UDON is a Japanese noodle made from wheat flour. Usually we eat it with simple soup of dashi and soy sauce. Toppings are similar to Soba’s topping, Tenpura, Aburaage, etc,. But when eat good udon, we prefer simple style without topping, even soup. Here are menus of UDON shops, a lot of variety.
Tenpura UDON: What a kind of Tempura is depends on shop. Usually Shrimp Tempura is most popular. I think.
Kitsune UDON: Kitsune means fox and we say Fox like to eat Aburaage (but of course fox doesn't like it actually.) It relates to Ianri Shrine history. The god of Inari Shrine is originally Dakini in India and servant were jackals. In Inida, they offered fried mouse to them as nutritious food, but when Japanese Buddhism adopt Dakini as Inari'god, Jackal was changed into Fox and since Buddhism doesn't allow to eat meat, Aburaages were offered instead of fried mouse to Inari Shrine and its servant FOX. This is related to why we call sushi with aburaage “Inari zushi” too.
Tanuki UDON: Tanuki means Japanese raccoon. And it means Agedama or Tenkasu when it comes to Japanese noodle. There are various views why call it Tanuki. Traditionally Fox and Tanuki, both are said they are animals cheat human, we have many old story about it. Since there is fox in menu, we should make Tanuki too. That is the one of reason why it is called Tanuki. And we say seeds of fruits “TANE” and also we call the center part of dumplings (meats part) or such type of foods “TANE”. Agedama is a kind of a by‐product when we cook Tenpra and it looks like tempura without center part = “TANE” + “NUKI”(means no or without) —> TANUKI, this is another and there are more.
Curry UDON: There is dashi in curry soup of Udon shop. So it is mixture of dashi and curry, soy sauce. You think weird? But it's very Yummy. One of my favorite food.
Tukimi UDON : Noodle with raw egg and it means moon.
Nabeyaki UDON: Usually this is the winter special in Japan, very hot and a lot of topping on it.
Kagawa prefecture is famous for UDON and inhabitants of Kagawa eat UDON a lot. They eat UDON over twice the amount of Tokyo people eat. Actually the rate of diabetic is the highest in Japan because of their UDON love. The reason why I wrote about UDON today, it was so funny to find this news last week, when we have this big news, "The first observation of gravitational waves explained", of course all Japanese news paper picked it as the biggest news at the day. But only local papers in Kagawa area picked "the average price of UDON is 3.2yen UP" . it was such a big news for them.
Comments