Japanese Supermarket Cuisine

When I first arrived in Japan, one of my first reactions was, “A hundred pesos for a cup of rice?!” When I left the Philippines, a cup of rice only cost around ten pesos. Five, in fact, if you knew where to go. I wasn't planning on paying ten times more than what I was used to! But such was the pricing in Tokyo that, during my first year there, I refused to eat at restaurants and satisfied myself with buying food from the supermarket if I didn't want to cook.

The experience was quite interesting, actually.

First, let's talk about drinks. In Japan, when they say “iced tea,” they mean, “iced tea.” As in Oolong tea... with ice. The most widely-ingested drink in Japan is tea, and the Japanese people drink it hot or cold.

People in Japan drank tea like water. Everywhere you go, you'd see people bringing pet bottles of tea. And the tea came in a variety of types. There was Jasmine tea, Oolong tea, Sencha, afternoon tea, lemon tea, green tea, milk tea, and many others. And then milk tea would have sub-varieties such as Earl Grey milk tea, Royal milk tea, green tea latte, and several others. And green tea also had sub-classifications of Maccha or the dessert green tea, Midoricha, which looked more like the Chinese green tea, and a mixture of both.

I was a coffee drinker back home but, before the end of the year, I was a fan of the Maccha and the milk teas.

Moving on to food, if I wanted it really cheap, I bought onigiri: triangular clods of rice wrapped in pieces of nori (dried seaweed). Onigiri comes with different fillings like beef, salmon and chicken. My personal favorite was tuna. The filling tasted somewhat like tuna sandwich minus the pickle relish. Not all fillings may be enjoyable to non-Japanese, though, so be careful when choosing. Once, I got an onigiri at random, thinking I was okay with any filling. I bought what turned out to be a plum-filled onigiri. It was very very sour.

Raising my budget a bit, I tried buying set meals. Supermarkets in Tokyo sell meals in plastic bento boxes. Some of those boxes contained the familiar tempura shrimps and teriyaki chicken, but others seemed to be rice meals with tofu, just tofu with a bit of sauce. No meat! I also found out that one of their viands that I thought was a breaded pork patty was actually made of mashed potatoes. Talk about an all-carb diet!

Mabo Tofu and the all-potato Koroke are very much part of everyday Japanese fare, I found out later. Though I never really learned to appreciate lunch of rice with only tofu or potatoes, I did form a fondness for other types of... unusual Japanese dishes.

Another type of meal the plastic bentos carried consisted of rice topped with bits of dried seaweed, chopped up pieces of scrambled eggs (sweet, by the way), flaked smoked salmon, and raw salmon eggs. As I looked at it, I couldn't help but think how strange the dish was. The thought of spooning in mouthfuls of those raw pea-sized eggs gave me goosebumps. The thin transparent shell of the eggs hid nothing of the creature forming within.

I bought one of these bentos later on. Strange as the combination might sound, I liked it. The nori gave it texture. The flaked salmon and sweet eggs gave it flavor. And the breaking of salmon eggs inside one's mouth made it a truly unique culinary experience I don't think I ever had in any other country. Just a note, though, this dish is eaten cold. The last time I heated it, the salmon eggs burst all over the insides of my microwave.

Now for the dessert. I usually used my homesickness to justify my buying cakes all the time. Japanese supermarkets sold dessert cups, and cakes by the slice. And they were no ordinary desserts. They were strawberry shortcakes, chocolate cakes, chocolate mousse, coffee jelly with cream, pumpkin jelly, chocolate pudding, and a selection of other mouth-watering goodies. And they were as delicious as they were beautiful to behold.

There were also Japanese sweets they usually sold in twos or threes. They were round sweets. Some were covered in brown powder, presumably made of wheat. Others were covered in sesame seeds, others in green tea powder, and still others skewered on sticks with sauce poured on top of them. And in spring, they even had a kind that was sakura-pink with a piece of leaf wrapped under the ball. Do not be deceived, however. The bean paste-filled balls taste more or less the same. Still, they were rather pretty to look at.

After a year, I got tired of converting the prices to peso and went on to eat at fancy restaurants in the Shibuya and Roppongi areas of Tokyo. But my experiences with Supermarket food taught me that one need not splurge on expensive restaurants to know the food culture of a country. After all, even Japanese people don't eat out all the time.