 My name is Chris Gertys, and I'm chair of the Japan Research Center and senior lecturer in the history of contemporary Japan here at SOWAS. I want to thank Professor Harry West, chair of the Food Studies Center, and the entire team of the alumni relations and the Centers and Programs Office for putting together this event tonight. Their hard work makes SOWAS the space where the world meets Japan. Tonight, we are exceptionally lucky to have with us Chef Tim Anderson, freelance chef, food writer, and 2011 master chef champion cooking with us, while in conversation with Dr. Barack Kushner, university senior lecturer in modern Japanese history at the University of Cambridge. We've never done this before, so it should be pretty interesting to see whether it works or not. Barack admits that he simply fell into the field of East Asian history. After graduating from Brandeis and a brief sojourn teaching high school in Chicago, this New Jersey native went abroad to teach English in Japan, and then history in China. Those experiences sparked an interest in the history and culture of the Far East, especially food, which further spurred Barack to seek a postgraduate degree from Princeton University. Two published books later, one quite famous history of ramen noodles, and a third forthcoming, Barack is now an established and well respected academic. Indeed, Barack's book on the history of ramen was awarded the 2013 Sophie Co. Prize for Food History, the longest running and most generous prize for writing in food history in the English language. Tonight, Barack will be wearing his hat as both scholar and foodie as he helps distract Tim from concentrating too hard on his part for the evening. A native of Racine, Wisconsin, Tim Anderson is a freelance chef, food writer, and consultant based here in London. Tim's cooking is primarily informed by his American heritage and his love for regional Japanese food, but it also draws on a personal history of worldwide culinary tourism and a keen interest in food science and modernist cuisine. Millions watched Tim emerge victorious on BBC One's Masterchef in 2011, some even in tears while they watched. And Tim has since enjoyed an exciting career in the world of food. Working as a freelance chef and consultant, he has had the pleasure and privilege of working for a diverse range of clients that include Google, Unilever, BrewDog, Oral-B, Strollen, Twining's KitchenAid, and the Japanese national tourist organization. His first cookery book, Nanban Japanese Soul Food, is due out from SquarePag next year. So with no further preamble, please join me in giving a warm welcome to Dr. Barack Kushner and Masterchef Tim Anderson. Thank you, Chris. All right. Well, thank you. Thank you all for coming. Thanks, Chris, for the introduction. Thanks to everyone at SOAS for organizing this and letting me be here because this is amazing. I sort of wanted to go into academia and sort of still want to do that. So this is as close as I think I'm going to get giving a talk at SOAS. Thanks to you. You were saying Barack. I've always said Barack and I'm sorry if I've been mispronouncing your name. It depends which side of the Atlantic you're on. I can answer to both. Yeah. Okay. But anyway, thank you. Thank you for joining me up here. This is, well, it's going to be... I'm supposed to keep you on target, right? Right, yeah. Anyway, I should basically, I think, talk about who I am and why I am here broadly. My name is Tim Anderson. Like Chris said, I won Masterchef 2011. Since then, I've been... Well, let me go back a step. Actually, the reason I'm cooking Japanese food and talking about Japanese food is just because that's sort of always been what I'm interested in. When I was 14, a show called Iron Chef came on TV in America, which if any of you have seen it, it's like a crazy over-the-top Japanese cooking competition. And it just sort of blew my mind. And since then, I've always sort of been interested in Japanese food for one reason or another. I went to college at Occidental College in Los Angeles, and I got to study Japanese food. I was an Asian studies major, which here at SOAS seems pretty silly to say. But I got to study Japanese food history and culture while I was there. Anyway, then I moved to Japan on the jet program. I lived in Fukuoka Prefecture for two years. And then I moved here. After meeting an English girl there, I'm getting married. So that's why I'm here here. But anyway, long story short, I went on Masterchef after I got here. One, and since then, I've been doing pop-up restaurants and street food, mostly under the name Nanban, which does southern Japanese food, mostly southern Japanese food, specifically from Kyushu, which is the southwestern most major island. But anyway, I have a book coming out. It's meant to be out now, and that's why I'm here. But there was an issue, and it's been delayed till next year. It'll be a better version when it comes out. Yeah, it looks nice. This is my model. This is the display purposes-only version. But the book is called Nanban Japanese Soul Food, and I just want to sort of... I'm going to structure this. I'm going to do cooking in a little while. I'm going to lecture you first, with input from Barack Barrick. Dr. Kushner. Dr. Kushner. From Dr. Kushner. It makes it easier. My esteemed colleague. I'm going to lecture you first, then I'm going to break it down sort of by key terms. So first of all, why is it called Japanese Soul Food? I'll start with that. It's actually not my expression. I stole it from Ipudo, which is a ramen chain that opened in Manhattan. They're from Fukuoka originally, and they've got shops all over Japan, but they opened in Fukuoka years ago. But they had, as one of their ads on their website, ramen is Japanese soul food. And I thought, ah, I'll bank that for later. But why does it speak to me? First of all, the food that is in the book and the food that I cook, it's food from the south of the country, just like American soul food, comes from the south. It's got a big influence of foreign migrants that have lived there and go through them and also ethnic underclasses. So obviously in the South America, soul food started with slaves from Africa. In Japan, it's everybody from Iberian merchants to English politicians to American soldiers to Korean immigrants. They've all sort of brought something to Kyushu, especially Nagasaki and Fukuoka. The Dutch too, right? Never forget the Dutch, never forget the Dutch. We don't tend to include them in food history that often. No. For Japan, they play a big role. Yeah, no, it's true, absolutely. Yes, but there's a big aspect of what I call Japanese soul food that's got these foreign influences, and we'll go into that a bit more later. Also, just the actual flavors and cooking methods and sort of the style of Japanese soul food is the same as American soul food. It's hardy and it's rustic and it's usually unhealthy. There's a lot of inexpensive ingredients used, off cuts, awful, things like ribs and intestines and stuff like that, which you don't often see or think about when people... People are usually associated with Japanese cooking in general. But I mean, just as an example, in my book, there are three fried chicken recipes and six recipes using either pork belly or pork ribs, and if that's not soul food, I don't know what is. So anyway, Nanban. Nanban originally means southern barbarian or southern barbarians. The Chinese used to describe people from Southeast Asia. The Japanese used to describe Europeans because they had been coming up from the south and arriving in the south of Japan in Kyushu. And they were barbaric, so southern barbarians. Now, they brought with them new foods and new dishes and new recipes. And this was all started around the 16th century when it really sort of kicked off, isn't it? And actually, in this book, which is... I lost the jacket for, but it's by Eric Rath and it's called Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Japan. There's a great chapter on this book called Nanban Yorishō, which is the barbarian's cookbook, basically. It's not really a cookbook as we know it today. Some of the recipes are quite funny. But it shows how there were these unusual European influences coming into Japan long before we sort of think that was the case. And some of the hallmarks of what they called Nanban Yōri, Nanban cooking, would have been spices. There's actually a surprising amount of spices listed in these recipes. Anything using chicken and eggs sort of set things apart as Nanban cooking. Peppers and also refined sugar. So it's things that... I don't know, now they've obviously become quite incorporated into Japanese food, but back then they were exotic and unusual and people didn't know quite what to make of them. And inexpensive. Yeah, very expensive. They were not for everybody. Everybody else was eating, I don't know, millet or something. Acorns. Acorns, yeah. It's now they feed to korobota pigs, which are delicious. Anyway, we're going to pass out some cakes now. These are called castella. We've got two different kinds. One is a modern version, which is in my cookbook, and it's more or less the same kind of castella you'd find in Japan today. It's especially of Nagasaki, like a lot of these dishes actually. But it's more or less sort of a basic sponge, but then we've also got the original, or one of the first castella recipes. It comes from Paode Castile. So Castilian bread basically. And the original version, and you can probably guess which one's which. The old 17th century recipe, well it is a bit more like bread. It's not what we would think of as a modern sponge. The only ingredients are eggs, sugar, and flour. And I tried to be somewhat accurate by using slightly less refined sugars in that one, whereas the other one uses modern techniques and more ingredients and raising agents and all sorts, so it's more palatable to us. But in a way they haven't changed that much. And there's a lot of foods that the Nanban brought to Japan that have worked themselves into mainstream Japanese food, cooking, and some of them have changed a lot and some of them haven't. Tempura is one that I think has probably changed. We don't really know what tempura was like, but that's another issue. Or who originally comes from it. Right, yeah. There's a lot of different theories about that. But then also there's a candy called Kompeto, which is a really old school candy. Has anybody seen Spirited Away? It's the candies that the Boilerman tosses to the soot sprites to feed them and pay them basically. They're little knobbly star-shaped multicolored candies. And they're not very popular anymore. But they're better snacks now. Yeah, exactly. But anyway, all these things come from 16th, 17th century Portuguese and Spanish and Dutch, of course, influences. Should we consider... I mean, it's interesting to think that the Japanese at this time, and still today, are eating cake. We tend to associate pastries and cake with European background, but not really with Japan. How do we deal with that? What do you think about that? That is interesting, because also this book has a bread recipe, and they recommend using sweet sake to get the fermentation going. I think it actually... Well, I think there's two interesting points to be made from that. One is that there's been a western influence in Japanese cooking just for longer than we expected. All these things that we do not associate with Japanese gastronomy, they're actually pretty well established there. I mean, 400 years is a long time to be in existence to kind of keep it separate. Right, exactly, yeah. But I think the other thing that's interesting about it is that... Well, I just think that in a way, things only change slightly over time. Because obviously, if something like castella can last that long, I don't know, it's just interesting. It means people are eating it and like it. Right, exactly. It means it's staying in Japan. I mean, if they didn't like it, it would disappear. Yeah, I think probably getting sugar in, because they didn't really have sugar in Japan. They used other things as sweeteners. That probably meant an awful lot to sort of changing the palette and then getting people into things. Because sugar is sort of... Well, can't get enough of it. But anyway, so the Namban cooking influence comes 16th, 17th century. Another thing that's interesting about this is that Japan is always considered, especially in this period, a closed country. And that Japanese food is sort of... It's followed a path that's been very internal and focused on itself and not had this influence. And the whole country's sort of been like that for many centuries, which obviously isn't really the case. But anyway, if we go forward about 200 years, then you're starting to see a Chinese immigration into Japan, into Nagasaki again, mostly. Was it mostly? Well, Yokohama as well, all over, really. Yeah, I mean, certainly in the... Before 1850s, it's in Nagasaki. And then after that, it's in Yokohama and in Hokkaido in the north. Hokkaido. Hokkaido. I had no idea. Well, there you go. I should reread your book. I should reread the book. But so why... The Chinese were there as workers basically, weren't they? As students. The largest number of foreigners in Japan until really the turn of the century are Chinese. Because they're the go-betweens between the few western businessmen and they can read Japanese because of the characters can't. So they're the comparators, they're the go-betweens. And then they become students in the 1890s. Right, okay. The largest foreign student population in Japan. Okay. And they're hungry. They were, yeah. So they started setting up their own restaurants and started to cook the food that they wanted to eat. And one of the dishes they made was champon. Champon, it comes... There's a few different theories on its etymology. I'm not going to try to pronounce these Fujianese words, but they sound like champon, apparently. One of them means to dine. The other one means blending. I think I'm more in the blending. I would go with blending. I don't speak Fujianese either. No. There's another theory that it comes from a Malaysian word. That's also influenced the word champuru, which is an Okinawan word. It means stir-fry basically, but it also means a mixture. So basically champon means a mixture. It's sort of a jumble of things. And you said in your book that champon started off as being made from scraps, which I quite like that description. Do you know specifically what went into it? No, there's no precise description. The Chinese immigrant in Nagasaki starts it out, and he's trying to sell it to Chinese students, Japanese students, and the burgeoning urban class workers. And they want to dish that stamina that has kind of meat and it gives them calories so they can work all day. And that means anything they can find, they put it on top of the noodles and they stir it around. So it could have come from leftovers. There were a lot of these leftover food stalls all around Japan. And it wasn't expensive. Right. It makes me think that probably modern champon is not that different. Although not made from scraps anymore, I think. We'll be on YouTube, so we don't want to. Basically it's a proto ramen. It's sort of one of the very first ramen-like dishes. It's noodles, wheat noodles, alkaline noodles in a meaty broth, probably made from pig bones and chicken bones and all sorts, and then piled up with vegetables and other scraps, basically. So it was a mixture of things, probably changed from day to day. We might want to remind people why the alkaline part makes a difference with soba noodles. Ah, I'll get to that. Or should I go into it now? Right. We just mentioned it, so it's... Okay, alkaline noodles. I'll get to ramen next. So this is champon, and it's the first ramen, so I'll move on to ramen. Ramen is so basic in a way that we all sort of take it for granted. If you know what it is, it's almost hard to describe. It's most basic. It's wheat noodles in broth with toppings. But the wheat noodles are made with alkaline salts called kansui, which, from a culinary perspective, they disrupt the gluten formation in your noodles. So it gives them a springy texture. I don't know enough about food science to explain what actually is happening, but the salts involved are potassium carbonate and sodium carbonate. And the reason I've heard this is called kansui. There are two kanji readings. One just means salt water. The other one I heard is because there's a lake in Mongolia called the lake kan, where the water is naturally full of these alkaline salts, and that's where they originally made the noodles from. But that's just what I heard. That's the great thing about the ramen field. There's enough theses for everyone to write a book on it. Yeah, the salt one. Maybe I'll write a book. Yeah, but anyway, that's what makes ramen in particular distinctive from, say, udon, which is another wheat flour noodle, or somen, which is another wheat flour noodle. Can you talk about the theories on where the word ramen comes from? There are many theories. Some are more pejorative than others. Because it was Chinese cooks cooking in some of the restaurants, one theory is that when he was done with the dish, he would say haola, which means, I'm done, here it is. And because it was a men dish, which is mian in Chinese, or men in Japanese, Japanese people in the store would say, I'll take some of the la mian, some of the la dish that the Chinese guys making, because they were kind of making fun of his accent. Other people say, well, it sounds like la mian in Chinese, which is pulled noodle, which is our background for that. Right, because they're not actually pulled, they're cut, they're rolled out and cut like you would with soba or udon. There's tens of different ideas about where the name comes from. But the interesting part is they weren't called ramen at all, really, until the post war. They're called Chinese noodles. Chuka soba. Which means Chinese noodles of a kind. And it's not until the post war when that completely stops that they were identified as something Japanese, as opposed to being Chinese. But are they Japanese? Well, it's Nambanjuri. I mean, it's interesting, you're breaking our myth here of Japanese food. Well, this is the thing, I can't be the arbiter of that. But I think that at this point, ramen, people have these thoughts on national dishes, like, I don't know, in Britain it's maybe a pork pie, or a sundae roast. But in Japan, the old sort of national dish or the national food is rice. That's sort of the symbol of Japan. It's got all these associations with it. But now, I think that the national dish of Japan is really ramen because it's so popular, it's so important, and also because there's so many variations. You go from prefecture to prefecture from shop to shop, it's individualized, and people are doing their own thing with it and it means something to people. But also, looking at Japan from the outside, ramen and tonkotsu ramen, pork broth ramen in particular, has now sort of exploded in big cities around the world. It got started in places like Los Angeles, in New York, places that had a big Japanese population there, expect communities, but then it was in Sydney, it's in Hong Kong, and now London is having ramen shops, four different companies, which somebody's laughing, probably because it's not very many. But for London in terms of before, there was nothing. There was nothing in terms of good ramen. It seems like it's taking over. We've got, right down the road, we've got Kanadaia, I think it's from Futsukaiichi or something, or Yoshizuka in Fukuoka. They've opened down by Kamigarden and now Ipudo, they're having their soft launch this week. So, ramen's big. It's big in Japan, and it's big outside Japan, and I think that people are associating it as this is Japanese food, it's the Japanese food, it's my favorite Japanese food, but it's not Japanese. That's sort of the tricky part. So I wasn't really going to talk, go into the politics of it, but last week I was here, and it was something named, what do they call it, on the representative list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO, which is like having a World Heritage Site, except it's a thing that you can't touch. But they... What's washoku? So washoku, good thing you asked, Chris. Washoku... We assumed everyone knew already. So shoku means food. Wah can mean Japanese, it could also mean harmonious. I always say that wah, like when spas call themselves zen or you have a candle that's called zen, they should really be saying wah, I think, because it's sort of this it's this delicate aesthetic of cherry blossoms falling and things like that. Wah is a very sort of specific kind of Japanese aesthetic. It's also a word that comes out of the Japanese defining themselves against yoshoku, you had Chinese food but no one really uses that term because China wasn't necessarily food unified in the sense of Sichuan, and northern food, it's all very different. But once all the non-bun, all the non-Chinese and the non-Japanese start mingling, well, how do you identify the dish? And then they have to think, well, this is western, which of course becomes a problem because that means the Portuguese and the Dutch are all shoved in with the French and the British and then you have washoku, so it's anything that's domestic supposedly. Your idea that there's this somehow a big division between what Japanese eat, and that's called washoku and what non-Japanese eat, and that's called yoshoku for the westerners, and then there's Chinese food. But then that makes your cookbook a real problem because the Japanese ate that food also. Yeah, because this is I had somebody come to one of my pop-ups recently and he was like, there's no fish or delicate flavors on the menu. I thought this was Japanese food and I was like, yeah, well, sorry. Because the thing is a lot of what we would consider Japanese food, and what a lot of Japanese would consider Japanese food is it's not wa, it's quite sort of western influence. It's got a lot of those big flavors involved and it's... The reason I wanted to talk about it is because the official definitions of washoku is given by UNESCO and the Japanese government. The Japanese government, these points here. Reading these lists is like reading the opposite of everything that ramen is. So freshness of ingredients, respect for their inherent flavors, not really. There's a lot of hard boiling of bones going on. Exceptually well balanced and healthy, again, nose, pork belly, dissolved pork fat, noodles, it's just not salt, it's not good for you. We should interrupt and say that Andomomofuku, the inventor of instant ramen. Here we go. His company was very he didn't give me an interview, he was kind of close to passing away but his second in command did. And I said, you know, there's this theory going around in the world that MSG and instant ramen are very bad for you. And he said the president of the company has had chicken instant ramen, the original flavor every day for lunch, and he was in his 90s at this point and it was another slim. He pointed out that he only had chicken ramen and didn't have anything else with his lunch like a beer or any other side dish but he lived to be in his 90s. And no chashu, no pork belly. Seemingly not. That's the ticket. You know, never mind. Yeah, John Adams, our second president, drank a tanker of cider every morning. The Americans were mostly inebriated for the 5th century. He lived until he was 90 as well. And there's your longevity diet. How to stay healthy by drinking your way through culinary history? Yeah. But anyway, it's not usually healthy. Momofuku, you know, on the momofuku side. But yeah, okay. Expression of natural beauty and changing seasons, not really. Ramen tends to stay the same all year and use ingredients that are not associated with any season. They tend to be quite far removed from the traditional practices. There's a lot of, even in the toppings, there's a lot of pickling and fermenting involved. It's not about freshness, really. Close links with seasonal events. Again, not really. Now, this block of text is what's listed on the UNESCO site, which is more focused on the New Year's cuisine. That's their sort of framework for talking about what washoku is. It's got these, the seasonality to it and the ceremony to it. They say officially it's not about the food, it's about the food that's being made so that they can be flexible, obviously. But even in this description, there are a lot of things that rule out ramen, at least in its current form. I've underlined them. Rice is mentioned twice. Ramen shops, if they serve rice, it's going to be fried rice. It's a Chinese thing, basically. Symbolic meaning. I don't know of any symbolic ramen or chefs that imbue their ramen with symbolic... ...explicitly, they're all in the same position. And he said that making good... This is one of those quotes when you do an interview and you get the quote, and then you pause after and you both kind of reflect and say, that was a great quote. I was chatting with him, this was in New York in 2004 when ramen was just coming out. And he said, making good ramen was like performing jazz. I thought, I don't even know what that means, but it sounds really good. There is a certain kind of element that you think of the movie, Tampopo. She studies to become the great ramen master. There's certainly that idea behind it. True, there's an art to it. There's also the nitty-gritty, which is that making ramen is more like making glue. It is physically... There are no tiny ramen makers. You have to kind of have gusto in those giant pots. This is not to say that ramen isn't beautiful or it can't be creative because it is, but it is not all of these things. Special tableware, sometimes. Shared by family members. No, it's usually eaten alone and very quickly. Again, rice, fish, vegetables, edible wild plants. Again, yeah, but not in a way that's sort of... They're not the showcase, they're garnishes. Passed down in the home. Ramen is almost never made in the home. It's the instant kind that you sort of embellish by putting... Your neighbors would kick you out if you made ramen at home. Yeah, they would. Because I was making this broth yesterday and my wife came home and she was like, you're making broth again, taking her head. Because it smells like what it is, which is boiling pig into oblivion, basically. So she was unhappy, but it's all good. She's used to it. Once you live in a pork fog for long enough, you come to miss the smell when you're not in it. But no, even me, and I love Tonkotsu ramen, walking down the streets of Fukuoka, you occasionally just get hit in the face with this big stink. You're like, oh, there must be a ramen shop nearby. Kudume in the south of Fukuoka prefectures, even stinkier. The Japanese comment on that. When they go to Nagasaki in the early 1800s, you need a passport to get into Nagasaki as a Japanese, because it's a foreign city. And they write in their diaries and they say, this is disgusting and yet awe-inspiring at the same time. Really? It's completely different to a lot of other smells in the rest of Japan. But you brought up an interesting point, which is something we might want to consider, that ramen, but also Tim's kind of non-bon diorite, the recipe book demonstrates that there are all these different tastes around Japan, and that Japanese cuisine is not a unified monolithic taste. In some ways, actually, for a small country, although quite long and thin, it has a phenomenal variety of tastes from north to south. I got to live there. I'm not sure you can. Nowadays, there's a bit more information about it, but probably not before. This is why I find the washoku designation problematic, because I think that it's only really supporting something that I think deserves being supported, but it might be to the neglect of something that's equally important, things like ramen, or just to show that Japanese food is constantly evolving and it's open. It's not this closed off thing that has these set strictures and lineages involved. There is an aspect of that, but there's also a much broader outward looking cosmopolitan, I think, more sort of fun and modern aspects of Japanese cooking. Again, whether it's actually Japanese cooking is hard for me to say, but if it isn't, then who's is it? I don't know. It's interesting to consider two things. First is kind of the national competition for cuisine in East Asia. Koreans did not manage to get imperial Korean cuisine. Well, they went to elite, didn't they? They did, and then I think the Japanese team that was working on the UNESCO bid saw that, but also I was taking a plane a number of years ago from Taiwan back to Japan, and a young Taiwanese guy was sitting next to me and I said, oh, are you going to Japan to study? A lot of Taiwanese study in Japan. He said yes, and I said, oh, science computer goes, no, I'm going to study Italian cooking. And I thought, you're going in the wrong direction, because normally to study Italian cooking you go toward Italy. And he said, he was on the right plane, he confirmed with me, and he said, no, because Italian is very difficult, but he could already read Japanese, same character system, and if you want to study world-class Italian cooking, you go to Tokyo. So it's not just in a sense. French patisserie too. It's interesting to think that a country that was not thought of highly for its until really very recently, maybe the late 1980s, early 1990s, is now a food mecca for international cooking. It's also incredible considering that Japan's minority population is so small, like in most towns of a certain size in Japan, regardless of how many Italian people they have, they'll have a place that'll make you a bologpasta, or a pizzeria or something. It's actually, and what is it, 2% non-Japanese living in Japan, something like that? It's just an incredibly low number. I mean, to have that kind of diversity and have that sort of... So what does that tell us about what the Japanese are eating on a daily basis then? I don't know. What do they eat on a daily basis? That'll be our next question. A lot of things that aren't necessarily Washioku perhaps, or Japanese as we conceive of it. I mean, there's a few things up here on this slide, which some of it would be sort of more restaurant cooking, but some of it is stuff that people would cook for themselves in their home, such as Italian food, mentaiko pasta in the lower right there. Mentaiko. So, here we are today. We talked about the history of foreign influence in Japan and the South Japan in particular, but now it's a Korean influence mostly that we're seeing in Fukuoka. So, mentaiko is this incredibly awesome, very ugly food. Let's get a picture. The first time I had it, I thought, oh my God, no. They look like something you should eat. Basically, they're haddock rose or polychrose, a fish called mentai which is cured in put it in the camera. There we go. They're cured in chili, salt, sugar, sake sometimes. How long are they cured for? Not long. About 24 to 48 hours. Oh, very short time. But they just come out looking like weird pink organs. But the flavor is delicious. It's this fishy, spicy, salty umami thing, and you can squeeze it out of the tubes that they're in, the sacks I guess, and mix it in two pasta, kind of like the Northern Italians would do with botarga, which is dried mullet roe. It's nice because it sticks to everything. It sticks. It's got a great, almost creamy consistency by itself and sometimes it's mixed with cream to boost that. But it's this amazing, I don't want to use the word fusion, but it's a great fusion dish, but it's also something that's Italian in terms of its composition. It's just something, it's this weird pigeon food, which you see a lot of in Japanese cooking, I think. You mentioned the visual aspect. I mean, one of the things that was difficult for me when I first went to Japan in the early 1990s was, A, the raw ingredients, which I had never experienced, but also the look of food. Yeah. It was very different from what I was, I mean I was brought up with Twinkies food that usually came unsealed from a package and you had to kind of pry it off of its brother with a knife. Kraft macaroni and cheese. I mean, do you think that's been part of the issue of the inroads of Japanese food into the rest of the world, that it was the look or was it the ingredients were so different that it took a while to be accepted elsewhere? It's hard to say. Sushi is always a funny one for me because sushi, I think it's got a lot going for it that would appeal to people even though on paper it's one of the most bizarre by Western standards. The simplest, right? You get a fish and cut a piece of something out of it. But I think that the big sort of, the reason that sushi kind of took off before anything else did I think first of all it looks great it looks fun and colorful and like you want to try it even if you're kind of weirded out by it. But I think also the big sort of secret about sushi especially outside of Japan is that most of it's really bland. I think that what gets people into Japanese food is it has to appeal on a visual level which mentaiko doesn't and sushi does but then it also has to gel with their palates basically. So I think that if you've got something like mentaiko which looks weird and tastes kind of weird, like if you're not into fish eggs and Korean chili that's going to be a challenge for you. I don't know many people who don't like mentaiko but that's one of these things that will you have a question? Okay. Have you had any dishes that you've tried with audiences or tried in I can't remember all of the episodes but my partner Mami will remember all of the episodes that you were in in MasterChef Were there any that you tried in the show when you won or with audiences that you thought are good and would be okay with a western audience and have failed miserably? Ooh that's a good question No, that's why I won No Actually it was more the other way around there were things that I wasn't sure about that people seemed to love. I did tuna baked with a miso vanilla glaze once and I was like I don't know but people loved it so So is that also one of the reasons then for this expanding Japanese food boom that it's not just the Japanese who are adapting to outside tastes We are actually able now to move beyond our own stereotypes This is the thing I think that you have to It's almost like a culinary vocabulary that you learn Like when you do Japanese food you're introduced to certain flavors soy sauce, miso, mirin, sake What you mean people might not be familiar with Mirin, sweet cooking sake, actually distilled sweetened shochu but whatever What else Seaweeds, tofu These are things that people sort of have to You have to be on board with them before you can go further into a cuisine and if you don't get past them, if you don't like them you can delve any deeper You can take them off your plate when you're eating You could, yeah, but then you're not going to feel encouraged to try more I didn't even like sushi which was the first Japanese food I ever had when I first said I thought I'm not into it But I was I loved the idea of Japanese food and I knew there was something there that I kept trying it And actually ramen was the one that sort of tipped me over the edge into thinking there's something about Japanese food But if you don't get past the sushi the gateway you may never get into ramen because you have to delve a little bit deeper for it or things like Okonomiyaki which is a savory cabbage pancake You make it sound so appetizing With a sweet Worcestershire sauce type glaze How do you describe something like Okonomiyaki? That's what it is It's a pancake, savory pancake There's a version in here called rice yaki which has rice in it But One of the things we haven't mentioned yet with all the different tastes is what do you drink while you're eating all of these interesting and different Does wine go well? Would you have a beer? Would you have a glass of water or tea? By far the most popular drink for this kind of food and really everything in Japan now is beer which typically is a dry mass produced inoffensive fizzy yellow lager which are delicious and refreshing but they don't have much character If you want something that's got a little bit more oomph you would drink shochu And shochu is another thing that's got a Korean and Chinese influence to it It's a distilled spirit that's usually made from either rice barley or sweet potatoes but it can be made from anything from seeds, carrots milk, had a milk shochu once Was that good? Yes Very good But it's like a slightly toned down It's not as strong as vodka but it's got more flavor It's about 25% alcohol 25 to 35 And you tend to drink it maybe with ice or sometimes watered Hot water or just plain cold water It's a shochu highball which is with it's most basic just soda water ice and a squeeze of lemon but it's got all kinds of flavored syrups that go into it as well It's like a Japanese aquapop in a way Why do you prefer shochu to Japanese sake? Probably out of nostalgia I drank a lot of shochu when I was living in Kyushu It is more popular in the west of Japan It's taking over sake is falling off in Japan and shochu is on the rise What do you think that is? Because is this Kyushu food taking over the restaurant? Kyushu food is actually taking over Last time I was in Tokyo I noticed all these Kyushu restaurants I was like, huh, that's weird I think that, yeah I don't know why that is Because I didn't notice any Hokkaido restaurants We tend to think of Hokkaido as an amalgamation of everywhere else in Japan and not necessarily perhaps although they do have their own ramen Yes, that's mentioned soup curry They make cheese and Hokkaido That's going to be my next book Hokkaido cheese Your book is going to be on just Hokkaido cheese? No, no, no, Hokkaido cooking Anyway, where are we? Anyway, just to sort of wrap everything up Champon, which we're going to get back to now That's the reason I chose Champon is to cook today It's a mixture It's got a lot more going on than a lot of people will tell you at first glance But anyway, should we cook? I think we should move into the cooking part Okay, so Champon Champon is... I'm going to call it a kind of ramen You said it was a wannabe ramen Yeah, but we can differ on that It's the early childhood of ramen before it becomes an adult It's got a lot of boxes though It's got flavorful, meaty broth It's got wheat alkaline noodles And it's got lots of toppings In this case, the toppings are It's actually a stir-fry This is something that's actually gone It's spread throughout Japan It's a Nagasaki dish, and if you go to Nagasaki You have to have it You've already started the broth Yes, this broth took 12 hours Why don't you tell us what's in the broth? The broth, typically in Champon It would be a pork and chicken bone blend And it's boiled or simmered for many, many hours now So you're just using the bones You're not putting in any meat? No, whatever meat is left on the bones There are trodders in this as well Which I use to give it some Glutenosity, some stickiness So it essentially becomes a almost gel Yeah, if you were to leave this out at room temperature It would turn into a brick A rubbery brick It takes that long for the bones essentially to melt Yeah, you just want to get out all of that gelatin It is like making glue, to be completely honest with you Delicious glue But A lot of people make broth at home And you should make your own broth That's a great thing to do But if you make Champon broth or Ramen broth at home Don't think about what the French guy told you about how to make broth Ramen broth is totally different from making a fine French stock With a fine French stock You want to keep it at a very low simmer They say you should be able to read the date on a penny at the bottom of a pot of French stock And the way you do that is by very, very gentle simmering constant skimming of proteins off the surface And you get a very fine French stock But with Ramen broth You have to be boiling hard for hours to get all of that collagen out and get all that flavor out and all that meat That meat basically, the meat actually breaks apart So Kudume Ramen Kudume is a town in the south of Fukuoka Prefecture And people in Kudume will tell you that's where Ramen comes from People in Kudume is almost a religion Recently another guy They kind of really take to it They're intense Ramen people down in Kudume Not only do they boil their bones for just ages They use skulls and heads in their broth Which gives it a really intense flavor But they boil it so much that some of the bone starts to break apart and they only coarsely sieve the broth So you end up with little bits of chalky bone in your bowl of Ramen And people say that's They love it I think it's okay, it's not my favorite thing to eat bone, but that's what I'm The point is Ramen broth it's not refined It's not clear Anything else to the broth besides just the bones that you've cooked down? Another thing that differs, at least when I cook my broth, so when you do a French stock you start with a miropois You start with vegetables that you chop up and that's your base You usually saute them to get a bit of color on them and that provides your base flavor Ramen broth the Aramats come in later They come in at the end because if you boil something for so long and so hard you're boiling away all the aroma The Nordic Food Lab I don't know if you've heard of the Nordic Food Lab They actually just found a way to distill an essence of chicken off of their chicken broth as it evaporates because they realized they were losing that flavor over time as they boiled it So the longer you boil and the harder you boil, the more flavor you're losing So when I do any kind of Ramen broth the Aramats, the vegetables go in towards the end and in this case that's garlic, shallot, onion star anise bay, which is unusual for Ramen broth, but I think it works in this one What else is in there? That's about it. Oh, also dried prawns not typical in Champon but it's a seafood ramen basically it's got a seafood stir fry on top so I wanted to sort of get that flavor in there and I think it adds a lovely umami It does make the color a bit dark which is inauthentic, but hey let's experiment before you come up with a broth that you've, I mean, I assume you've made some broths and you think that's not the broth I want Yes, now I've got it down to where I like it, but it took me I don't know for the basic Tonkotsu broth, the pork bone broth I make probably 10 or 12 trials And each time you're boiling it for 10 to 12 hours and trying it, and how much do you make when you're doing it? At home you can do a little 4 liter pan full and it's fine, but when I do pop ups you know, about 20 liters at a time um, it's a lot of broth This is why it's harder to open a ramen shop than a burger joint because if you test out your burger recipe and you get it wrong well, it took 10 minutes you know, let's be real here Ramen's hard, man Anyway Right, so broth, we have the broth and the broth is so important for any kind of ramen um, not just because that's what a lot of people judge it by but also because it's the seasoning, this is your sauce this is what's going to flavor everything else in the dish so it has to be seasoned well in this case it's only seasoned with sea salt and white pepper but there's all kinds of other ways to season your ramen using a tare, which is like a a liquid reduced seasoning base usually based on soy sauce and dashi that is a typical one pure soy sauce miso, MSG, all these things Do you use MSG in your cooking? I don't use I do use MSG sometimes I don't usually use it to season my ramen broth but the fact is everybody uses it indirectly one way or another if you're using soy sauce, cheese, miso all these things they all have naturally occurring, oh, kombu kombu seaweed all of them have naturally occurring MSG anyway so you're putting it in your food whether you want to or not and people who say no MSG on their menus or on their packets don't ever trust them because they're usually lying, not on purpose but they usually are but yeah, MSG since you brought it up I do use it because when I was living in Japan I noticed on the restaurant tables or the izakaya tables they had salt shakers and after a few visits I realized it wasn't actually salt it was ajishio, flavor salt which is MSG and I was like, oh, that's why all these very simple, humble things taste so good because you're dosing them with MSG, not a lot people might not realize that MSG is essentially you're adding, it's not a spice per se it enhances flavor that is already inside of something it makes something which is not very savory more savory or something which is perhaps not so great palatable so it can be used as a cheat and I think that that's where it becomes problematic for chefs if you're using it like you would salt to bring out flavor it's a brilliant thing to use one of my favorite things to eat in the whole world is pork belly just grilled skewers with a little bit of MSG on it of all the dishes you could choose it's like instant bacon, it's just so good right so good well seasoned ramen broth David Chang from Momofuku chef in New York he says ramen broth should be too salty and he's right when you taste it you should go ooh that's too salty but bear in mind that salt you need that for everything else in there including your noodles, so we'll get to the noodles in a bit but these are thick, straight alkaline noodles, they're very basic ramen noodles from a company called Winner you can buy these anywhere around the UK you can buy these, yeah these are produced just outside of London you can get them in any Chinese supermarket you can buy them online as well but they're a good base model you can use a champon which use a medium thick noodle but yeah, there's not a lot of variety if you want to make ramen at home and I hope you do, give it a go at least once even though it's kind of a project don't feel like you have to make your own noodles most ramen shops don't however they will have them made by a factory to their own bespoke recipes or to their own parameters there's only one ramen shop I think in town now that's making their own noodles and that's Tonkotsu they bought the machine yes they have the big machine because you really need the machine if you want to do it yourself but those machines are fantastic you put in water, you put in flour you turn it on and six hours later it has birthed phenomenal little kind of pockets of noodles to your specifications it's much better than doing it by hand if you're running a shop I've tried to do it by hand a few times if you're serving 80 people and you're rolling out 80 portions of ramen oh my god never again so yeah find a good quality fresh fresh ramen if you're serious about it the fresh ones just have a much better texture but like I say you can find them in Chinese supermarkets Winner is a good brand and so is a brand called Lion but anyway we'll get back to that there's a stir fry this is sort of unusual for ramen most of the time ramen is just sort of an assembly dish you have lots of different things that's getting very hot it looks like it's getting warm they've turned off the alarms we'll need it hot though you like to get the fry pan very hot very hot get your wok very hot usually it's an assemblage of things braised pork belly, little egg you sort of just reheat and put on the ramen individually with jampon it's just a big pile of stuff a pile of stir fried stuff you've made that sound very appetizing by the way it's a delicious colorful pile of stuff what are you opening now this is lard that's one of the key ingredients again interesting south of Japan using so much of the pig base we don't think it's Japanese cooking lard based no absolutely not and there's good reasons for why we don't think that could you do this with oil as well yes you can use oil I smoke point, use it with dripping I've done it with chicken fat that was good anyway so we just throw everything in here at this point smoking wok that's good so onions and carrots I cook next to that all the time it's been baptized already so you're putting everything into the wok yep just to give it a stir I'm starting with the onions and carrots obviously because they take a little bit longer to cook than the other things this is a problem with induction it only heats on the bottom so you lose I could touch the wok there would you prefer to cook with gas better to cook on gas that way it conducts better for wok cooking anyway now when you're doing this in a restaurant I assume you've kind of prepared a lot of these beforehand or is everything cooked fresh with each bowl that you're putting out with a stir-fried dish like this it only takes 5 minutes to do so you can do it all a la minute as they say gonna heat up a bit next step we got cabbage and bean sprouts I just feel like if there's cabbage in a dish it's healthy I was gonna say you know it came from a poor community I see like it's such a I love cabbage but it's such a good bulking agent it's not that expensive yeah it's cheap and there's an awful lot you can do with it so yeah I mean these are things one thing I was thinking earlier about champon is how and ramen in general it's how it's considered a virtue to have quite a large portion size it breaks our notion of this delicate Japanese of serving exactly it's a very masculine dish masculine it's one of the changes in champon but also ramen in the last 10 years that you start to see single women now or women in ramen stores eating where you wouldn't necessarily have done that before because ramen was for salary men or industrial workers on their way home or eating on the way home after a night of drinking yeah true but I just I think it's a sign of generosity to have I like these symbols of generosity there's some symbolism in ramen in champon if you have a big mound of things that's overflowing from the bowl it makes you like wow yeah they like me they're treating me well my other favorite thing is when you get the sake glass which is set inside a masu a sake box and they pour the glass so it deliberately overflows into the masu and you have the glass in the box right and they pour into the glass and they pour it overflows deliberately and it's like saying yeah the other guy will fill your glass but I'll fill it so high it overflows man but the opposite is true I always feel disappointed in Japanese pubs when I go and they only give me the glass and they don't put it in the box because you're thinking I've been now cheated out of my normal overflowing glass exactly where's my box so what are you putting in now okay now it's good sexier but only just that's shellfish we have some squid some prawns and some scallops which are fairly Japanese ingredients yes I mean this is a mostly quite authentic champon recipe and it does suit a sort of Japanese style of cooking can I ask you a technical question you're taking out each one as opposed to what I would do when I cook the entire box into the wok is there a cooking reason why you're doing that it's because I only have chopsticks and I don't want to dirty my hands with raw fish I see no that's that's out of necessity it does so you're not adding any spice yet you're still just cooking the vegetables and the seafood yeah so the seafood goes in I'll be generous to add the rest of the squid now there's also usually some kind of fish cake in a champon you won't want to exploit I don't associate fish with cakes fish cakes are well it's like it's fish loaf it's like a meat loaf made from fish except it's a much it's a puree rather than a grind or a mince what kind of shapes does it come in they're a D shaped or a half cylinder shape usually dyed pink on the outside and there's different variations it's a naruto which in the photo that's what I've used there fish cakes that have been laid out and rolled up so they have that spiral on the inside where the dyes bend so these things always go into a champon so you're putting fish in with other seafood right so it's quite a fishy flavor that's why I added a bit of prawn to my broth but I couldn't get Kamaboko when I went to the Chinese supermarket yesterday so I have Thai fish balls which are basically the same actually but in a bowl shape and do they come with any flavor or do they absorb flavor and take on the flavor of the dish they have quite a well they have a bit of flavor I'm gonna add the juice in there actually are they cooked or can you eat them do they come cooked and they just have to heat them up they come cooked that's why I'm adding them here towards the very end right so prawns are pink scallops getting there I think one of the questions everyone knows that prawns when they're pink they're done but how do you judge a scallop to be finished the best way is to give it a squeeze with your fingers if it feels firm and this is true of most meat proteins if it feels firm then it's pretty much good to go okay so meaning what otherwise it would be too squishy yeah if it's got some squishiness then it's still raw basically but obviously they shouldn't be too firm so just keep your eye on them if you're really actually when I make champon at home I usually fry this excuse me fry the scallops off first so they get a nice color on them and that way I can gauge their doneness a bit better and then I just chuck them in at the end I mean to the untrained eye it looks like you're making a Chinese stir fry now that's exactly what I'm doing that is exactly what I'm doing and it's made from scraps basically okay towards the end of cooking I'm just gonna turn the heat down on that I'm gonna add something for color usually you get the color from Kamaboko the fish cake yes the fish cake but today I'm using red pickle ginger, beni shoga I really love it it's one of my all-time favorite toppings for anything I even tried to turn it into a cocktail which wound up tasting like dirt but it's a lovely sort of in a bad way I assume right? yeah I wasn't trying to go for like a dirty cocktail dirty cocktail but it's got a great sort of vibrant acidity to it a fantastic amount of MSG I have to say the color is artificial originally it was this color because of red shiso which they used to dye it but I love the color I love the sort of zing it gives you so you cook that in last yes I want to keep the color I want to keep the texture I want to keep the vibrancy in there I'm also adding this is nira these are Chinese chives would this be different from the traditional Japanese similar to well you wouldn't usually find beni shoga red fickle ginger in there would you find it on the side maybe as a side yeah you also find chili oil on the side as well ryu will you use that as well the chili oil oh not today sorry I've got something similar anyway at the very end I'm going to season this what are you putting in now I've got a little container how do I open this there we go a bit of salt it's a sea salt only the best you only use sea salt when you cook yeah or MSG or MSG but you would say sea salt and now you're putting in white pepper always white pepper I find black pepper is not as used as much even in Nambu or other Japanese cooking no it's not I actually prefer it maybe it's just because that's how I came to know it but I think it there's something about it that matches the flavor of pork quite well it's got this sort of earthy piggy musk to it I think finally just a little bit of seasoning blend I made up earlier this is sesame oil mirin sweet cooking sake a little bit of vinegar and a little bit of soy sauce so you're adding your sauce almost as the last step yeah everything is hot and it's just kind of attaching itself as an outside kind of glue and that's it it's not much to look at actually but it's getting there this goes back to those breaking all the rules of washoku you know it's going to be tasty of all the elements you've been putting in but it doesn't look refined once we garnish it and pile it up in a bowl it'll look impressive and lovely but in a very different way from like a kaisaki meal okay last step then we can plate up as they say I haven't talked about the bowl yet the difference in what you find in deep Japanese donburi the deep bowls and western bowls would you I don't know much about that actually well I will say one of the first pop-ups I did where I served ramen I tried to do it in like a shallow western soup bowl it was a disaster because it lost its heat so fast there wasn't enough volume so all the heat just evaporated right off and I wound up when I got to the table being lukewarm which for ramen broth yeah I got into it now so yeah the volume of it the depth of it that is important I think it's also sort of a generosity thing isn't it like you because you can do with less ramen and feel full it's true well I couldn't it's interesting because the instant ramen people when they first brought instant ramen to the states the first western country they brought it to they served it they gave it to the Americans and the Americans brought out their kind of thin shallow soup bowls and it didn't work and that's when they developed a cup ramen they realized they had to sell it in its own bowl to be deep enough so that it had maintained the heat melted the noodles and of course it was good that's amazing they analyzed the market but you know it's a Chinese it's historically a Chinese bowl as well a deep large bowl it's not domestically Japanese right so I'm boiling these noodles in the broth which is very atypical for most ramen I don't really like it either because it gives the broth sort of a starchy flavor but it is typical for champon the one thing that's good about it is that the starch actually sort of thickens up the broth a bit and it helps the noodles absorb the flavor this would be different than ramen where ramen you would put the noodles into the broth or spoon the broth over not cook them in it yeah exactly usually when you do ramen you've got your broth there at a simmer and you've got a big pot of water where you're constantly running water through it or replacing it noodles go in transfer them to the bowl pour the broth over give them a toss and that's how how ramen's usually plated up but in champon it's a little bit different these are not going to take long by the way ramen cooks since they're already kind of fresh how long does it usually take these ones usually cook in about a minute and a half and how do you test them do you throw it against the refrigerator oh no you slurp it there you go you have to taste salty well that's good these are about 30 seconds off I reckon then we'll just dish it up and do you let your toppings cool normally or if you had another yeah absolutely I would time it so that it's all coming together at the same same time but yeah that's the other thing about ramen it has to be served piping hot piping hot hot hot the first few times you have ramen from a proper ramen shop you will burn your mouth incredibly and that's why you have to slurp what your mother told you not to do growing up I've heard all kinds of reasons about slurping those are bit hard still give me another few seconds but it is you're going to enjoy this am I eating the you all got ancient cake he gets to have champon I didn't realize that I got the oh actually we do have food coming out we do do you want to tell people actually yeah let me go back in the slide a bit there's something I forgot to mention you're giving us three different dishes from the cookbook in a sense also that will hopefully break people's stereotypes about what is Japanese cuisine right well we had the castella two different castellas right the modern and the pre-modern in a sense those noodles are done you like them kind of al dente definitely al dente bearing in mind that they will cook a little bit longer in the bowl in the hot broth this is all go in pour the broth over oh yeah and then I do find it difficult to eat in front of people should I get you a bib I did an interview in Japan just before I returned and they said please eat in front of the camera you're very self-conscious am I holding the chopsticks correctly and stuff all over myself it is nerve-wracking it does look kind of like a seafood I mean chompon is a mess it is yeah it's a mixture it's a crazy thing let me get that in front of the camera almost looks like a curry rice with the thickness of the broth as well yeah well the color is like I said off from standard chompon because of the dried prawns in there and you put a few more chives on at the end and just a little flourish some thread cut red chili now is that is that your addition or is that yeah there you go show the camera what it looks like there's the Nagasaki chompon but the other two dishes you can try this in just a bit you need to demo slurping oh you want it now well you want to eat it hot don't you of course yeah piping hot of course what am I thinking let me get you some clean chopsticks there's your denge I've been watching you make it now I'm left-handed when you're left-handed in Japanese as soon as you take anything in your left hand people remark on it yes I am left-handed you heard it here first you're okay you're in good you know company in Japanese TV shows you have to eat it then you pause and then you say umai very tasty of course have you guys seen the movie tempopo it's a it's a romantic drama comedy thing about yeah it's about a woman who learns how to cook proper ramen from like a traveling ramen master almost like ramen right and there's all these weird vignettes that are part of it it's a great satire of Japanese food culture even though it's from the 80s it's 20 years old now 30 years old Jesus like me um but anyway there's a great scene where this old ramen thank you thank you this old ramen masters enjoy now I will close my laptop though there's an old old man who's teaching like his young protege how to eat ramen and he says first you have to move aside the pork belly and apologize to it then you must take three sips of the broth and take it in and then let it you know it's just ridiculous um but that always stays with me and I still eat my ramen that way go through that weird little ritual um but anyway that's champagne so the foods that we're going to have now I forgot to mention earlier there's a couple dishes so namban's not used in Japan it's a word for Europeans anymore obviously um in most places in most places maybe in Kyushu but it still hangs on as the name of certain dishes so this photo is nambanzuke which means barbarian pickle basically and it's a Japanese version of eskibesh with fried fish and peppers and onions, vinegary sauce then the other one is chicken namban which is very bizarre but very delicious sort of hybrid French, British, weird American dish which is basically fried chicken in a batter with Japanese tartar sauce and then also another sort of vinegar ginger sauce made from the marinade that the chicken's in uh it's very good we're going to have little samples of that so it's almost kind of a tempura chicken? it's like a tempura chicken I always the texture I think is like efficient chip batter it's a little bit chunkier and crunchier than than tempura um and that would also be very different than most traditional I mean fried chicken doesn't come in although it's very popular in Japan now as is McDonald's we wouldn't consider it part of washoku would we? no but equally wouldn't call it yoshoku necessarily it's kind of one of these dishes that's neither here nor there some of the food that you've been telling us about do we see elements of it still in Dutch or Portuguese or Spanish food or is it? there are in I know in Portuguese there are some things that are still being made like there's a cookie called bodo um or marubodo in Japanese which uh it's just around they're kind of like a cupcake top they're sort of a cakey chewy cookie thing um those I know are still being made in Portugal um though they're different they're crunchy rather than chewy um I don't know about castella but there is also a kind of there's a dish called temperero or something like that they think might have been an early tempura and that's still being made in Portugal as well so I and also there are noodles in fujian which are similar to this not quite the same but I know that they're eating a champon like dish there but anyway the other thing we'll have for you to try is um what I think might be a very early tempura um that's just sort of hung on unchanged for many many centuries because like I mentioned earlier there are nobody really knows what the first tempura was like they're pretty sure it was fried but not totally sure but they think it also might have not been battered uh it might have been served in a broth it might have been simmered fried um but this one is unusual it's it's basically another sort of fish cake um but it's basically a deep fried mince with no batter and no breading um like it would have been fried in in fish oil in oil um in vegetable oil vegetable probably we're using groundnut or something at that point um not lard but not lard yeah but the dish is called obi ten which is short for obi tempura and obi is a town in Miyazaki which nobody goes to but they're known for this sort of old school kind of tempura um but anyway one of the ways they use it is to take the fish mince and wrap it around an egg so it becomes sort of a like a Scotch egg basically but made from mackerel and it's actually really lovely um so we have that for you to try as well a potentially historic tempura and then a modern chicken nanban um so yeah and I think we're gonna have a closing by uh Dr. Chris Kurtzich very simple thank you very much Tim and Barack we have gifts for you thank you and thank you all for coming this evening uh this has been a great experiment and um please join us for some wine and some food which we will be having behind us please stay thanks