A Fukuokan's Notes from Sapporo

At last, temperature gets under 20°C. It’s time to enjoy oden!

To celebrate the beginning of winter, I went to a long-established market where several oden-ingredient stores competing with each other. Along with the oden stores, in the market are high-end fishmongers, speciality greengrocers, and upmarket grocers—all of them are intended for professionals or decadent foodies.

This is the one I go for oden for special oden occasions, such as my mother’s vigil, my husband’s first oden in Fukuoka, or your visit.

Actually cooking oden can be quite time-consuming if you do it in an authentic manner. You need to parboil ingredients separately, making huge amount of soup stock, put the ingredient timely according to their texture and your preference (I love three-day old oden eggs!), and if you are a serious cook, you even could prepare fishcakes (essential for oden) from scratch (which I gave up long before)… and all the procedure has to be done the day before you actually have oden so that all ingredients soak up the taste and flavour of the soup and the soup gets richer taking taste from the ingredients.

So for me, in terms of time and effort, oden is quite a feast, maybe next to the New Year’s banquets.  The problem is, despite the time and labour, oden looks rather dull on the table.

Steaks or sashimi look much more appetising and luxury though they take only a few minutes to cook.