Japan

As I wrote in my introduction to this book, one of my seminal food experiences was eating fresh silken tofu, served in a bowl of iced water, at a Japanese restaurant in Melbourne when I was 19 years old.

For many years I’ve been an avid purchaser of Japanese produce as well as a regular at Japanese restaurants. I’ve always felt that there’s an extraordinary adult clarity and purity to Japanese food, more evident than in other cuisines. Whilst a green coconut curry from Thailand, for example, may be a riot of sweet, sour and spicy flavours (although still combined with an underlying richness), the food of Japan has always seemed to me to be slightly austere. Serious. Delicious, yet a refined cuisine rather than a playful one.