Secret Ingredients

by David Remnick

  I had been to Daisen-in earlier that week, and at my first sight of the mounds I surprised myself by bursting into tears, perhaps because, for all its austerity, the garden is an image of release: of the moment at which, after an intractable struggle, you get permission from yourself to let the inessential go.

  The temples I had come to Japan to visit were of a different sort, though they, too, had a Zen foundation. They were the workshops where tofu is handmade by artisans faithful to the old tradition. Here I should admit that, to a Western palate—mine, at least, unable, despite my best efforts at Daisen-in, to transcend an incorrigible greed for new sensations—even the greatest artisanal tofu didn’t produce the kind of epiphany that my first mouthful of white truffle, or of a fruity tomato, or of corn rushed from a field into the pot did. But tofu has been the dietary mainstay of monastic life in Japan for about a millennium—it was imported from China and Korea, along with Buddhism—and it has never lost the soulful, exalted aura of its provenance. In that respect, its relation to the bean curd sold in plastic tubs at American supermarkets is that of a Communion wafer to a rice cracker. Westerners tend to regard tofu as a convenient and perhaps necessary but vaguely pathetic substitute for some less wholesome, more morally dubious carnal indulgence—a rare burger, say. They may even be a bit disdainful of a dish (as they would be of an individual) that, by their standards, lacks an identity, or begs for a disguise. Every tribe, however, has an ancestral food that its exiles yearn for, and that its children can’t live without: its manna, which is often soft and white. When a tofu master offers you a slice of bean curd he has just unmolded, he is inviting you to partake, insofar as a stranger can, of what it means to be Japanese.

  Okutan is a place congenial to such reflections. It is the oldest tofu riyori in Kyoto. The original restaurant was established almost four hundred years ago within the walls of the Nazenji temple, and the current proprietor, Yasuie Ishii, is the fifteenth generation of his family to preside there. He is now in his sixties, but as a young man he bought a villa and its outbuildings—a cluster of thatched pavilions—near the temple of Kiyomizu-dera, with the idea of one day opening a second Okutan. This newer branch sits on the hilly site of a village once owned by the temple’s lord. Guests eat at low tables in a tatami room cantilevered over the garden—a lush glade of cherry, cedar, and maple trees. Mukashi dofu is the first course on the set menu: a dish from the monastic repertoire. A kneeling waitress prepares it at your table. She sets a clay crock on a charcoal brazier, adds two or three small bricks of momengoshi (“cotton” tofu—well drained of moisture and firm in consistency), pours some hot water over them from a kettle, and, after they have simmered for a few minutes (they are not supposed to steep, as they do in the classic hot pot, yudofu), she ladles them into a bowl. You then help yourself to a sprinkling of scallions and seven hand-ground spices, and a spoonful of enriched fish stock that contains algae from Hokkaido. The courses that follow observe the principle set by the first: exquisitely bland bean curd, devoid of the bitter or metallic aftertaste that, in the commercial product or its milk, is masked by additives; and served with a refined sauce or paste that sets off its plainness the way a fanciful bijou sets off the elegance of a couture dress. Yet nothing else at Okutan, or perhaps in Japan, rivals the purity of shima dofu—an ivory-colored attar of bean curd that arrives on a turquoise plate, with a coral drop of sea-urchin (uni) purée, and whose creation is an almost mystical rite.

  I was having lunch with a Japanese friend—a native of Kyoto—and after the meal Mr. Ishii introduced himself to us. We chatted briefly about a mutual acquaintance, Hiroko Tanaka, who had arranged the interview. Madam Tanaka is a lithe woman of sixty who dresses in kimonos and wears her dark hair swept high off her pale forehead in a classic pompadour. A fan, a cell phone, and a pack of cigarettes are all tucked neatly into her obi. She has a dancer’s carriage and the stage presence of a beauty who has spent her life being looked at. Her theatre was the world of the geisha house. Like many retired geishas (who are called geikos in Kyoto), she opened a bar on one of the cobbled backstreets off the river, in the Gion quarter, and she trains a small troupe of teenage protégées—maikos—in the arts and protocol of her former profession.

  Though Mr. Ishii is a busy man, he devoted the better part of an afternoon to giving us a course in soybean history and gastronomy. This engaging lesson took place in his tofu kitchens and in his private museum of beans, which is housed in a crypt beneath the restaurant. Beans, he explained, are the seedpods of legumes, which grow on every continent except Antarctica, and Glycine max (soya) is one of some twenty thousand species, the majority of which are poisonous. Mr. Ishii has managed to obtain (and, in some cases, to finesse through customs, with the help of airline-pilot friends) about five thousand specimens, along with their flowers, which he displays, mostly for his own enjoyment, in glass bottles and vitrines. He also took us to his studio, in one of the thatched pavilions, where he edits photographs taken on a life of travels to the remote, mostly tropical places where one finds exotic bean stalks like the locust tree and the Calabar. I wondered about this extravagant politesse, until my friend received a cell-phone call from Madam Tanaka. Ishii-san, she said, had once been her admirer. But not even a celebrated geisha could get him off the subject of tofu.

  Histories vary, but according to Mr. Ishii the art of extracting a milky liquid from the soybean and turning it into a cheap and versatile solid food by means of a curdling agent—a salt or an acid—was invented in China about two thousand years ago. The Chinese called the dish dofu (do = curdled; fu = bean), a name as basic as the nutrient it described. About seven hundred years later, a delegation of monks studying Chinese Buddhism brought the technique back to Japan with them. Tofu was exclusive to the upper classes (nobles and samurai) and the vegetarian clergy for about five centuries, in part because the labor required to pulverize dried soybeans (daizu) by hand, with a mortar and pestle, was too costly. But the advent of the millstone made tofu accessible to common people, and its place in the national diet and psyche has been compared to that of bread in France, or of potatoes in Eastern Europe—a difference being that one cannot live by bread or potatoes alone, whereas tofu (discounting one study, not cited by Mr. Ishii, that links its consumption by middle-aged Japanese American men to an increased incidence of brain atrophy in old age) is an almost uniquely perfect food: low in calories, high in protein, rich in minerals, devoid of cholesterol, eco-friendly, and complete in the amino acids necessary for human sustenance.

  The workshop where Okutan’s tofu is made occupies a multichambered grotto beneath the dining rooms that has the chaste and contemplative atmosphere of a chapel. Apart from the plumbing and electrical fixtures, almost no alloyed metal or industrial materials have been used in the construction of the kitchen or are used in the cooking process, as if they might profane the tofu with their modernity. Nearly all the accoutrements—even the sink—are handmade of cedar, and the stove is a slab of lava. In the kitchen’s inner sanctum—the salt room—the regimen of purism is absolute. Adobe walls of clay mixed with rice straw are sheathed in bamboo; the ceiling is tented in thatch; the floor is cobbled with sea stones; and, though the dim light is electric, the bulbs are disguised by old wrought-iron lanterns. Here, Mr. Ishii explained, he distills his nigari—the coagulating agent. Salt from the mountains of China is wrapped in straw and suspended from a wooden tripod over a weathered cypress barrel. It absorbs humidity from the walls and exudes its moisture in an almost imperceptible drip, filling the barrel at the rate of three centimeters a year. Every six months, he adds more salt to the bundles, and if their hemp bindings break he replaces them. Otherwise, they have been hanging undisturbed since he courted Madam Tanaka, about thirty years ago.

  Shima dofu, however, is the one variety of bean curd at Okutan that isn’t curdled with nigari. It is an exceedingly expensive delicacy (about fifty dollars for a few thin slices), and on special occasions Mr. Ishii delivers a provision to the emper
or’s palace, molded with the imperial mark, a sixteen-petaled chrysanthemum. A dish of great antiquity, it comes from one of tofu’s early landfalls in Japan, Ishigakijima—a small island southwest of Okinawa, 150 miles from Korea. Mr. Ishii learned the art of making shima dofu in his youth, from two old women there.

  If you would like to try whipping up a batch at home, here is the recipe. Negotiate a contract for organic soybeans with a reliable farmer whose fields lie on the slopes of Mt. Hira, in the Shiga Prefecture, where the soil and the water are unpolluted. Make sure that the farmer harvests the beans as late as possible—preferably in December. (Green summer soybeans become edamame, and most commercial soybeans are harvested in the fall. The extra time on the stalk intensifies the flavor.) Pick the beans over carefully, throwing out those eaten by worms—a desirable sign that the farmer isn’t cheating with a little DDT. Soak them overnight in very cold spring water. The beans will swell. Rinse them in more of the same, and grind them with a granite mortar, using all your strength, for two hours. Drain the pulp in a bamboo colander, and put the white soy juice you obtain—gojiu—to cook on a stone hearth. Let it bubble, subside, and bubble again, several times. (Heating gojiu, otherwise known as soy milk, is an essential process that deactivates a toxic substance found in most legumes which blocks digestion.)

  Sometime well before you reach this point, however—perhaps while you are waiting for the delivery of your soybeans—hire a boat, and locate the tiny island of Hateruma on your charts (it isn’t that far from Ishigakijima). The island is inhabited only by several hundred farmers, who raise sugarcane. Off the coast there is a coral reef (perhaps the sugar farmers can tell you where to find it). You will need a depth finder in good working order, because when the tide is at its lowest ebb you are going to moor the boat and gather the seawater—as Mr. Ishii does—that cascades from the reef, which has an exceptionally rich and complex mineral content. This primordial bouillon is your curdling agent. Add some to the strained gojiu (time and failure will teach you the precise amount), stirring with a wooden paddle, and turn the thickened curds into the slatted, four-by-ten-inch cedar boxes that you have lined with a fine-grained cheesecloth. Cover them, weight the covers with blocks of lava—about ten pounds per box—and leave them to drain. Do not, under any circumstances, cool your shima dofu, as you would common tofu, by unmolding it in a tank of water, which slimes the skin and dilutes the flavor. What is that flavor? Sublimely unsensational, like a perfectly clarified consommé—which keeps the spirit but discards the substance of the earthy ingredients and patient toil that have gone into it.

  Traditional tofu-making in Japan is a nocturnal occupation. At Okutan the staff starts at 4 A.M., but many artisans show up for work around 2, and it is probably a good guess that behind the only lighted windows blazing in a darkened town soybeans are being soaked, ground, boiled, strained, reboiled, curdled, pressed, drained, cooled, sliced, and packaged. So at five o’clock one morning, I rolled off my futon in a lovely old ryokan, the Yoyokaku, near the beach in Karatsu, ready for research.

  Karatsu is a small provincial city in the Saga Prefecture, about four hours by train from Kyoto, on the spectacularly eroded west coast of Kyushu Island. It is a former whaling port known for its pottery-dun-colored vessels used in the tea ceremony, which are a legacy of Japan’s invasions of Korea and of the Korean artisans who returned with their samurai conquerors to settle there in the sixteenth century. The city is also famous for a rowdy, picturesque harvest festival, the Kunchi, which features a parade of gigantic floats and a week of revelry and feasting every November. But off-season it is a quiet backwater, rife with the sort of intrigue that makes for an old-fashioned novel of manners.

  By the time I had found my shoes at the front door of the Yoyokaku and had unlocked my bicycle, the sun was up. I pedaled across a bridge linking the beaches to the mainland, and past Ka-ratsu Castle—a fortified seventeenth-century pagoda that is imposing at a distance, though deplorably restored—which guards the entrance to a bay dotted with misty and misshapen islands. The town was still shuttered, although a few fishmongers and flower sellers were setting up their wares. Downtown Ka-ratsu is Kyoto in miniature: a grid of low, mostly ramshackle timber-and-stucco houses that converges on two glass-vaulted pedestrian arcades, Gofukumachi and Kyomachi.

  My destination was a tiny restaurant in Kyomachi, which has a gingko counter with ten seats, framed by parchment walls decorated in drippy ink by an inebriated artist. You have to reserve well in advance, and be on time for an early meal (breakfast or brunch), because the service ends at noon, when the exhausted workers go home to sleep. The cuisine consists almost entirely of artisanal tofu made nightly, on the premises, by Yoshimasa Kawashima, an oenophile, chef, organic farmer, philosopher of gastronomy, and devotee of flower arranging and the tea ceremony, whose family has been making tofu in Karatsu for nine generations. He, however, has created his own signature product, zaru dofu, a melting, ethereal confection with a mousselike consistency that is eaten with a spoon. It starts out like other artisanal tofu, but one of Kawashima’s secrets is his nigari—magnesium chloride, which is trickier to use though milder than the more common calcium chloride, which leaves a saline aftertaste. As the creamy curds of zaru dofu are setting, they are scooped from the vat and mounded softly into shallow bamboo colanders, where they drain, and in which they are packaged for sale. These appealingly rustic receptacles give Kawashima’s delicacy its name (zaru means “basket”). It is served in some of Tokyo’s best restaurants and exported to New York by air twice a week, where diners unable to make the twenty-hour journey to Karatsu can try some at Megu, in Tribeca.

  That morning, the breakfast menu included white, green, and black zaru dofu (the green is a pale celery, and the black a mauvish blue, like a berry gelato) served half a dozen ways: with soft rice and wasabi; with pinches of sea salt or sesame seeds and dribbles of olive oil or tamari; and in a bowl of the thick and fragrant house miso. A side dish of homemade plum pickles accompanied a seared bream, which had probably still been alive when I left the inn. The fish course was followed by a square of “silken” tofu, kinugoshi, deep-fried, but custardy on the inside—a contrast in texture that reminded me of crème brûlée (if you can imagine eating crème brûlée with chopsticks). The soybean lees (okara) dissolved on the tongue, like the fine shavings of a mild root or nut. Okara is the residue of the separation process—the stage at which the boiled soybean pulp is pressed in cheesecloth. It looks like sawdust or wheat germ, and it is often fed to animals or used as fertilizer, but Kawashima considers it worthy to be savored with a sprinkling of fish powder, minced carrot, and Japanese mushrooms. There were two soy-milk desserts: a gelatinous sweet made with sesame paste and a pot of quivering blancmange.

  Kawashima is a large presence in Karatsu: a local boy made good, whose fame, or at least whose tofu, has reached America. At a smoky café with dark woodwork and a polished bar that seemed to have been modeled vaguely on a Greenwich Village coffeehouse, the customers were happy to tell me what they thought of him. One was a stocky, middle-aged woman who had come in for a jolt of caffeine after her tango lesson. She lit a cigarette, as did the waitress and a white-haired gentleman in a business suit. He fled, however, when another woman arrived and settled down with a cigar. The echo of ribald female laughter in the hazy gloom gave the place the atmosphere of a coven. No one seemed surprised that I had flown seven thousand miles to eat zaru dofu, but they gave me to understand that Kawashima was a “character,” and “very rich”—he had bought “a big estate,” a much envied property in the hills, and a beach house, too. There were forty other tofu makers in the town, but it was hard work, and none of the others made as much money, they said. I tried to buy them a round of espresso, but they wouldn’t hear of it. The tango dancer pressed me to accept her fan.

  I had also heard around the Yoyokaku that Kawashima owed at least some of his fame to another local luminary, Takashi Nakazato, one of Japan’s greatest potters and the scion
of a Karatsu dynasty going back thirteen generations, whose patriarch, Taroumon Nakazato, is a Living National Treasure. Nakazato is a noted gastronome who has helped to make a number of reputations, particularly those of sushi chefs and sake brewers. His original enthusiasm for Kawashima’s zaru dofu piqued the interest of the press. But the two men had quarreled, it was said, over some matter of etiquette, and their falling-out seemed to enthrall the town. When I met Nakazato, he was at work on a huge urn in a serene, barnlike studio with high rafters and mullioned windows. The light was streaming in, and his assistants were silently prepping a rack of pots for firing. Their master is a slight man of sixty-eight, with a noble head, and his intense containment—a stillness of eye and body while his deft hands move—gives him a sagelike aura. When I asked Nakazato about Kawashima, he slowly looked up from his wheel. “I love food,” he said laconically. “I know a young sushi chef in the pine forest. Do you know the pine forest? You should go there.” There was a long pause. “There is lots of great tofu in Japan.”

  Kawashima bounded into the restaurant at about eight, as his pretty wife, Keiko, was clearing away the Nakazato pottery on which breakfast is served—rust-and-ash-colored vessels with a dark underglaze and a primal beauty. Tofu-making may have a Zen gestalt, but Kawashima—a sporty fifty-eight year old with a goatee and a crewcut—doesn’t make a monklike impression. He is the sort of character the French call a gaillard—a bon vivant bristling with rakish vigor. One keeps up with him at a fast trot. His cottage-scale factory and offices occupy a warren of rooms in a somber two-hundred-year-old house, with blackened beams, that survived demolition when the arcade was built, and seems out of synch with its festive swags of plastic wisteria. At the back of a rather cramped, unlovely industrial kitchen, baskets of zaru dofu were moving down a conveyor belt, getting wrapped and labeled. (The tofu is handmade and strictly organic, but the packaging is mechanized, and a small fleet of white delivery vans was waiting at the loading dock.) Kawashima’s younger brother was dressed in kitchen whites, stirring soy milk in a metal vat. It was warm but hadn’t been curdled yet, and he offered me some from the ladle. Its taste was slightly beany, yet elemental, with an ineffable sweetness, as if it came not from a plant but from a breast.