Shizuoka sardine curry
Uncategorized 
Comments Off on Shizuoka sardine curry
Tom Baker (Chiba, 1989-91) is writing a 47-part weekly series of posts on his Tokyo Tom Baker blog, in which he samples and comments on a curry from a different prefecture each week. Here’s an excerpt from his seventh installment, about Shizuoka Prefecture.
Shizuoka Prefecture, southeast of Tokyo, includes Japan’s highest point (the 3,776-meter summit of Mt. Fuji) and its deepest bay (the 2,500-meter deep Suruga Bay), for a total altitude difference of 6.2 kilometers (just shy of four miles). And the Shizuoka curry I sampled this week had a very Japanese flavor: umami.
In case the word umami is new to you, here’s the basic concept: Humans enjoy eating salty things because we need a certain amount of salt to live, and we enjoy sweet things because natural sweetness indicates that a food contains readily available energy. Similarly, the flavor known as umami is appealing because it indicates that a food is protein-rich. Meat, seafood and cheese all have their own special kinds of deliciousness that cannot be characterized as sweet, salty, sour or bitter. That category of flavor is called umami.
Comments are closed.