Cooking and Eating

The philosophy of Japanese cooking is to serve food that has retained as much of its natural flavour as possible. It is therefore essential to choose ingredients at their best - they should be very fresh and in their season. If the food needs to be cooked at all this is done for the minimum time possible. The Japanese cook belives that vegetables are best eaten raw or only very lightly cooked, to retain their crunchiness. Otherwise, they may be salted a little to draw out the cold water of the raw ingredient.