January, 2018

Buying flour (ko mugi ko) in Japan

You can see clearly in the photo above that this is indeed bread flour but at the supermarket you won’t always have nice easy pictures to know the difference between bread and all purpose flours but the Katakana in large white letters should keep you right Hopefully you aren’t faced with […]

January 10, 2018 No comments

Umami

Bucketloads of umami… In 1908 Kikunae Ikeda, a chemist, discovered large amounts of glutamate in the white crystals that form on kombu and realized that the taste was neither bitter, sweet, sour nor salty and named it umami -“deliciousness” Almost 100 years later scientists in America identified a taste receptor for glutamate on the […]

January 1, 2018 No comments