Yep, article (title) is hard to believe. The affordable food is rice, noodles and fried things like chicken and some fishes. Every other thing (meat, vegetables, fruits) is really expensive. It’s often not worth the hassle to cook lunch meal in comparison to the cost of raw ingredients in the supermarket. To add insult to the injury Japanese cooking involves a lot of steps, tools and preparation so cooking something tasty is like a full time job. Making foreign dishes is usually even more expensive, and usually hard to even get the ingredients in the first place.
> To add insult to the injury Japanese cooking involves a lot of steps, tools and preparation so cooking something tasty is like a full time job.
I have to disagree here. A large number of Japanese recipe are highly homecook-able especially for Japanese people living in Japan, who probably already have the right tools/ingredients. It all depends on what you usually shelf at home.
In fact, even as I live in US, I find it easier and quicker to cook Japanese food rather than Chinese or western food. When I'm tired or in a hurry, Japanese recipe is my go to choice.
> A large number of Japanese recipe are highly homecook-able especially for Japanese people living in Japan, who probably already have the right tools/ingredients. It all depends on what you usually shelf at home.
Agreed. I'm not making kaiseki every night, nor any night for that matter here in Tokyo.
Typically I'll have the rice cooker set to have rice ready at 17:00 when I finish work for the day. I'll usually have some dashi on hand that I made over the weekend, but otherwise it's a 5-minute job with instant stuff that's not powdered, or 20 or so if I feel like making it from scratch. Mix in white/red miso and any other extras, and soup's done. A quick stir-fry with some meat, bean sprouts, and a packet of seasoning takes me all of another 5 minutes, and that's dinner.
If it's noodles, I'll usually have some fried vegetables from the supermarket in the fridge, and that takes 5 minutes to heat up in the toaster oven. Udon can be boiled and done in that time. Slice up a green onion, mix in a raw egg, add soy sauce and some roe, and that's another quick dinner.
When I feel like doing something more major, making nabe on the weekends really isn't that much harder. Prepping ingredients takes maybe half an hour, and then it's just letting it simmer for another hour. Plus, leftovers from the last a long time.
Curry's also something else that takes an hour tops from start to finish.
Pan-fried chicken thigh with Nanban sauce (soy sauce + vinegar + sugar + mirin + sake). If I have tomatoes and lettuce lying around, I'll cut a few slices and make it into a chicken sandwich.
This takes me about 17 minutes, 20 minutes tops, basically as long as it needs to cook and rest the meat.
I'm interested what dishes you're specifically talking about here? Japanese cooking is not complicated, just different.
Me and a lot of my friends here can all meal prep <500yen per meal and that ranges from Japanese food to Indian/Italian/Mexican. You just need to make smart adjustments and substitutions.
Agreed, it's pretty dead simple and cheap to make some miso soup, some kind of stir fried veggie dish, sear a piece of fish and throw in some tsukemono from the market - which is exactly the kind of easy, healthy meal me and my wife eat at home all the time. Perhaps I got the crash course for eating cheap in Japan on easy mode by having a Japanese wife who already knows how to do it, but there's plenty of simple recipes to follow on Cookpad if you can read some Japanese.
Also are you going to an expensive supermarket? If you can buy vegetables and fruits from a green grocer (yaoya, 八百屋) or from a cheaper supermarket like Gyomu or Big-A or something, it's much cheaper than buying it from a higher-end grocery like Seijo Ishii or Kinokuniya - like several times cheaper sometimes. I didn't know that when I first came to Japan but point is, it's worth it to do your due diligence and find the cheap groceries just like you would in your home country, Americans have complained about Whole Foods being overpriced since the dawn of time.
> it's pretty dead simple and cheap to make some miso soup, some kind of stir fried veggie dish, sear a piece of fish and throw in some tsukemono from the market
Sure if you are going for the lowest of low effort you can make something edible, but that doesn’t mean it’s tasty nor something one would like to eat everyday. The miso soup meme is funny once a week but let’s be honest and not pretend it has good nutritional value. The pork soup is a way better upgrade but it already requires two times more ingredients and more step and doing a steak and fries. One time a friend cooked a ratatouille plus some meat aside for three persons and it’s cost us 2000 yen each... (ok I could have lowered the price by 500 but not more given how expensive vegetables are)
In fact your message hints at the root of the problem when mentioning your wife: the Japanese cuisine is based on the model of the housewife who had a full day to go shopping for various ingredients, do many processing steps, use various sauces and let things soak in it to prepare the 3-4 side dish of a Japanese meal for a family. This kind of organization is impossible for a working people living alone.
If I dont make breakfast for my boyfriend he'll make 一汁三菜 for breakfast or miso with a tsukemono and TKG. None of these things take an abundant amount of time to buy or prep for. We both work full-time jobs. Again, this sounds like a lack of knowledge about meal prep rather than a actual time issue.
Huh? Not only is my wife a working engineer, but I do this same kind of meal all the time on my own as a full time working person, and it takes about 5 minutes of bumping around the supermarket and yaoya that are across the street from each other conveniently located next to my station. It really is not hard to put together a nice meal of a hot pot or whatever. Miso soup isn’t literally just miso and water, you can put whatever you want in it, including boiling vegetables, tofu, fish, soy milk, whatever - crazy simple, I some variation almost every day and it’s neither boring nor a meme.
Meta point, you sound very bitter and defensive about this. How about give some of the suggestions people have made a shot? Like I mentioned, can you read some Japanese? Cookpad has tons of simple recipes.
Gyomu for chickpeas, tahini, real peanut butter and all my frozen vegetables, and then Hanamasa for the bulk meats.. my freezer is basically overflowing 24/7 but its so cheap it feels like daylight robbery haha
> I'm interested what dishes you're specifically talking about here? Japanese cooking is not complicated, just different.
That isn't necessarily true, Japanese cuisine (along with Italian which are my two cuisines I cooked professionally) actually relies more on elaboration and skill of seemingly humble ingredients: more than just about any other cuisine in my experience. It's a great equalizer to have something seen as exotic as truffle shaved on a soufflé be outshined by a long way by a Chawanmushi with a proper dashi, seasonal (cheap) vegetables, herbs and seafood.
Sure you can make staples like maze gohan, tamago gohan, takikomi gohan or ocha zuke with whatever you have on hand and rift where needed to keep it from being boring but each and everyone of those dishes that is carefully created and balanced makes it so much more satisfying and I find that to be the trick to Japanese cuisine as it makes you re-evaluate your perceptions/positions, and thus the execution of what is really important in a recipe as a result: I dislike eating in the morning, like really hate it, but I really loved having onsen tamago over slightly seasoned uruchimai rice and some handmade zukemono and miso (with proper dashi) for breakfast. The extra I could just eat as onigiri with toasted nori later in the day with a miso shiro and it was that good and never something I never get tired of despite being prone to 'palate fatigue.'
And all of that is because the elaboration and prep that went into making things that use affordable ingredients but require a great deal of attention to detail--for example a bitter salty dashi, or worst yet that hondashi powder, is repulsive and indicative of improper heat monitoring and regulation with the katsubushi/niboshi. A hastently made zukemono is very disappointing when eating teishoku as you want the sourness and saltiness and crunch to refresh your palate as you go back and forth between dishes. Not having that ruins the meal entirely.
