Eating my way through Hokkaido

Hokkaido is the wonderful northern island in Japan and I don't think there are many Japanese that will argue against the fact that it is a breadbasket and has some of the best food in the country. Typical Hokkaido food is hearty; quite a bit of meat, butter, and milk from the farmland. Milk...hands down the best and creamiest I've had. From milk you get ice cream. And also from milk you get Nama (Raw) Caramel, a fad food in Japan that seems to have originated in Hokkaido. Can't forget about the crab and seafood too. This is the same water as "Dangerous Catch" and crabs are brought in fresh, not flash frozen, into the ports of this island.
First foodie stop was at the restaurant attached to one of Kirin's beer factories. The beer was unimpressive, but the main dish, lamb, called Ghengis Khan, is a Hokkaido specialty and worth a space on the blog. We order and the lamb comes out like this, in some sort of sweet sauce. Sweetened meat is part of the Japanese palate, and although sometimes gets unbearable, it was tolerable on the lamb. There was also a plate of vegetables that came with the order.

Lamb is cooked at the table, on this special type of plate/ burner. It's grooved and domed, moving the juices from cooking off the center and out to the sides. The shape makes sense...you can load stuff on and not worry about it steaming all that much. What you see in this picture is a piece of lamb fat being used to grease the pan. Fat is fat, no point in discriminating against lard as an ingredient as either software or hardware (this is a hardware application). Now what did bother me about the preparation was the veggies down first then the meat. It contradicted the purpose of the pan. There was hardly any meat-metal contact, hence no browning of the outside. As you can see by the bottom pic, this does not appear to be a really browned or sauteed piece of meat. Even in Hokkaido, the concept of browning really has no place. As for the results, the meat was delicious, very lean. It had a mild lamb flavor and very tender, but I think the lambiness was abated by is freshness or special breed rather than the sauce that it was in. Now because the veggies were on the bottom, and so were the drippings from the sweet sauce, there was a chance for caramelization and deliciousness. But the nearly burnt, bottom portions of the pan had no appeal to the host family, and it was just me scraping off every last scrap as the waitress was going in to change the pan for the next round of lamb...


Hokkaido is famous for ice cream, espcially soft serve. Big flavors are Milk, Vanilla, Lavender, and Melon. I am not sure how the melon got in there, thinking it was a tropical fruit, but Hokkaido grows a variety of canteloupe melon that fetches a pretty high price when brought to Tokyo. I had two flavors at different time, lavender and milk. I had my eye set on the milk flavor for a while, ever since my past ice cream post from Costco (which was vanilla but I looked up the Hokkaido style afterwards) But first we have lavender. It sounded like a brilliant concept, especially since this past summer I ran into a few amazing lavender-scented panna cotta during NY's restaurant week. Other than the purple color, this was week. The lavender just barely came through; you had to try hard to taste it. Lavender honey or any dessert, for example, carried this wonderful purfume, close to rosemary but sweeter and more flowery. Even worse, there was not much richness in this ice cream to back it up. My first experience with "Hokkaido" ice was an incredibly rich, custard-like vanilla that poured out of the dispenser in a firm circle spiraling up the peak, so rich and thick that the center of the ice cream (pour, swirl, not sure of hte name) was hollow becaue the cream had such body. This was nothing like that. So it was kind of disappointing as far as mouthfeel, richness, body (spine of the ice cream perhaps) and flavor (the decorations)
Now this next example is a natural milk flavored soft serve from Otaru. There was also a caramel swirl but I had to go pure for my first taste. Now this was more of what ice cream is about. Still not as incredibly rich as the one sold in Costco (although that may not be a bad thing) this pulled all the richness and flavor of natural milk, added minimal sugar, and came out a the custard-like, almost chewy consitency that make Carvel's career and soft serve so pleasurable to eat. But Carvel can't hand a candle to this. Carvel's vanilla is fun and delicious, but it's got more sugar, probably some stabilizers, and because mass produced from mass produced cows, you lose the association with the milk and cream, and in a sense the ice cream becomes something apart from the dairy that it was born from. Not the case here. I believe drank some of the sweetest, richest, milk in the world at a hotel in Sapporo before coming to Otaru, and this ice cream was clearly made from natural ingredients of that same quality. So what did it taste like? It tasted like milk, and butterfat; flavors in their own that really do not need to be vanillized to sell. If you look at it logically, you shouldnt have to flavor milk/cream. Taking things back, and then wayyy back, the first flavors/foods that we are exposed to in this world milk, milk sugar, and butterfat. Now wayy back - raw milk was one of the basic foods of the first civilizations with the domestication of animals. We are hardwired to love this stuff, and like the Cro-Magnon I am, I loved this.

Next up, Otaru sushi. Otaru is hyped up as one of the best places for sushi in Japan. This above poster is for a type of white, rare salmon, 1 in 10,000 taken from salmon breeding grounds, which is why one piece costs more than a sushi lunch around Waseda university (panic sets in when I realize I haven't blogged about that yet.) No, I did not eat this salmon. So lets see how we compare to Yasuda.
There are sushi restaurants eveywhere, but we are brought to this one, by a horsecab driver that Koji wanted to ride. I'm sceptical because usually there are kickbacks for those things but no use arguing. I would have rather wandered to the place with a line in the front. Can't complain though because I got a free sushi lunch and the guys behind the counter were friendly. Where Yasuda and his accomplices worked with a friendly but mechanical accuracy, these guys seemed to have a little more fun.
Sushi being assmbled. Two guys making it by hand. Counter looked promising (remember I am comparing everything to Yasuda in NYC) Same serving style, on the big leaves. Sushi fish was displayed but not pre-cut. Yasuda does no show his goods.
Here is my sushi plate, later a piece of uni and salmon roe sushi came out. The roe on the far left was disappointing, kind of low quality sushi, but the one next to it is awabi, abalone, one of hte most expensive shells. I'm not going to go piece by piece becaue I dont have pics piece by piece but the fish was extremely fresh. Couldn't argue with that. But it did open my eyes to why some sushi bars are better than others, and why Yasuda is king. It is not about the freshness of the fish because if you live near the water or a big city with a market its easily obtainable for eht right price. It is about much small things, which Yasuda does and no one else can. How you cut the fish, thin, thick, small, hashed, wrapped around the rice ball, etc. It is about how you prepare the rice, and form the ball. How the fish is balanced with the rice and wasabi/other seasonings like soy sauce and sea salt. Because I think I ate at the best sushi restaurant in the world, I'm going to be pretty harsh to say that even these guys in Otaru couldn't match Yasuda. They cut the fish and made the rice balls to big, hard to fit in your mouth. Although fresh, Yasuda's fish just gleamed and sparked the way he cut it. Wasabi was balanced. The definition of zen in food. There to enhance flavor based on the weight of the fish. Here, there were times where the wasabi placed between teh fish and rice overwhelmed the fish. And then finally, the rice balls were a little sloppily made. Irregular, some grains poking out. Guess Yasuda turned me into a snob and I'm waiting for someone to step up in this country at beat him or for me to get back to NY.
Final specialty of Hokkaido was beer, ji-beer to be exact, or microbrew. Sapporo and kirin factories aside, wherever we went there were beer bars and special cans/bottles of the local stuff. This can is one I bought in the Tomamu hotel, the towers. It was a black porter, sweeter than a stout. Sweetness from carmel and toffee notes rather than chocolate as in stouts. Mouthfeel was kind of light, but sticky as carbonation was low. Here are some more examples, ranging from German trippels, American Lager, Pislners, cans, bottles, double fermented liters. Great selection. Too bad I couldn't carry all that much on the plane.


Lots of beer came in 3 can sets. See upper left.