Secret Ingredients (47 page)

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.

“I’ve started showing up late,” Kawashima told me. “At around three, to give my brother some breathing room. He’s learning the ropes, and the only way you do that is by yourself.” Kawashima’s elder son has also decided to become a tofu maker, after a brief stint at Gateway Computers. “I didn’t oblige him,” Kawashima says. “I told him, on the contrary, to get away from home, the way I did. In my late teens, I left Karatsu for Fukuoka”—the nearest large city—“and worked at another tofu place, to see how they did things.

“I studied
chabana,
flower arranging, and learned to make tea—my business for ten years. When I came home, I wanted to create something new with tofu.” A sudden loud clatter made me start: Kawashima had just pulled down a steel trapdoor in the ceiling, and he shooed me up the ladder. Under the eaves, he has built a tearoom for himself.

In the next two hours, making the rounds with Kawashima, I got to see quite a bit of his enterprise and its fruits. Having asked me if I liked dogs, he took me to his beach house—a Hamptons-style bungalow in an upscale enclave near the castle—where we played with his St. Bernard. Then we drove ten miles out of town, through strawberry fields, and up into the hills, where Kawashima owns several acres. We fed the fat koi in his pond, and tramped through the woods to admire his Shinto shrine, an altar guarded by two gaping stone dogs, one of which catches evil intentions, while the other spits out good luck. I helped him open the elaborately engineered stone sluices that irrigate his kitchen garden, where he stopped to do a little puttering. His wife doesn’t like the country, he confided, so this is his bachelor kingdom, and he bought it with his “pocket money,” because she also wouldn’t like him spending the profits of their business on it. All his crops—tomatoes, melons, eggplants, cherries, a few beans (for
edamame
), and some white lettuce—are organically grown, as is the rice that he is seeding, experimentally, in a blanket of cotton, to keep down the weeds.

Though I normally don’t start drinking at ten in the morning, I had the excuse that it was nine in the evening (of the night before) by my body clock, and Kawashima is a persuasive host. “I think I was born to make people happy,” he said. So, having tasted some of his homemade plum wine, we sat at the kitchen table of his farmhouse, chasing our aperitif with a bottle of excellent Chapelle-Chambertin ’96, while Kawashima reminisced, as oenophiles do, about the great vintages he has owned and drunk—an ’81 Pétrus, some venerable Lafites—and what he ate with them. His memory stirred, he ducked into a walk-in wine cellar the size of a bank vault, and came back, looking very pleased, with a Château d’ Yquem ’21. I wrestled with my conscience before urging him, with feigned conviction, not to open it.

The farmhouse is built in the traditional style, with shoji windows and a tiled roof curling up at the edges, though its amenities are from a glossy shelter magazine. It sits on a rise overlooking a valley of terraced rice paddies that were simmering under an opaque sky and waiting for the spring rains—a timeless scene only somewhat spoiled by a fretwork of electric pylons. A little farther up the slope, Kawashima has added a luxurious bath pavilion that, like his kitchen, is a sybaritic gadgeteer’s paradise. (The plumbing responds to voice commands.) The tub is in a sort of turret penthouse with glass walls which faces a deep forest furrowed by ravines and inhabited by wild boar and monkeys. When Kawashima is soaking there, he says, he sometimes sees a constellation of impudent simian eyes staring at him through the glass.

I doubted that
zaru dofu,
or any other sort of tofu, not even
shima dofu,
would have enough character to hold its own with a great Burgundy like the one we were drinking. But wine and bean curd, Kawashima’s twin passions, are more compatible than you might think. To prove the point, he served us a little
amuse-gueule
that he devised for wine-tastings: a wedge of dense and pungent saffron-colored
miso zuke dofu,
which is a block of
momengoshi
steeped in fermented miso, wrapped in
konbu
(a form of kelp with a thick, ridged leaf which, in its dried form, resembles a slice of rubber tire tread), and aged for months. At last, some tofu with bite: an alarming, even macho one, like that of a Roquefort at the limit of ripeness.

If you don’t speak Japanese, traveling alone in provincial Japan is not for the timid: the lingua franca is pantomime. I mastered the greetings, which change according to the time of day; a few adjectives (though I got into trouble with
oishii
—delicious—which may have a lewd connotation in the wrong context); and I learned to count. So finding the Yoyokaku had been a stroke of luck. The motherly proprietress, Harumi Okochi, whose husband’s family have been innkeepers in Karatsu for more than a century, is a former English teacher with a nuanced command of the language and of the local society and folklore. Her library overlooks a rock garden and a waterfall, and after I had bathed in the
ryokan
’s communal tub and wrapped myself in a blue-and-white
yukata,
she poured me some tea and we sat reading poetry—paeans to tofu. She asked me if I knew the
Manyoshu
(“Assembly of Ten Thousand Leaves”), an anthology of literary treasures collected in the eighth century. “Some of its earliest verse,” she said, “was written on Kashiwajima, an island you can see from the tower of the castle, and the fishermen there may have been among the first Japanese to make bean curd. According to legend, their tofu was so hard that it could break stones. That is what they still call it:
ishiwari
—stone-breaking—
dofu.
Though I have lived here all my life, I have never tasted it.”