Black Black Gum

It says on its package: “Hi Technical Taste”….whatever that means. Anyway, this gum is loaded with all the caffiene goodies that will jolt you right up when you need it. It contains, Vitamin B-3, ginseng and oolong tea. Now how about that for a triple shot? The ads for this gum is real funny too with Jean Claude Van Damme hyping it up with his kungfu kicks and moves. The most I saw of a commercial for a gum was two people chewing their teeth off and grinning like nuts.

The flavor for both is intensely minty. Ingredients in Black Black Gum are: sugar, starch syrup, grape sugar, erisuritol, oolong tea extract, gingko extract, chrysanthemum flower extract, gum base, flavorings, coloring agents (cacao, gardenia), caffeine, niacinamide.

Get some of those gums today if you can - I can safely promise that it will not be like any gum you’ve tasted before. Promise.

:P

Source: ThinkGeek

When I was a little girl, I loved watching the Ghostbusters and the one character that I remember most is Slimer. He’s this green little slimey ghost that oozes and leaves trails of green goo everywhere he went. Now, I was fascinated by the goo even though I can safely say that I was also disgusted by it - fascination and disgust can bring a very interesting combo of feelings in a person.

Natto

I find that that combo of mixed feeling came in handy when I was given Nattō in a Japanese restaurant - a type of preserved soy beans. It’s not green but the texture of the slime reminded me of Slimer’s trail goo. I was fascinated as I played with it with my chopsticks - swirled it around and poked at it - and in all those times, it just gets slimier and slimier till I could bear it no more. I had to taste it.

Now why would I want to taste something that smells like funk and looks like the filth left behind by a fictional cartoon character? I don’t know. I was mortally digusted but I wanted to also try.

And so I did.

I didn’t vomit but I didn’t like it all that much either. It’s slimey inside your mouth but it has a little nutty taste with the perfume of sewers to round up the taste. If you drink alfalfa juice, you’ll find it tastes almost the same - almost. But the natto has a slight sourness to it…let’s just put it this way, natto tastes like a combination of alfalfa juice, peanuts and blue cheese.

I ate it with my rice and with lots of soy sauce - it didn’t taste half as bad.

It appears that Nattō is a very nutritious food. It’s got a very high protein content and vegetarians would benefit from it greatly. Nattō is most commonly eaten at breakfast to accompany rice, possibly with some other ingredients, for example soy sauce, tsuyu broth, mustard, scallions, grated daikon, okra, or a raw quail egg. In Hokkaidō and northern Tohoku region, some people dust nattō with sugar. Nattō is also commonly used in other foods, such as nattō sushi, nattō toast, in miso soup, salad, as an ingredient in okonomiyaki, or even with spaghetti or as fried nattō. A dried form of nattō, having little odor or sliminess, can be eaten as a nutritious snack. There is even nattō ice cream.

I shuddered to think about natto ice cream. Anyway, I think it would be find for savory food but not for the sweet…it would just be weird. Imagine have fried chicken flavored ice cream. Along those lines yea.

But would i eat natto again? Sure. I didn’t hate it and would certainly love to try it with other ingredients. I am thinking Nattō with…I don’t know any other way of eating except with rice really. Oh well.

Source: Wikipedia

I don’t really know what to make out of this. I got this from this site. All I know is how wasabi tastes like and how chocolate tastes like, individually. But i just can’t quite seem to put the two flavors together. I know that it’s normal to add some chili powder into chocolate cakes because it enhances the flavor but wasabi isn’t like chili…the type of hotness is just totally on a different level.

I just can’t fathom how it’d taste like. And it seems like even American chocolate makers are adding wasabi as a flavor to their confectionary. It must be good, otherwise, they wouldn’t be making it. Look at this American chocolate brand, Vosges Haut’s wasabi, ginger and black sesame seed chocolate bar:-

That must be one HOT chocolate bar….the packaging looks good though. Vosges Haut is a well known maker of exotic chocolates. Check out their site for other flavor while i try to imagine wasabi and chocolate still.

Vosges Haut’s Exotic Candy Bars

I haven’t tasted anything new recently, as far as weird junk food or junk drink is concerned. But it’s not a reason for you all to suffer from a lack of update in this column. Fortunately, the No Apologies! Press people have a page they call “Crazy Asian Drinks” in which they talk about …crazy asian drinks! And since many of them are from Japan, if you want to read someone else’s point of view on Ramune, Pocari Sweat, or Oranamin C, you might want to go and have a look in there. I am not totally convinced by their conclusions nor their choice of drinks to review, but it’s kinda fun anyway.

Not really “Japanese food”, but still very much news about Japan and food, it is a Japanese man, Takeru Kobayashi, who won the Nathan’s Famous hot-dog eating contest held every July 4th, for the fifth year in a row. He managed to gulp 49 frankfurters in 12 minutes. Unfortunately, he didn’t manage to beat his own world record of 53-1/2 dogs, set last year. Kobayashi is 27, stands 1.67 metres and weighs 65 kg.

Found on an englishman in osaka (he’s english, he’s a man, and he’s in osaka): God comes from the Kilimanjaro and is available for 110 yen. I have never seen it, but it could be that God loves Osaka and hates Tokyo.

Has anyone tried this yet?

Japan is famous for its cute/strange characters which have been developped mainly for the purpose of merchandising. Probably the most famous of these characters would be Hello Kitty. There are many other little branded characters you can spend your money on, and the most recent ones are the Aokubi Daikon series.

So why am I talking about gadgets in the Food section? Because a these particular characters are daikons, and in case you don’t know it yet, a daikon is Japanese giant white radish (sometimes called daikon radish). It has the shape of a giant carrot, approximately 8 to 14 inches (200 to 350 mm) long and 2 to 4 inches (50 to 100 mm) in diameter.

The Aokubi Daikon (I couldn’t figure out if it was the name of one main character or just the name of the series) come in various shapes and forms of course, from giant plush toys to pens, to stickers, to traditional bento lunchboxes.

They also made little angry purses. The message is too deep for me to understand it fully, but you gotta admit they look original.

These daikons have human features, with the facial expression of a daikon of course. You can find them pretty much everywhere these days. In Tokyo, at least.

Aokubi Daikon were created by Takara, the famous toy company, and Kiddy Land, the (also famous) Harajuku toy store. And of course they have an official website. There, you will find a flash animated cartoon which I urge you to go and watch. It shows a daikon’s everyday life, including relaxing in hot springs and watching mount Fuji, or going (to bed?) in the middle compartment of a fridge… In case you’re interested to see the whole lineup of merchandising associated to this series, there is of course a section for this as well. Which one is your favorite?

In Japan it is all about seasons. Summer comes and you get the ads for ice cream popping up. That’s quite normal. But drinks are also very seasonal, colors, smells etc. Pocari Sweat is usually drank when it’s hot outside and you sweat. Hence the name.

Talking of the name, a lot of people wonder about Japanese brands naming, and as you can imagine, Pocari Sweat is no exception. One theory is that Pocari is very close to the Japanese word “pokkari”, which has the meaning of “clouds floating in the sky.” The logo of Pocari Sweat is white letters on solid blue background, and the drink comes in summer when the sky is bright blue. Cheap and efficient marketing applied to the first word. And it works: look at the huge ad on Shibuya Station these days. It is bright, and blue, and the sky behind the girl is the same hue as the big brand label next to it. It is even more sky-like than the actual grey sky behind it. The message? Drink Pocari Sweat and it’s summer. Or the opposite…

Now, the second word: “Sweat”. That’s a bit trickier obviously. Pocari Sweat is usually drank in hot summer, or after sport, when you sweat. But according to a spokesperson at Otsuka Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., the same company who does CalorieMate:

‘Pocari’ sounds relaxing, easeful, light to Japanese people. It dosen’t have any English meaning. ‘Sweat’ has the meaning of diligence and effort in Japanese.

This would imply that you don’t DRINK sweat, but rather you earned your drink WITH your sweat. Cultural difference I guess. To me, it sounds like something they tried to get meanings attached to afterwards. But it works nonetheless. Well, anyway, most people call it “Pocari” and drop the “Sweat”.

Official English-language homepage here.

No, I don’t mean “Sushi”…
The Boneless Fish (骨なし魚) is a fish-based frozen food invented by Dairei Corporation (大冷株式会社) of Japan in 1998. It is essentially a fish that has been scaled, gutted and deboned by a skilled worker before being reassembled to look like a dressed fish (gutted and with its head and fins removed). The fish is then flash frozen and packaged. It remains uncooked.

It is possible to use this process to manufacture a boneless fish with its head and fins intact. However, this is not very practical.

Purpose

The Boneless Fish was initially intended to feed three groups: the elderly, hospital patients, and schoolchildren. It differs from an ordinary frozen fish fillet, as the Boneless Fish looks just like a dressed fish. It is also cooked in the same manner as an ordinary fish.

Dairei began to market it to families in 2002. Aside from being easy to prepare, cooking boneless fish at home generates very little kitchen waste.

Production

The production of the Boneless Fish is labor intensive. Dairei set up HACCP-certified factories in Thailand, China and Vietnam. The workers cut open the fish and use a pair of tweezers to remove the bones. The end product is then examined to make sure that it is free of bones and then “glued” together using a food-grade enzyme produced by Ajinomoto.

This binding agent is a transglutaminase (product name: Activa TG-B) which is separated from a culture of Streptoverticillium mobaraense. It works by binding the collagen in the fish tissue. At temperatures under 5°C, it may take several hours for the enzyme to do its job properly.

Controversy

While serving boneless fish to hospital patients is not controversial, as it keeps the ill and weak from avoiding food, the inclusion of deboned fish in schoolchildren’s meals makes some proponents of table manners unhappy. Eating a whole fish properly using chopsticks is an important element of etiquette in East Asia. Letting children eat boneless fish seems to be anti-educational because it deprives children of the chance to learn to enjoy slow food.

From another point of view, it has been observed that the younger generations of Japan are already spoiled by fast foods. Fish consumption has declined and schoolchildren are allegedly throwing their fish into trash cans. Making fish boneless may be a way to bring people back to traditional Japanese cookery. The popularity of sushi is proof that children still eat fish.

As a country with a long tradition of eating fish, there exist techniques to make fish practically boneless; sushi is the most obvious example. A traditional method to make fish with countless fine bones (such as pike eel, Muraenesox cinereus) edible is to make 1 mm cross cuts on the fish meat while leaving the skin intact. It is an art developed in Kyoto, Japan’s de facto cultural capital. Only a well-trained Kansai chef with a special eel-cutting knife (hamo kiri bojo; 鱧きり包丁) can perform such exacting kitchen knife work[1] (http://homepage3.nifty.com/ajiyoshi/hamo1.htm). Therefore making fish boneless per se is not historically a bad idea.

Similar products

The success of Boneless Fish inspired another technology-intensive product, “Fish with Delicious Bones” (骨までおいしい魚; honemade oishii sakana), on sale since 2004. The fish, in the form of a butterfly fillet, is prepared by a patent pending process that uses heat and pressure to tenderize fish bones. It is said the entire fish, including the head and fins, becomes completely edible, much like what happens to canned sardines. It is a joint invention of Maruha Corporation (株式会社マルハ) and Miyajima Soysauce Corporation (宮島醤油株式会社).

Another, chimeral, product is the “Cold Set Bound Fish Kebabs” made from alternating layers of salmon and cod which are “glued” together by transglutaminase.

External links

• Boneless Fish Q & A (in Japanese)
• “Boneless fresh fish gains popularity”, December 17, 2002
• Boneless Fish manufacture (in Japanese)
• Fish with Delicious Bones at Maruha Corporation and Miyajima Soysauce Corporation (in Japanese)
• Boneless Fish: A debate (便利？それともおせっかい？賛否両論の「骨なし魚」; in Japanese)
• Ajinomoto: Enzyme for Binder and Texture improver
• Ajinomoto enzyme catalog in Japanese
• United States Patent #5,156,956: A transglutaminase catalyzing an acyl transfer reaction of a Γ-carboxyamide group of a glutamine residue in a peptide or protein chain in the absence of Cz2+ by Ajinomoto
• United States Patent #5,658,605 Process for producing bound-formed food by Ajinomoto
• United States Patent #5,968,568 Enzyme preparation for use in the binding of food materials and process for producing bound food by Ajinomoto
• Innovation Product Library see page 18, “Cold Set Bound Fish Kebabs”

Via Wikipedia