Went for a sake tasting lunch at #SennenKojiya #Sake Bar #千年こうじや in Azabu Juban, Minato-ku, Tokyo, the work of collective of food artisans based in the #Uonuma region of #NiigataPrefecture that use sake brewing & local fermentation techniques as a starting point for extending what they eat, so from the raw rice through to a kind of rice-malting, through to koji, sake lees and miso, salted early spring greens, all combining to form the menu they serve at #SennenKojiya.
We came here in a roundabout way. I’d asked Chiaki @kushimotochiaki, Miyuki & Megumi, if there was a female chef they’d recommend, as I wanted to help give more attention to #womenchefs in Japan, and so that’s how we came be sitting at the bar watching chefs Sayuri Yabata & Fumie Masubachi cooking.
The Uonuma region of Niigata Prefecture has this odd combination of warm humid summers then winters where you might get 3 meters of snow. So the cuisine that evolved makes use of both warm fermentation, sometimes using persimmon with its high sugar content as part of the fermentation process, and ice-chilling in winter, in particular for one of the great sake they brew which utilises the steading ice-cold temperatures that don’t fluctuate (as opposed to the way a domestic fridge temperature slightly fluctuates).
We started with shredded #driedscallops with a miso dressing, and chicken liver cream with a #fermentedpersimmon jelly, alongside a salad of bamboo shoots and aubergine in a soya bean sauce (not soy sauce, more like you’d get with a puree of fermented beans). Had these with in-bottle aged #hakkaisansparkling sake.
The we had toasted sandwich fingers with salted and fermented herrings with wasabi, with slices of bamboo simmered in water with burnt rice bran.
Finally we had these little fermented seed pods, don’t know what they were, but they were reputed to be “catnip for people” and, well, yes, we were very lively after eating these.
Do go, a fascinating lunch.
