Monday, May 28, 2018

Japanese omelet and japanese sandwiches

Speaking of Iwo Jima, all your base are belong to us. We are the US. All of your culture will be appropriated. And all of your food preparation techniques will be assimilated. Resistance is futile. Pardon the mixed sci-fi metaphors as we study your ways.



Those thing that he adds will be a portion the standard Japanese flavor ingredients. Dashi, the broth that's like a seafood tea made with steeped kombu kelp and steeped bonito flakes (a skipjack tuna that is dried and smoked to near petrification. Available on Amazon if you'd like to shave it yourself, and the bonito shaving box is available on Amazon too. Otherwise you can buy the bonito flakes in a package.) This dashi is the base for miso soup and many other Japanese dishes including this omelet. Mirin, soy sauce, sugar.

If you'd like to try this yourself you're going to need a square pan. They're all the rage at the finest of experimental kitchens.

Maybe you've had this omelet as sushi. It's belted to the sushi rice ball with pressed nori seaweed. A lot of Japanese style sandwiches, onigirazu and onigiri, made with rice instead of bread are held together with this same nori seaweed. Rice with this nori seaweed are a spectacular combination enhanced with nearly anything else including just regular tinned tuna. One whiff and you're transported directly to the ocean.

Did you notice they use the tinned tuna that is not white albacore? I bought that one time and it smelled like cat food. Nothing you do can fix it. Anything else is better, including those small frozen pieces of tuna where they add coloring to make them look better.

Dad enrolled us in Japanese classes the first weeks that we lived there. I didn't know what a noun is, nor a verb, or an adjective. Predicates were beyond me, and I had yet to learn about prepositions. I didn't know about tenses or moods or conjugations. I didn't know any of the words about words. So the class was useless except by way of osmosis. The cognitives were amusing, the ones that came from American G.I.s, pensulu for pencil, sandoitchi for sandwich. I see it's been shortened to sando. Sort of like saying, "make me a samitch." 

We know they prefer bread made from high protein. The highest protein level of all of the wheats. I know from sourdough that high protein wheat makes more a closed crumb loaf. It's used for bagels and pizzas. It's not the same result as wide open crumb French baguettes. So wide open there is more large air bubbles inside than there is bread. That comes from middle protein wheat, All purpose type flour, although in Europe flour is classified differently than in the U.S. Open loves come from very wet dough, that's kept wet during baking. This allows the gas bubbles trapped inside to expand when heated instead of breaking through. Japanese bread is kneaded three times for the high protein to form intricate molecular network that traps tiny bubbles. It's proofed three times, knocked back twice, to make sure the bubbles do not grow large. The texture is close to cake which is low-protein flour leavened chemically. 

Their bread has the even closed crumb of Wonder Bread except made with high protein flour, so denser and heavier.  Like a synthetic sponge. Their spread is mayonnaise or unsweetened whipped cream without vanilla. Their sandwiches can be anything under the sun. While you'll see the tonkatsu pork shown earlier and these Japanese style omelets. Breaded and fried shrimp, banana and chocolate, strawberries, mango, kiwi, and tinned peaches, even cherries. Fish and cucumber, tuna from tins, egg salad made as westerners do. chicken and wagyu beef, figs, melon. Everything you can imagine except possibly peanut butter and jelly, vegemite or marmite.

It helps to be a little bit goofy to be a Japanese culture presenter. This whole assimilation business goes both ways.



Come on, be a sport, let's try this. 

I'm going to fry up some shrimp and turn them into a sandwich. See if I can get the balance just right.

This woman cracks me up. Her accent combined with her American colloquialisms is hilarious. She makes a morning omelet sandwich the non traditional way. She does not use ingredients traditionally, instead, she sprinkles bonito flakes directly onto the bread.

There are very many more videos on YouTube explaining the thinking behind the Japanese approach to sandwiches. Videos show different types of sandwiches, variations of rice balls, and sandwiches so different you gag just thinking about eating them, like egg-head octopus sandwiches. 

YouTube [japanese sandwiches] Have a look. It'll blow your mind. And possibly change your approach to making sandwiches forever. 

I bet we could improve them.

I made the best lox and bagels ever. Nobody tops them. Little pieces of them were always a hit at large parties. Here's my approach. Just for you. Now you can blow the minds of your family. It doesn't have to be a bagel, those are kind of tough but we like them, this type of high protein tight crumb bread would do very nicely.

You bring cream cheese to room temperature and flavor it however you like. Chives, what have you. 

But best of all is to flavor it with lime and with cumin, vegetable garlic, and possibly scallion. 

That's for avocado slices to go on top of the lox. Avocado flavored with lime, coriander and cumin. 

Usually the stack is bagel, cream cheese, lox, avocado, diced tomato mixed with finely diced onion and chopped rinsed capers so they're not rolling around all over the place. Coriander and cumin are two essential spices that bring the mysterious and captivating scent of Old Mexico. When you smell those two spices you go, okay, here we are. 

Possibly cilantro or basil. But if I did this today, I'd try fresh tarragon. I'm really digging the penetrating flavor of licorice. 

So you got your bagel and smear up both halves Top them up and divide each half in half. Divide each quarter in thirds, for a mouthful of bagel with lox and avocado. Each bagel makes 12 hors d'oeuvres. 

I must be maturing. I just now avoided the whores de ovaries joke. 



1 comment:

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

I do not typically care for the sliced Japanese omelettes. They aren't bad, just boring. But I have always had them cold. I would like to try one fresh off the pan. It might be much better.

I do like the idea of adding mirin and saka to an omlette though (I will pass on the extra sugar, there is plenty in mirin already). I would try that. I also prefer the Italian/Spanish technique of very slow and low (to get the creamy result of how the proteins cook) as opposed to the Japanese/French higher heat way (which gets it spongier).