Japanese Cooking Lessons with a Local

Japan has a plethora of delicious food to enjoy, from the cheap and casual, to the fancy schmancy - however if you’re living in the country or simply love food - I cannot attest to how much one should try a cooking lesson, learning the local, everyday ingredients, seasonal produce so that one can make their own healthy food with local flavours - because one can’t survive on conbini (convenience store) onigiri and Family Mart fried chicken for every single meal.

Taking lessons at a local Japanese home also helps to learn your way around a Japanese kitchen, because like any country there’s alway something that works in a different way then you expect!

Morimi- San’s Kitchen

In the cozy neighbourhood of Setagaya-ku, easily accessible by train from both Shibuya & Shinjuku station, lies Morimi-san’s home kitchen where she teaches traditional Japanese home - cooking and other cuisines to both locals and foreigners.

Born in Kyoto, with two sisters, Morimi-San’s love of cooking started from an early age as she loved to bake and create delicious treats. After she married, and was raising her two sons; she worked part time at the local library whilst also attending various cooking classes from traditional Kaiseki, to international cuisine (Italian, French etc).

15 years ago, she was inspired to get her formal cooking licence & start cooking classes, when her husband’s work colleagues started to ask her to teach them how to cook after tasting her delicious meals. For her own personal pleasure, Morimi-san loves to cook cuisines from all around the world, like hummus, guacamole, shepherd’s pie, coq au vin and pasta all genovese

A Tasty, Healthy Japanese Lunch

For a Japanese cooking lesson, Morimi-san specialises in 3 popular Japanese dishes; a sushi course vegetarian; a tofu course and a Japanese tonkotsu curry. Both the sushi and tofu course can be made vegetarian or vegan depending on dietary needs.

On a lovely weekend day, hubby and I spent the afternoon learning how to make a flavoursome tofu course. Tofu is something I’ve eaten copious amounts of, since I was a child, inherent in my mother’s cooking and especially because it’s believed in Asian culture that Tofu is good for the beauty of the skin. With my childhood eczema, I ate a lot of Tofu as a child. However I’ve only known how to use Tofu in a more Chinese, South East Asian cooking style so I was highly looking forward to learning how to make more traditional tofu Japanese dishes, and discovering the essential basics to find in Japanese grocery stores.

The Tofu Course

So inherent in Japanese cooking, is the “dashi”, the famed broth packed full of umami which popularly is made with konbu (Japanese seaweed) and some type of dried fish, whether it be sardines/bonito flakes/dried seafood; so our first step was to make our own dashi broth as this is the starting basis for practically every single Japanese dish. (Morimi-san also informed us that using dried shiitake mushrooms is a perfect alternative to create a vegan dashi! And I love Japanese mushrooms - so I will be trying that in the future!)

Another staple is of course rice, and in this particular course - home made onigiri. Though I grew up cooking rice in a rice cooker, Morimi-san teaches her students to cook rice in a pot, so anyone coming from a non-Asian country can make the rice back home without the need of a rice cooker. Whilst our rice bubbled away cooking, we began to make one of my favourite side dishes I have in many Japanese teishoku and kaiseki meals “shiraee”; a salad with tofu dressing and wonderful goma (sesame seed flavour).

This course is a perfect exploration of some of Japan’s most popular, traditional tofu dishes, finally learning how to make agedashi-dofu (fried tofu) - a dish I absolutely love but have always been a bit wary of the ‘frying oil’ process - having Morimi-san explain it simply and clearly, and how to get rid of the oil - makes me feel more confident that I can finally cook it at home. Followed up by making our own “tofu hamburg” (Japan’s love of a hamburger patty but done the Japanese way, with a rich sweet sauce).

Finally when it was all ready, we sat down at Morimi-san’s dining table to enjoy this delectable tofu lunch with her, her husband and some wonderfully tasty nihonshu (sake).

Morimi-san will also prepare a copy of her recipe with step by step instructions & photos in English, so you can recreate the yumminess at home.

One of the best things about having such a personal cooking experience, is not just meeting local Japanese but also having someone help you decipher all the basic & specialised cooking ingredients you can find from the local grocery store so that you can find it easily, because for many foreigners living in Japan/wanting to cook Japanese back in their home country - it can indeed be slightly scary trying to find everything you need in a Japanese grocery store if you don’t know the language/are just overwhelmed.

Cost

For groups of two or more, the cost is ¥10,000 - ¥13,000 per person depending on the course you want to do. For private lessons with one person, the cost is ¥20,000. Children are usually half price.

Additionally, you can add options such as seasonal Japanese sweets for ¥1,000 or sake for ¥1,000.

WEB: MORIMI KITCHEN | INSTAGRAM: @MORIMIKITCHEN