Doesn't TaZte Like Chicken

Location: Sapporo, Japan

Author: My Husband

Before heading off to “Ramen Hour”, my wife and I spent the earlier part of the day walking around and sightseeing in Sapporo’s business district. Sapporo, Japan’s youngest and fifth-largest city, was planned much like a North American city where the grid pattern and rectangular city blocks dominate. The business district is pretty compact, and very walkable even though the chill in the air was a constant reminder that we were a little under-jacketed. But despite the cold, my wife was adamant about trying the famed soft-serve at the Hanabatake Farm retail store.

Hanabatake Farm retail store – right across the street from the historic Sapporo clock tower.

Hokkaido is famous for its agricultural products, especially milk. Milk from Hokkaido cows is so strongly perfumed, rich, smooth, and creamy that North American milk tastes bland by comparison. Hanabatake Farm is known for its range of high-quality dairy products made from the milk from their own herd of cows.

We tried the soft-serve, which turned out to be everything it was cracked up to be.

Hanabatake Farm soft serve. Smooth, rich, creamy, and redolent with milky goodness. It is very easy to get hooked on this stuff.

We also tried the milk pudding, which was packaged in a very interesting manner.

A cylinder containing three servings of milk pudding.

A closer look at how each serving is packaged up. The pudding is allowed to set in a tightly fastened balloon-like material, and is bouncy to the touch.

To eat, you pop the balloon with a toothpick and the pudding is readily released. It’s a very ingenious hygienic and green way to packaging pudding. And oh yeah, it was delicious.

Christina ended up buying several jars of condensed milk and dulce de leche to take home, and as of this writing, we’ve just finished up the last jar of it.

Our readers might remember that I had written about my new found fondness for Royce’ Chocolates in an earlier post on this travel series. In a rather serendipitous turn, we found after landing in Sapporo that Royce’ Chocolates were made in Hokkaido, and that there was a retail café in the city. It didn’t take much convincing for me to go and visit.

The Royce’ Café.

Serving their own Americano brew. It was pretty good – unlike many Japanese blends, it was actually on the richer/heavier side.

Royce’ Chocolate’s latest product – the chocolate covered potato chip. Word has it that these chips are quite tasty, but we didn’t buy any to try. Next time we will.

The café had the complete line of Nama chocolates. Suffice it to say, we bought a few to take home as souvenirs.

Royce’ has a range of ice cream flavours as well.

Royce’ also had a wide range of other products – cookies, teas, coffees, even cocoa based skin care products!

To end this post, here are some photos of Sapporo in no particular order…

continue reading…

Location: Kirin Mandarin on Alberni

Author: My Husband

It’s that time of the year again – King crabs are back in season and there are deals to be had. So I thought I’d take a little break from our trip to run this public service announcement.

Many better Chinese restaurants are selling the crabs for $15/lb. An 8 lb crab (assuming you don’t get ripped off on the weight) would easily feed a family of 4. There are places that sell the product at a cheaper price, but beware of getting cheated on the weight.

We went to Kirin Mandarin on Alberni for our first King crab meal of this season. The crab legs were steamed with a duo of fresh and deep-fried minced garlic. Other leg portions as well as the body portions were deep-fried in the Cantonese “salt/pepper” style.

Steamed with duo of minced garlic. The deep-fried minced garlic really kicks Kirin’s version up a notch.

Deep fried salt/pepper style. The crab pieces were left uncracked in their shell, which kept the meat very moist and very sweet. Incredible dish.

And since man can’t live on crab alone, we had the following dishes to accompany the crabs:

A tofu dish to balance out the richness of the crab. The tofu was sucked up all the flavors imparted by the chinese ham, ginger, and mushrooms.

Lamb brisket “pot”. The lamb was tender and the flavors were strong. This is a great dish, but you’d have to like the gaminess of the lamb in order to like this dish.

Back to Japan in our next post…

Location: Sapporo, Japan

Author: My Husband

Boy, it’s been a month since our last post! Well, what better time to jump back in than now, with so many Vancouver blogs posting about ramen? I thought it might be interesting to compare pictures of “Vancouver Ramen” with “Japanese Ramen”, so I’m putting up this post about our ramen meal from day 2 of our Sapporo trip.

Truth be told, I don’t eat a lot of ramen in Vancouver. My wife and I have tried many of the local ramen places, and though they serve up very decent bowlfuls, we think there’s still that little something that’s missing. It’s like eating Vancouver satay vs Singapore satay – there’s just that little je ne sais quoi in the Singapore version that makes eating the “real deal” so much more enjoyable.

To pick up where I left off with my previous post – Christina and I slept like babies during our first night in Sapporo. This, I attribute to our relative lack of sleep the day before. We spent the second day in Sapporo exploring many of the interesting food places and restaurants that Christina read about, and boy, was the eatin’ ever good. We pretty much hopped from place to place stuffing our mouths (and tummies), and we started inventing new mealtimes simply because… well, simply because there was something we ran across that we had to try. Like for example, there was one hour between “second-afternoon-tea” and dinner that was begging to be filled – so we came up with “ramen hour” to fill it.

We named it “Ramen hour” because we found ourselves in the vicinity of Sapporo’s famed “Ramen Yokocho”, a small alley off a side street in Susukino that housed an amazingly large number of ramen shops.

View from one end of Ramen Alley.

The board at the entrance of the alley describing each of the ramen shops and their house specialty. Talk about choices.

We didn’t know which one to choose, so we “eeni-meeni-money-moed” our choice. We ended up at this place, which I suspect was eponymously named.

”Ramen hour” was around 5:30pm in the afternoon, which was way too early for dinner. We had the run of Ramen Alley to ourselves at that time of day. Peeking into each of the shops, we saw the noodle chefs all doing the prep for that service; there were hardly any other customers in the alley except for us.

We stepped into Kunimitsu Ramen Shop, which only had one U-shaped bar/seating area. Ramen shops are not places where you would want to hang around after eating your noodles. Etiquette dictates that you order, eat, pay, and leave.

Since this was a meal in between “second-afternoon-tea” and dinner, my wife and I ordered one bowl of miso ramen (which apparently was originally “invented” in Hokkaido) and some gyoza to share. Here’s our food:

Very nicely fried gyoza.

Miso ramen. This was a very nice bowl of noodles, with a rich – yet puzzlingly light – miso tonkotsu broth. The fatty cha su was a nice accompaniment, portion control (i.e. 2 slices) meant that the fat never overpowered your tastebuds. The noodles were cooked to a degree of doneness that was psychically aligned with our desires that afternoon. And the half-boiled egg was just perfect.

We enjoyed the egg so much, we ordered another one. We ate half of it before remembering to snap a photo:

Perfect half-boiled egg.

The ramen was slightly different than what we had in Tokyo from a previous trip, but I think I’m more partial Hokkaido’s version. One shop down, seventeen more to try. Methinks we’ll be headed back to Sapporo sooner rather than later.