seeds or could I plant the myoga that I find at the store? Thanks!

I live in Montréal, Canada (which has a tiny, tiny japanese community - and most of them students) and no, I haven't been able to source myoga yet. Perhaps the big asian groceries carry some, but they're too far. The Japanese, Korean groceries - or the Asian markets in Chinatown - don't have it (not even pickled whole - the only taste of myoga I've ever had was in a mixed shashimi bowl at a higher end restaurant where the flavour was a bit lost and in commercial tsukemono using it as accent and that tasted more of salt and MSG). I have some hope it's going to show up eventually, as Japanese aromatic ingredients are becoming trendy (yuzu and sudachi are still a 5$/fruit rarity, but a local hef was saying on a radio show a while ago - in a segment he made about the wonders of yuzu - it's only a matter of time before fresh yuzu is available more widely, as after Japanese introduced them to western chefs a few years ago at food fairs in Europe and America, Japanese and non-Japanese citrus growers are now starting plantations outside Japan to meet the ever growing demand (western chefs are going nuts - a little too much - about it). Yuzu juice around here has made its way from Japanese groceries to gourmet shops and is starting to appear in some regular groceries now (it's still mostly popular for desserts with the fancier local homecooks, from chocolates to sponge cakes, mousses and macarons).

Still, I also love to read posts about those harder to source, lesser known ingredients. I can speak only for myself, but don't hesitate to post those! I love the philosophy you've adopted for the two blogs (and I owe to you several excellent meals for it) but though I've read about most of the ingredients in cookbooks and all, it's always a lot more fun to read about them from your perspective, just like a lot of your recipe articles are more enjoyable to me than similar ones in cookbooks - you've become my favourite source about Japanese food beside Tokiko Suzuki (and I find you have a little je-ne-sais-quoi in common with her outlook on Japanese food. Do you like her cooking, Maki-san?).

I think your guess is perfectly right that the ingredients are now (sometimes much) easier to find anyway. I've been shopping at the small local Japanese grocery and the Korean groceries for about 25 years, and there's definitely something happening in the last two-three years. The japanese community here is small (especially once you remove the majority of them who are students from Japan and who apparently don't cook much I'm told), so the store really needs the business of locals and for that reason used to focus a lot on sushi products, beside all the basics for expats. But now izakaya are on their way (here, and I think pretty much everywhere?) to repeat the "sushi boom" of 25 years ago and introduce people to a whole new range of dishes previously little known except by Japanese and nipponophile homecooks, and with them seems to come more and more demand by locals for many "new" ingredients for izakaya-style and homecooking-style dishes. For eg, the grocery started to carrt one brand of green yuzu koshou about two years ago, but lately I've seen they had brands each of green and red (It took me a while to contain myself and stop adding it to everything!), and also preserved uni which I had never seen before. Most of the ingredients you posted about quite a while ago (the post about stuff your mom sent you) can be found at the grocery (except dried komatsuna, and that's easy enough to make in the oven, or to substitute dried kale). That wasn't true even two-three years ago, and I can only imagine what it's like now in areas with a bigger japanese community. The hardest to find remains veggies and fresh aromatics aside maybe from shimeji, enoki, shitaake, shiso, kaiware and all those also used in Chinese cuisine (shungiku, lilly bulbs, renkon, nira and of course daikon that you can find in a lot of regular groceries now etc.), but the seeds are more and more easy to source and (also thanks to a post of yours!) I grow a few now.

And oh, finding them months after getting enthusiastic after reading one of your posts seems to make them better somehow. :)

My two cents worth: I have a pot of myoga growing on my deck here in Oregon; this is their second late summer at my house, and although I had a "large" crop last year [maybe 10 flowers], after a rather harsh winter, a long, rainy spring and a late summer, I see three flowers popping up this week. I love the taste, especially in salad dressings!

Salut Maki!

I live in the Southwest of Germany (near the French Border) and I have grown myoga here for a couple of years now without any problem at all. I cultivate it in large pots that I keep in a dark but frost-free shed during the winter period. I can regularly harvest the buds in large quantities around mid to late August. As I'm writing this, the buds I left on the plants are fully flowering. There are even reports of growing it outside in the garden soil with just a little protection in winter in our relatively mild wine-growing region. Wikipedia says it ist cold-resistant to -18°C or even colder. I have not yet tried this, but I think there should absolutely be no problem to grow myoga in the South of France! Provided you keep it in a not too sunny and relatively moist place (it's a woodland plant, isn't it?), it will thrive and give you many delicious buds every summer.

Best wishes,

Detlef (also called Hashi-san)

Greetings from Suzuka, Mie-Ken. I've long been a fan of pickled miyouga. We slice it up thinly and put it in a jar with a 1:1 mix of mirin and ume-su, plum vinegar. After a day or 2 in the fridge it's really yummy as a topping with rice or in salads. The same mirin/vinegar mix is good for thinly sliced kabu (Japanese turnip) too. I guess any fruity vinegar could be substituted if you can't get plum. Raspberry would probably be nice, though I haven't tried it. I find it interesting that people here either love or hate miyouga.

Thanks for the great blog. We've got a small garden at our place here with tomatoes, eggplants, cuccumbers asparagus and European herbs, but I'm eager to grow lots of Japanese herbs from next spring, including myouga and ginger. Cheers!