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Eating in Asia

Ten questions on what goes on the plate from Beijing to Seoul: fermentation, broths, chillies and received wisdom.

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What is real wasabi traditionally grated on?

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  1. Question 1. What is real wasabi traditionally grated on?

    • A sharkskin grater
    • A pumice stone
    • Woven bamboo
    • Hammered copper

    Answer: A sharkskin grater. The traditional oroshigane grater is covered in sharkskin, whose very fine grain reduces the rhizome to a paste without tearing it. Most "wasabi" served outside Japan is in fact coloured horseradish.

  2. Question 2. Which ingredient gives kimchi its red colour?

    • Smoked paprika
    • Gochugaru
    • Tomato paste
    • Saffron

    Answer: Gochugaru is a Korean chilli, sun-dried then crushed into flakes. It only reached the peninsula in the seventeenth century: earlier kimchi was white, simply salted and fermented.

  3. Question 3. What sensation does Sichuan peppercorn produce?

    • An intense burn
    • A fizzing numbness
    • A lingering bitterness
    • A sharp sourness

    Answer: A fizzing numbness. The molecule responsible, sanshool, excites the touch receptors of the lip at a frequency close to fifty hertz: you feel a vibration and numbness, má, distinct from the là heat that comes from chilli.

  4. Question 4. What does "dim sum" literally mean?

    • Little baskets
    • To touch the heart
    • Morning tea
    • A thousand flavours

    Answer: To touch the heart. 點心 reads dim sam in Cantonese and means "to touch the heart", in the sense of a light snack. The ritual around it is called yum cha, "drinking tea": the tea structures the meal, not the dishes.

  5. Question 5. Which spirit is distilled from sorghum?

    • Soju
    • Baijiu
    • Makgeolli
    • Awamori

    Answer: Baijiu. Chinese baijiu ferments sorghum with a solid starter, qū, before distillation. Korean makgeolli is not distilled at all, and Okinawan awamori starts from Thai long-grain rice.

  6. Question 6. Which bacterium turns soybeans into nattō?

    • Aspergillus oryzae
    • Bacillus subtilis
    • Lactobacillus plantarum
    • Saccharomyces cerevisiae

    Answer: Bacillus subtilis. Nattō owes its threads and smell to Bacillus subtilis natto, a bacterium found in rice straw. Aspergillus oryzae is kōji, the mould behind sake, miso and soy sauce: a different family of fermentation.

  7. Question 7. Which Korean soup is eaten on your birthday?

    • Tteokguk
    • Miyeokguk
    • Samgyetang
    • Kongguksu

    Answer: Miyeokguk, a wakame seaweed soup, is served to women after childbirth for its iodine and calcium; it is eaten again every year on your birthday, in memory of that meal. Tteokguk, by contrast, is eaten at New Year.

  8. Question 8. Which Chinese tea is pressed into cakes and aged for years?

    • Longjing
    • Pu’er
    • Tieguanyin
    • Keemun

    Answer: Pu’er. Yunnan pu’er is the only major Chinese tea with post-production fermentation: pressed into cakes, it keeps evolving under microbial action and lasts for decades, which turned it into an object of speculation.

  9. Question 9. Which broth defines Hakata ramen?

    • Shio, salt-based
    • Shōyu, soy sauce
    • Tonkotsu, pork bone
    • Miso, soybean paste

    Answer: Tonkotsu, pork bone. Fukuoka’s tonkotsu comes from boiling pork bones hard for twelve hours or more: collagen and marrow emulsify into a white, opaque broth, very different from Tokyo’s clear soups.

  10. Question 10. From which ingredient did the chemist Ikeda isolate umami in 1908?

    • Soy sauce
    • Kombu seaweed
    • Shiitake mushroom
    • Dried bonito

    Answer: Kombu seaweed. Ikeda Kikunae was looking for what gave dashi broth its particular taste. He extracted glutamate from kombu, named the flavour umami and filed a patent: industrial production of monosodium glutamate began the following year.