Search results for “tokyo”

You pick up a bottle in a Japanese liquor shop and turn it around. On the back, you find a column of kanji and numbers: Junmai Ginjo, 55%, 15%, Yamada Nishiki, +3. So learning how to read a sake label means spotting which clues matter, a...

On a cold evening in Tokyo, the aroma of yaki imo, Japan's roasted sweet potato, still drifts through shopping streets. Today, many vendors favor moist, intensely sweet cultivars, but Beniazuma once defined the classic fluffy style acros...

Walk a few blocks from Kaminarimon Gate in Asakusa, and you start to notice a pattern. One shop sells candied sweet potatoes, and the next sells sweet potato bars. A third, meanwhile, grills little sweet potato cakes. The Asakusa sweet p...

Fukuda Pan (福田パン) is not known for croissants or elaborate pastries. Instead, this family-run bakery in Morioka, the capital of Iwate Prefecture in northern Japan, specializes in one oversized style of coppe pan. It has been in busin...

In fiscal 1973, Japan's breweries shipped about 1.77 million kiloliters of sake, more than in any year before or since. Fifty years later, the figure was under 400,000. Modern sake is the story of how Japan got from one number to the oth...

In 1697, roughly 640,000 casks of sake arrived in Edo by sea. Almost none of it came from Nada, although that district later dominated Japanese brewing. Edo period sake is not really a story about better brewing, since most of the key te...

Benikomachi is a Japanese sweet potato cultivar closely associated with Chiba Prefecture. Written 紅小町 in Japanese, it has dark reddish-purple skin and pale yellow flesh. Cooked, it develops a floury, fluffy texture and mild sweetness,...

Beniharuka, officially registered in Japanese as べにはるか and commonly written 紅はるか in shops, is one of Japan's best-known sweet potato cultivars for moist, strongly sweet yakiimo. It has reddish-purple skin and pale flesh that tur...

Silk Sweet is a Japanese sweet potato sold under a trademarked name, and the name is a promise about texture rather than sweetness. Its breeder registered it with Japan's Ministry of Agriculture under the cultivar name HE306, and it then...

Koshu miso (甲州味噌, Kōshū miso) is a regional miso associated with Yamanashi Prefecture in central Japan. In its traditional form, producers ferment soybeans with both rice koji and barley koji in the same batch, which gives the paste ...