It's Tea Time in Japan!

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

As a dedicated coffee drinker, tea is an enigma to me. So I figured that investing most of a day at Kyoto Obubu Tea Farms in the small town of Wazuka, at the southern edge of Kyoto prefecture, was a good start to my education.

Truth be told, I was also lured by arresting images of waves of green tea plants, with their characteristic spherical shape, planted in neat rows, clinging to terraced hillsides. From what I'd read, they are not accessible, except on a tour.

Just as the Napa Valley appellation speak to quality in wine, so does Uji, for tea. Wazuka is one of the major Uji tea producers, having grown tea since the Kamakura period (1192-1333). During the Edo period, Wazuka produced the tea for the Japanese Imperial family.

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A Taste of Japan: Yakitori

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

In Japan, there’s nothing that will get mouths watering faster than the sizzle and smoke of yakitori. Yakitori, or “grilled chicken,” is skewers of chicken or chicken parts (like skin, liver or gizzards), dipped in a delicious basting sauce, then grilled.

The basting sauce, or tare (tah-ray), is a trade secret of each restaurant and is usually made with a combination of soy sauce, mirin (Japanese sweet cooking sake), sake and sugar. That sweet soy sauce mixture sends up delicious aromas as the skewers hit the grill, the sugars caramelizing on the chicken.

To make yakitori, the chicken is grilled just until the juices begin to flow. Then the skewers are dipped in the tare and returned to the grill. With each successive dipping, the grilled chicken juices drip into the tare, improving its flavor.

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Anticipating Japanese Food

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

I’m sure there are some poor cooks in Japan. I just haven’t run into them.

This is a huge generalization, having been to just two cities – Tokyo and Kyoto – and just once, for a two-week vacation. But it seems that everywhere we ate, from the exquisite tempura restaurant, to the casual mom and pop eatery, even to the 7-Eleven, the food was consistently good.

I hope I won’t be proven wrong on my second visit to Japan this week.

In anticipation of my trip, I’ve gathered a collection of 30-minute prep Japanese recipes from the Special Fork database for this week’s post, to get us all in the mood.

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Recipes from a Santa Barbara B&B

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

There’s a palpable sense of calm and an air of gracious hospitality at the Bath Street Inn in Santa Barbara, California. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that Marie Christensen had worked as a licensed marriage and family counselor, and that Deborah Gentry had been in human resources before they became inn owners. Both are “people” people and it shows in the warmth of their welcome.

The 1890s house has been an inn for the past 33 years, and the current owners celebrated their 15th anniversary as its innkeepers this September. Steve and I were guests at the inn for a long weekend this summer.

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A Tour of a Genetic Library and a Taste of Figs

By Sandy Hu
The latest from Inside Special Fork

Many of us finally “got” the importance of plant diversity when we tasted our first heirloom tomatoes. Instead of the rock-hard, perfectly shaped and beguilingly red but tasteless supermarket variety, we were shocked to encounter an astounding array of colors and flavors.

These heirlooms came in a multitude of hues – yellow, green, purple, pink, orange, burgundy. Some were big and others were small, some were striped; most were misshapen. They boasted a range of tastes from sweet to tart. We experienced such variety that defied a single description of what a tomato should look like or taste like.

Those tomatoes were in danger of extinction until chefs took up their cause, farmers’ markets became fashionable and supermarkets caught the heirloom trend.

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