Umami Mart

It’s yuzu season! When my sister starts giving me yuzu, I know it’s official: the holidays are here and yuzu is in abundance to help me cope. Berkeley is the queen of Meyer lemons, but I’m beginning to think it’s also one of the best places for someone to grow yuzu as friends and family are […]

Japan has a wonderful fall tradition known as otsukimi (お月見) or Moon Festival, which celebrates both the moon and promise of a good harvest for the year. Besides otsukimi, it’s also called chushu no meigetu or jyugoya. The custom is believed to have originated in China. In the year 909, the Emperor hosted the first recorded celebration […]

The craze for sweets in Japan is so peculiar. There’s always, “This Year’s #1 Dessert!” which will inevitably be forgotten about next year. Sweets like macarons and other delicate pastries are kicked up a notch or two once they enter Japan land. Its level of sophistication is nothing you will see here in the States. […]

When we were little we used to watch my oba-chan (grandmother) make this seasonal treat from Kagoshima prefecture in southern Japan. We were too little to enjoy it at first, but as we grew older the dish became more and more delicious. Oba-chan’s preparation differed from the original recipe in that she substituted shochu for […]

*Nahoko Morimoto is a Tokyo-based photographer. Her work has been featured in Brutus and Vogue Japan.

There is something about Japanese confectionary and pâtisseries that pushes sweets to a level of sophistication I haven’t found anywhere else. It’s not the purely Japanese examples either. They excel in transforming desserts from all over the world into something less sweet, less heavy and more palatable. And it’s no coincidence that sweets are HUGE […]

Did you know that the U.S. lost all its chestnut trees back in early 1900s due to a disease brought over from China or Japan? Oops. Almost all of the chestnuts we have now come from Italy or China. But The American Chestnut Foundation has been working very hard to revive them in this country. […]

I don’t know about what’s going on in your city, but these days, NYC is filled with macaron shops. Sure some tastes better than others, but if you throw a stone, and it will hit a macaron shop or two. For the amount of effort you put in to make perfect macarons, I am slowly […]

As I’ve written about in the past, I have developed an annoying food allergy. I’ve discovered that stone fruite are definitely not for me.  Not that I need to carry an epi-pen, or that my face breaks out, or my body is covered with hives — but it’s just uncomfortable, since my throat scratches so […]

Hi, welcome to my new column, MOTOism. I’ll mostly be cooking here, as always, with the occasional restaurant rant, to keep everyone on their toes. It’s summer, it’s hot, and it’s time to make an easy dessert that doesn’t boil the kitchen. Over the weekend, I made batches of macarons, but I still haven’t figured […]