Japanese bread and hunks of foreign cheese

Japan is the land of cotton-candy bread. From corner stores to high-end bakeries, bright white bread reigns supreme. It’s a sandwich staple from Hokkaido to Okinawa and found in every Japanese household I entered during the year I lived in Kyushu. Sometimes it’s thick, sometimes thin and you occasionally see a version with non-bleached flour and therefore slightly off-white. It is utterly soft and completely benign. The texture is so consistent, sans holes or irregularities, that I can only imagine the modern-day version of Lucille Ball’s chocolate-factory gal yanking out the slices that aren’t completely perfect. Imagine a Pullman bread with no yeasty taste and a soft crust and you pretty much have it.

The first couple of times I visited Japan, in college, that bread tasted delicious to me. Toasted with butter, it was scrumptious. But the best of its kind came after a long wait in the food hall of one of Tokyo’s fancy department stores at Fauchon bakery. My friend Miho and I queued up with dozens of other women—young workers and older matronly types—to buy a loaf of hot fresh white bread. I believe each customer could only purchae a single loaf, so Miho and I paid for two and hightailed it to a bench, somewhere just outside the store. We devoured at least three-quarters of one of the loaves in about five minutes. Nothing, I repeat nothing, is better than fresh warm bread.

Once I moved to Nagasaki prefecture to teach English, I soon realized that my trips to Tokyo to visit Miho’s family (we met at college in the States) were not at all representative of what I would find in Nagasaki. Indeed, the Japan I knew was one where the locals didn’t sneer at foreigners or bother if a single woman ate dinner by herself in a restaurant. Most of those findings are for another post (or blog), but the other thing I realized is that I wasn’t so fond of that darn white bread known as pan, after the French word for bread, pain.

I had been raised on a steady diet of bagels, bialys and rye bread for most of my life, products so dense that when over-toasted, a great deal of butter-knife force was often needed to spread the goods. These are tough breads that could crack a tooth under the right conditions. My guess is that I was attracted to the Japanese white bread as “other.” It was oddly different, exotic.

About three months into my time in Imabuku, a little fishing village on the Sea of Japan, my Kiwi friend Pip and I joined a food cooperative called the Foreign Buyers Club. We joined the club expressly to buy cheese, as the dairy situation in Japan was dire. The only hard or strong cheese to be found in Nagasaki was imported and came in tiny quantities at exorbitant prices. Pip and I ordered kilo-size blocks of cheddar and Swiss that we split in half. It was a lot of cheese, but Pip usually blew through hers in a couple of weeks. I rationed my portion so it would last at least six weeks. I used a sharp knife or vegetable peeler to shave the hunk and carefully wrapped the brick it in plastic so that it was only exposed to air for a few seconds at a time.

The morning ritual was my favorite. Two or three days a week, I would toast that white bread once and then carefully butter it. It was easy to rip the bread, especially if the butter was cold, so I often removed the butter from my little fridge before I showered so it had time to get close to room temperature. I would then take a few slivers from the cheese hunk, place them on the toast and then put it back in the toaster over for another round, until it was all bubbly and brown and melty.

But that white bread, after a time, just wasn’t satisfying. I wanted something that needed to be chewed with incisors, not gummed and swallowed. I would have paid a lot of yen for a hardy wheat, pumpernickel or crusty baguette.

I would have paid a lot of yen for this almost no-knead bread from the December ’07 issue of Cook’s Illustrated. Yeasty with a touch of tang, it knocked my socks off. The Cook’s staff made a few modifications to Mark Bittman’s now-famous no-knead bread recipe that appeared in the Times last year which. That bread, it turns out, has a bit too much water in it. I’m no baker and tend to be intimidated by yeast, but this recipe is so easy and so delicious, you truly won’t believe it.

If I had known how to make this bread in Japan, it’s very possible it would have saved me and all my friends from the achy-breaky Kyushu blues, from which we all suffered mightily.

Budva on the half shell

It’s a cold and sleeting night in New York and I keep asking myself, why am I here and not barefoot on one of Montenegro’s divine natural coves, facing west into the sun and the Adriatic’s riotous blue?

Why am I not in the little town of Pržno in walking distance to four small beaches and the fairytale-like Sveti Stefan? The stretch of Montenegrin coast South of the ancient city of Budva is known as the Budva Riviera. While it may not compare to its French counterpart in scale or chic-ness or mind-blowing bling, it is largely undiscovered by Americans and to my mind a far less pretentious and expensive terroir, but no less enjoyable.

The small towns of this region are locked in a perpetual movie-scape with the cerulean sea in front of them and the black mountains for which Montenegro is named jutting up from behind. But save for the smattering of large and homely casino hotels and the luxury yachts moored in their harbors, there is nothing in these towns that says, “look at me.” (Except perhaps for the Russians who have overtaken the region and don’t much suffer from modesty.)

Cat and Charlotte and I landed in Montenegro in September. It was the last leg of our Serbia-Croatia-Montenegro extravaganza and we were pooped. We rented a car at the Tivat airport and made our way south about 20 kilometers to Przno via Budva, a medieval walled city on the Adriatic.

We parked and made our way to the town center by passing through a ragtag flea market along the shore. It’s a slightly grim setup with an outdated/communist bent, but it’s where real Montenegrins and tourists collide, along with Nutella crepes, bad CDs and cheap-ass clothing. It’s also where I saw a little Roma girl nearly get run over by an angry local.

Our lunch in Budva was a little ways from the walled city past the marina at a spot called Jadran. We sat a few feet from the narrow beach and ate a sublime meal, only half of which could be attributed to the food. The breezy Adriatic, the goofy waiter, the feeling of being so far away in such an unfamiliar but utterly pleasant spot – all of that constituted the other half.

We ate a salad, a ton of yeasty bread and a heaping bowl of grilled shellfish, including clams, two kinds of mussels, langoustines and the only shrimp I’ve ever seen with roe in it. If I found out that those fresh, salty and garlicky mollusks were to be my last supper, I would have been deeply satisfied.

I’ll get to Pržno proper in my next post.

Dueling bivalves

As oyster reporter in residence, I contacted Aquagrill to find out why some of the oysters I ate there were, well, no so oystery. Some of them lacked the salty briny liquor of the bivalves I know and love.

Jeremy Marshall, Chef owner of Aquagrill was indignant when I asked if his shuckers rinse the oysters once the shells are open. He assured me that that practice was verboten and that the only contact shuckers have with the liquor is to flick out stray sediment with a rubber gloved finger.

How then does he explain my experience of some of his oysters?

Marshall said the intensity and flavor of the liquor depends on where the oysters grew up. He says the water they were raised in has everything to do with their deliciousness, or lack thereof. So, for example, Mashall says west coast oysters and those from Virginia and New Jersey (!) tend to have a flabby or bland taste. And forget about New Orleans. Marshall would never eat those southern creatures on the half shell.

(I loved his use of the word “flabby.” It’s a great way to describe many an oyster I have known.)

The salty, briny, blood-pressure heightening ones, Marshall says, tend to come from Prince Edward Island, Novia Scotia and Alaska. And he said there’s an Alaskan current that makes it’s way down to the waters of Baja rendering oysters from that region particularly briny.

This all got me thinking about the oysters I’ve thrown back at the Acme Oyster Bar in New Orleans. If I’m honest with myself, they weren’t spectacular. They were just fresh and plentiful and the atmosphere is so great, you just end up routing for the little guys.

So that’s some of the skinny on the enigmatic oyster. It’s true that the night I was at Aquagrill, I grooved on the East coast kids. The West coast may take the lead in every Asian and Latin cuisine, but it’s the East that’s said to rock harder when it comes to our hard-shelled friends. I’m going to put the theory to the test and so should you.