That's interesting about "Turkish rice." In Mexico, there are tacos called tacos árabes, literally "Arab tacos," which are made with pork. Sounds weird, considering the Muslim ban on pork, but of course it's important to understand that not all Arabs are Muslim, and the Arabs who first served tacos árabes were Lebanese Christian immigrants to Mexico.
Well some of the original tacos arabes were made with lamb as well. This of course would eventually become al pastor and adobada tacos made from pork with corn tortillas instead of pita bread.
@@valmarsiglia Yes, there are lots of Lebanese christians, but I'll bet pork dishes would be hard to find in Beirut, even among the Christians.. Doesn't mean they didn't sell pork tacos in Mexico, of course... 😁
Check out the OTR video on Thai "Cook Shops" I linked in a separate post. There's also another one on American Fried Rice (which is rather amusing). They take a REALLY deep dive into Western-inspired Asian cuisine, and I recall the term "cha chaan teng" was used (in relation to Hong Kong, IIRC). What I'd like to know is why "Nasi Goreng Pattaya" is called "Nasi Goreng Pattaya"... 😁
Also, don't forget about Korea's counterpart in yangsik, as opposed to hansik (in contrast to the foodways of its native minorities the Jeju islanders & the Jaegaseung, both quite different from Korean food)
Hong kong has the same , western style food, every asian country that has western influence does this. This can be said about asian food in america. Some Chinese dishes in America are not served in China
What makes Japanese Yoshoku unique is that it has developed to suit the Japanese palate since the 1870s as a result of extensive cultural exchanges with Western countries.
The Portuguese influence on Japanese food is actually seen despite their expulsion. The tradition of having fried fish became tempura, which is now as integral to Japanese cuisine as soba or sushi. Still not used to the idea of serving both rice and spaghetti in one dish. There is also a version of “Asian” western food in Hong Kong which incorporates Chinese ingredients and western techniques and vice versa. And Portuguese gave us egg tarts from Macau and Hong Kong and beyond. Basically a version of crème burle in an edible shell.
yep also the Portuguese introduced one of the first breads or in this case cake that Japan encountered from the west is Bolo de Castela which the Japanese just call Castella which is still made today and one of the very first makers in Japan this year celebrated 400 years of making said cake.
I think for Japanese curry, it's actually the influence of Queen Victoria that led British Navy to adopt it as part of their food, and quite a number of Japanese military officer went to Britain as part of their training, leading to introduction of Curry in Japan. That's why the method of cooking is similar to a stew rather to an indian curry.
This is one of your best videos, great topic, I learned a lot about Japanese food which I could kind of see myself but never had it articulated and explained in an interesting way. Your video is crafted well with dynamic editing, b-roll, actual on site boots on the ground food tasting, I watched 100%, thanks!
Fantastic video! I think this has got to be one of the best videos you've made so far. The mix between you trying the food and it's history transitions is so smooth and doesn't feel forced.
There are some interesting Japanese delis in New York with the Japanese versions of Western baked goods, sandwiches, etc. There's one called Zaiya on E41st right by the library that had some great box lunches.
And curry itself was introduced in the Navy as a dish to address the problem of beriberi among sailors. One of the inducements for enlistment was unlimited white rice; the more refined rice was, the higher class it was considered. Milling rice, however, removed the part of the rice containing thiamine. Navy curry, adapted from British curry made from curry powder, supplied the thiamine missing from the rice-only diet some sailors ate. There is an article on the adoption of curry in Japan on the Atlas Obscura website.
@@seanmalloy7249 I would have thought it was all the vegetables that go into the dish that addressed the beri beri. I hadn't know about curry powder being supplemented with thiamine.
Doria, the casserole rice dish also exists in Cantonese/Hong Kong Cafe cuisine. Doria also is taken from a potato dish called gratin where the potatoes are replaced with rice
Thanks for being a star food journalist. The way you take food and interplay with a society's experience is masterful and engaging. Keep doing what your doing because your are doing amazing work. I can't wait to watch your future episodes.
Well some of these things are certainly staples on Japanese menus in the US. Then again, the majority of "Japanese" restaurants in the US are actually owned and run by Chinese or Koreans. The Japanese Ministry of Agriculture estimated that only around 10% of Japanese restaurants in the US are owned by people of Japanese descent.
When looking at the title, I'd have thought you'd be covering some of Japan's minority foodways such as Ryukyuan & Ainu plus Hachijo, but yoshoku does (with tragic historical reasons folded in) have a counterpart in Korea known as yangsik (in contrast to hansik & those of Korea's native minorities such as the Jaegaseung & Jeju islanders, quite different from Korean food that's often known). In any case, yangsik is just as fascinating as yoshoku & can often be found in bunsik places
Great episode! We could get this type of food in HK when I was a child (90s). My Japanese friend told me the curry became common after WWII as the returning service men would eat it regularly as it was easier to cook in large quantities than traditional Japanese food. Did a bit of googling and it seems that there is truth to it.
This video is great, very interesting and well done! I was wondering how this type of cuisine came be so influential And important in Japan. Your content is super underrated and definitely deserves more recognition.
Thank for your beautiful and very informative footage! Here in Germany (maybe in all of Europe) industry is trying to establish „Asia Food“: instant noodles with a thickened curry sauce or the same noodles with a thickened sweet chili sause. The Japanese definitely did a better job with Yoshuku!
Thank you! I loved how you gave us a background for why these dishes exist. I found it particularly interesting how beef was not a regular part of the Japanese diet until the Meiji restoration and within roughly one hundred years Japan is now responsible for some of the most highly prized beef in the world. Thank
Hey Matthew, I'm loving all your videos and have been binge-watching them lately, especially while on the treadmill. Keep up the great work! If you're ever in the LA area you should come try my family's Mexican restaurant which has been open since 1920.
Tonkatsu, are amazing.(I specificaly prefer the irekatsu variation ) I like that they are served with salad or cabbage. They even have some sort of tonkatsu who looked like cordon bleu, with cheese and ham on the inside. Also culinary speaking, Nagasaki is really interesting. They are a lot of western and chinese influence here. Like for exemple, they do a special dessert, castella (カステラ ) but they import it before the sakoku (the isolationist policy). So technicaly it's a yoshoku dish but it's was introduced before the meiji era where yoshoku where invented. Even more strange is that Portuguese today didn't do this meal ^^ (but a couple of mixed portugo-japanese tried to reintroduce it in the mid 90s ) It's so fascinating to me.
Hello, I am from Turkey. Pilaf (or as we call it Pilav) is one of main Turkish side dishes for centuries. We always have beans, meatballs or chicken as a main dish with pilaf. The brown thick sauce looks like Balkanian-Turkish dish called Gulash and/or Yahni. This is also one of the special dishes in Ottoman Empire Cuisine. So i guess, pilaf and sauce part of that dish is inspired by Turkish-Balkanian food. Cheers and smiles… 😋
Great video! It really showcases something I always loved about food but couldn't put into words until recently, and that's how much of a culture's stories can be told by their food. The context, ingredients, techniques, history, and ideas that accumulate collectively over time to culminate in a particular preparation that cannot be found anywhere else. Sampling a culture's authentic food has become one of the main reasons I travel now.
Ok Subscribed. It was your final words that did it. Both wise and weary wry. Also abjectly true. Also, you taught me something new, yoshoku, and I thought I knew a lot about Japanese cuisine. Well done Matthew, I'll be back.
In France we have a simple version of the burger with a fried egg, it's called "steak à cheval", it was popular in the 80/90 ( I eat that a lot), but not so much now. Impressive to see a japanese version of this plate.
There might be a connection here. A lot of cooks and chefs in Japan have trained for French cuisine, and it then influenced the more rough and ready cooking of the the yoshoku of the shokudo restaurants. So we see a hamburger steak / chopped steak with a brown sauce and an egg.
Great insights into Japanese cuisine with relevance to Japanese history and how its food culture is shaped over the years. Nice video editing, pace, and presentation too! Good job!
It was great to hear about the earlier versions of these dishes. I did not expect this video would be about yoshoku though, since I think a lot of people who have an interest in japan already know about it. I was expecting something niche like some form of fermented soy/vegetables that is only eaten in a small town because the dish has almost died out. Or insects or konowata (fermented sea cucumber guts).
I honestly can’t help but be a bit jealous of places outside America with their culture, cuisine and mostly their transportation. Like I just see all those people walking in cities that aren’t built for cars, having access to walk. My town doesn’t even have sidewalks in most areas and it’s just embarrassing to me and should be to our country as well. I’m not some weaboo or anything, 😂, I just don’t get how states like mine don’t have sidewalks, and yell at us for not driving or using bikes near ditches that are like 5 feet deep 🤨
From rural America, just visited Japan. Being in rural America is so depressing I live in a town of pop 48,000 people. We have more pollution here than Tokyo Japan, one of the largest cities in the world. It’s a damn shame. I even felt way safer in Tokyo than in my small town.
Food is moreso representative of history and our journey rather than tradition. We experience food with flavor, texture, and smell but also the memories associated with it. If we confine ourselves by being overly concerned with tradition, then we might rob ourselves of creating a new memory by clinging to the old.
Your videos are amazing! Very high production quality for such a small channel. As someone who loves cooking and history this channel is the perfect mix. Keep doing what you're doing and you're going to be big! (Like Tasting History grew a lot as well).
Very well thought out video. Reminds me a lot of Hawaii and its seemingly endless melting pot of ethnicities, cultural beliefs, and the tasty food that came with or was born from it. Saimin, manapua, and meat jun are just a few that come to mind.
it's interesting to hear how visitors perceive a country's culture - yoshoku is like comfort food for people of my generation. I guess kids these days eat a lot more sophisticated dishes and it's understandable that the "Showa Retro Kissa" is now a a popular novelty.
This was a really good video!! Ever since I lived in Japan (13 years ago) I kind of have always wondered a bit about these types of dishes (but apparently not enough to google it myself hehe), so I was really happy to learn from this video. I wouldn't mind a part two with more indepth info about the different dishes and the inspiration behind them.
It's a wonderful thing when food is reimagined in this way. I became aware of these dishes trough the Yakuza games but I didn't know about the how and why. Great video!
One of the things that drew me into wanting to know more about Japan when I was younger was their sheer amount of varied cuisine within their culture. All of which look amazingly delicious. Every thing I have had the chance to try has been wonderful, save for a few cheap dishes that were not made well. Food would be a major draw for me if I ever got to visit Japan. XD
Most non-Japanese people who don't study the culture don't know that the Japanese drew a metaphorical box around certain dishes and pursue development of them within a specific subgenre of the overall Japanese culinary umbrella.
Actually, there are a number of dishes in Hong Kong and Macau, which are similar to Japanese Doria. They are categorized under "Hong Kong Western Food". One classic dish is: "baked Portuguese chicken rice" ( 葡國雞焗飯 ). It signifies how cuisines evolve in Hong Kong and Macau region under Western Influence.
Great video! A lot of what you said really resonated with me because I've also been using food as a vehicle to explore culture, history, and especially how they change over time.
Really interesting video! The link between western culture and curry is pretty deep! When the British empire colonised india, they brought their foreign tastes and ideas to India. The british were very keen on having "gravy" with their meals, so to cater to demand from the British stationed there, the Indians served them dishes with "gravy" using their traditional flavours and spices, which evolved into the curry sauce we know today. Traditional Indian cuisine is typically drier, like my favourite biryani! Same flavours, less sauce! Curry is Japan's national dish, but did you know that curry (tikka masala) is also Britain's national dish? :D Many parts of the world are grateful to India for their influence on cuisine!
It's pronounced "yōshoku", with a long "ō". Also "demi glace" is pronounced "demi glass". Also "sakoku", with a short "a", not "saakoku". A similar category to yōshoku is "B-kyu gurume" (B-rank gourmet), which are déclassé dishes that border on fast food.
You make it sound like it's hidden in Japan. LOL. It's everywhere. I think most Japanese still have some sort of washoku vs yoshoku distinction in their head, but also realize that the dishes are very Japanized, despite the non-Japanese sources. The ban on red meat wasn't complete. Japanese in many places ate a lot of game animals. And they had been eating whale and other ocean mammals for a LONG time. BTW, I think in English it would be better to call curry rice, curry and rice. It's basically a curry served with or on rice. As for toruko rice, I would bet it's just some coinage of a Nagasaki restaurant post-war, when they combined the pilaf, the naporitan spaghetti, and the tonkatsu into a meal plate. And Turkey has pilaf dishes. Here in Fukui, in Takefu / Echizen, they did something similar with Boruga Rice. It is omuraisu, pork cutlet, and gravy / brown sauce. There is nothing that mysterious about it. Someone there saw a package of imported Volga Rice and just took the name. It is really more a pseudo-mysterious dish to encourage people to eat a big helping of government-subsidized-farmed rice. Since such dishes are so obviously just recombinations of true traditional yoshoku, there is nothing mysterious whatsoever about them.
You say that Yoshoku is not western food, and you're right. I wish Americans would take the same attitude about americanized food from other countries. Like, American-Italian food is actually quite different from the food they eat in Italy, but if you try to tell Americans that their "Italian food" isn't really Italian, but is actually American, they get angry. Same for "Chinese food," "German food," etc. No, it's not different because your great-great-grandma was Italian. Cultures are not stagnant (American nor Italian).
the hamburg steak was actualy most likely introduced by the dutch as they are the only people that both refered to the Buttelle (as it is called in Hamburg itself) as Hamburg meatballs (fried midsiced meatballs preserved using onions and pepper and fried outer crust) , in distinction to Königsberg Meatballs (a large cooked meatball preserved in an barrel of slightly acidic sauce for long see voyages) and Swedish meatballs (small meatballs small enough to be frozen using ice and prepared "fresh" on a ship), and had access to japan.
One of the most rarely discussed impact of Meiji restoration is the institutionalisation of Shinto religion, a separation between Shinto-Buddhist syncretism. It is done for a lot of things, also to fight off Buddhist dietary restriction. Other "western food" like Tempura (introduced by the Portuguese, along with firearms) are not typically considered "Yoshoku", since they were introduced way earlier during the beginning of Sengoku Jidai era (even before Edo period). Plus, Yoshoku is indeed kind of a very specific introduction period - that Meiji era. They evolved accordingly and becoming kinda "faux western" like Indonesian-western of the 1970s-1990s, which are mostly learned from Japan. The popularity of Hamburg steak and the popularity of the belief that "western people are bigger and stronger because they eat meat", is not a coincidence with the popularity of James H Salisbury's idea of promoting health through meat-eating in early 20th century. His recommended recipe of ground beef steak is named after him "Salisbury Steak" in the US since 1897. Ideas travel and kinda stayed, lagged in a foreign country during the pre-internet era. My parents and grandparents still believe that eating carrots improve eye sight as the British propaganda ministry suggested to the Germans, when they are wary about successful night bombing interception rate by RAF during WW2 - which was due to secret radar technology instead of RAF night fighter pilot's diet. Western food are reappropriated everywhere, in Indonesia, particularly Central Java, we have 'Selat Solo' - a form of Hamburg steak with caramelised onion as the sweet sauce. It was never labelled as "Indonesian food" back then, just like how Spaghetti Neapolitan (Naporitan) sold in Japanese Sogo Dept Store's cafe Chatterbox chain is always labelled "Western Food" instead of "Japanese Western Food". European influence also varies within Asia - Indonesia is not necessarily influenced 100% by the previous colonisers like Dutch, Portuguese, or British. My grandparent's RAF influence (carrot story) obviously reveals their Cantonese Hong Kong background. Then there is also fashionable Japanese obsession with anything French or Britain, depending whether it is Eastern or Western Japan - which is the same story with their electricity grid system.
Thank you for this fascinating video. I'm trying to track down these dishes to see if they're available in the San Francisco Bay Area, and it's hard with the automatic captions to get the spellings. Please be so kind as to proofread and correct them so I can get some of this deliciousness you've introduced me to into my mouth if it's here - I love Japanese curry but several of the other dishes are new to me. (Correcting auto-captions is a blessing for deaf people, too, just so you know.)
I stumbled on Yoshoku cuisine by chance in my area. Quickly became obsessed with Tarako Spaghetti and trying to do the same type of reimagining with my cambodian and thai food.
The remnants of (specifically) Portuguese influence still sticks around within Japan's yо̄shoku, which in my opinion permeates the cuisine more strongly than the other colonial powers, aside from probably the French. I'm surprised that one of Portugal's contributions, tempura, didn't get a mention.
Tempura is a weird one, cause despite it coming from Portuguese influence, it happened before the Sakoku policy and Meiji Era, so it’s often tagged as washoku.
@@offthemenuyt interesting, I never knew. So that would also extend to a few Japanese bread-based dishes then, like castella cake and all dishes covered in panko? If memory serves, bread itself also came from the Portuguese, and from around the same time.
Great video! Reminds me of Hong Kong's food culture, where some of its quintessential food that you see in their cafes are heavily influenced by the British
Some of the most interesting food that I had in Jaan a few years back was "Italian" food, but not actually Italian, but rather Japanese adaptations of Italian food. Thus making something new.
Very good message at the end. Food must be one of the only things that has to remain out of politics and confrontations in our ever-polarizing world. Cuisine exchanges are fascinating and allow us to expand our minds. Nice video 👍
I think this is one of the only times I've seen someones videos and been like what the fuck when I see the amount of subs this is super high quality man, keep it up👍👍
On the military wanting toadopt western diet: you forgot to mention most sailors got sick staying too long in the sea, unlike europeans, until the navy tried removing rice and adding beef and bread to the diet, which worked. After that the navy was forced to add red meat to the sailors eating habits.
The Baked Rice is also done and quite common in Southern China, HK, Malaysia and Singapore. From the seafood one like in the video to chicken and mushroom.
