Japanese Rice, where to find real Japanese ingredients?
Jan0
Well there is certainly nothing I enjoy as much as well prepared, steamy, Japanese rice. Japanese rice is a special variety of middle/short-grain rice that tends to stick just enough to be picked up by sticks but falls apart in your mouth. The variety itself is called Japonica Rice. Of course my first experience with Japanese rice was in a Sushi restaurant but nowadays my passion goes far beyond that. I discovered that Sushi actually only represents a fraction of the Japanese cuisine and that it takes so much more to compose a truly Japanese meal than a few pieces of Sushi.
About one year ago I started to experiment with Japanese ingredients and tried to reproduce authentic dishes. However until I managed to cook something that even remotely looked like in the cookbooks I had purchased, a lot of time passed and a lot of effort was made. All of this involved diving into a very obscure Chinese grocery store that holds a few Japanese ingredients and is unfortunately the only source of Japanese food here in Aix en Provence. After thorough research on the Internet, I thought I’d be prepared to enter the store and find the most important things quickly, but the reality was far from that. I was completely lost. I might add that my not speaking Japanese didn’t help at all. All ingredients had a unique and weird look, I literally had to pick up every jar and plastic bag containing food and carefully asses its contents.
The reason for my ignorance at the beginning was that quite frankly I didn’t know what to expect. When you read about Japanese food you hear fancy terms like dashi-stock, dried bonito flakes, pickled vegetables (oh no those are not any color you’d expect them to look like), aburage, pickled plums (yes salty), dried seaweed sheets (oh god there are so many…), various condiments like mirin (can just substitute that with sake, no?? well no, not really)… and so forth. If you, at this point, have no experience about Japanese staples, do you have any precise imagination of how these ingredients look? Well I didn’t and this is precisely why I started this blog, to explain Japanese food in easy terms, with illustrations and most importantly from the point of view of someone who wasn’t fortunate enough to ever experience Japanese culture first hand. (I hope that’ll change one day).
So let’s get back to the rice. If you truly intend to cook Japanese, rice would be the best thing to start with. Depending on where you live it will be more or less difficult to get a hold on this special rice. It really is different (significantly actually) from Basmati, Chinese, Western (long grain) rice, Risotto rice etc. this unfortunately means that you won’t be able to substitute it with anything. So when you set out to find this ingredient somewhere near you, try the following things:
- First check on the Internet if there isn’t an authentic Japanese store near you. Even Japanese restaurants sometimes have a little section where they sell groceries. From experience I can tell that Japanese shop holders will do their best to get quality rice into their shelves, which also means rice that hasn’t been harvested too long ago. They often have great advice if you ask them directly and contrary to people who never cooked Japanese before, they do know the difference between good and bad rice. Don’t be surprised if you pay about 2 € for a 1 kg bag… most Japanese staples are imported and hence quite expensive.
- If there is really no Japanese shop around you, check in Chinese, Korean or any other Asian shops. Sometimes these might be overwhelming with a lot of weird ingredients standing around, your best bet in that case is to ask directly if the shop owner isn’t too busy.
- If your search didn’t yield any results, your next stop is the biggest commercial center or supermarket that you have in town. Those also sometimes hold Japanese ingredients.
- If all of this doesn’t work for you, there is one solution that ALWAYS works, it’s ordering from the Internet. I personally don’t like ordering much, because it’s simply very costly with shipping and all, but as a last resort it definitely works. Some addresses to order Japanese ingredients: Mount Fuji and Japanese Kitchen are both UK based stores that deliver to most parts of Europe and maybe even to the U.S. // If you live in the U.S.A you can order from AsianFoodGrocer who deliver to any part of the U.S., but not to other countries // If you live in France you can also order from Asia Marché.
If finally you’ve managed to get a hold on Japanese Rice, you can move on to my next post, explaining how to cook, conserve and eat it best.
