fugu
Fugu, one of Japan’s most gourmet foods, is the ramen star of the classy Ginza neighborhood.
Get a glimpse of how one of Japan’s delicacies, the poisonous fugu fish, is traded at auction!
UFO catchers occupy a major portion of Japanese arcades nowadays. If you happen to walk by an arcade, the flashing lights and fun prizes all beckon customers to try their luck at these “skill” testing games. Normally, the prizes are figures and stuffed animals from popular TV shows and manga, but you will often see snacks and food. Most recently, a UFO catcher at the Amuseum Oizumi caught our eye because of its prize, a real live pufferfish!
When you’re hovering on the verge of leaving this world, the last thing you want to feel is lingering regret about those unique foods you never had the chance to try and all those unimaginable flavours and textures you missed out on, or never knew existed. To avoid such a terrible fate, a list of 20 strange bucket-list foods has recently been compiled by a British news site and has been widely commented on in Japan, as it features two home-grown favourites: fugu and shiokara. Fugu is the poisonous pufferfish of Simpsons fame, while shiokara is a relatively harmless dish composed of shreds of meat from a sea creature (commonly squid) in a slimy paste of its heavily salted, fermented raw guts. I mean, viscera.
So my taste buds won’t spend an eternity regretting the tragic circumstances that left their fugu and shiokara cherry unpopped, I aim to get to the bottom of these Japanese dishes! Er, okay, maybe not right to the bottom. I’ll have a few cautious bites and see how it goes.
You may think it’s crazy to voluntarily eat poisonous fish, but in the case of pufferfish, or “fugu” in Japanese, it’s something the Japanese have been doing for a long time. We understand how the idea of eating a potentially deadly poisonous fish could be off-putting to some, but most Japanese people wouldn’t think twice about going to a restaurant and having pufferfish; in fact most of us would welcome it as a treat, as a full-course fugu meal usually doesn’t come cheap. Well, this time, we have a story from one of the reporters at the Pouch website about an unusual way to have pufferfish, and this is definitely a recipe you won’t be able to recreate at home! Read More
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