There’s a paragraph in the introduction to Nikkei Cuisine: Japanese Food the South American Way in which Luiz Hara discusses The ‘F’ Word … fusion. Fusion food often gets a bad press, the result of too many car-crash combinations of flavours. If it can be done, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it should be done, but [...]
It’s often the odd cuts of meat that offer the most interesting possibilities to the chin the kitchen, the parts of the animal that are sometimes viewed as little more that waste in waiting. So it is with chicken wings, piled up high in the corner of a butcher’s shop, looking as if there’s no [...]
Japanese food has a reputation for being different and difficult, mainly because that very difference helps to create an illusion of difficulty … it’s a kind of self-perpetuating myth. Japanese cuisine is in many ways so radically different to Western food, and its strangeness is off-putting to some people … after all, this is a food culture [...]
Japanese cuisine is at once alien and very familiar. For every sashimi dish of raw fish, there’s something else much more recognisable to the Western palette, such as this, karaage, or Japan’s take on deep-fried chicken. Karaage is a world away from something like an American southern fried chicken dish…it has a delicate elegance in [...]