This cheese ... it haunts my tongue ...
For my birthday I went to San Francisco, and for my birthday dinner I chose a popular Ramen Bar in Japan town. We went at around 7pm-ish and of course there was a wait. We didn't wait long, however, and I was excited to see what this popular place had to offer.
I wasn't let down.
Not only was the place modern and inviting, the ramen was excellent. Umami everywhere.
BUT there was one thing that randomly stood out because it's the first time I've ever encountered it. There's only one thing I love just as much as a good ramen (actually I love a lot of foods which I'm sure you'll learn of throughout this blog) and that's cheese.
Cheese.
MMMMM cheese!
Anyways, at this place we decided to do the sake tasting flight and with it came little cheese cubes marinaded in something godly. I didn't think much of it until I took a bite.
Magical things happened that resembled how the girls act when they taste something soooo good in the anime Food Wars!
“Magical things happened that resembled how the girls act when they taste something soooo good in the anime Food Wars!”
Ever since that night, my mind will sometimes drift back to those magical cheese cubes and I almost get the urge to make the 8 hour drive just to try them again. Almost.
Re-creation
Since "almost" isn't "yeah, I'm going" the best I can do is try to re-create the cheese cubes myself.
I jumped on Google, went to the restaurant's website to extract as much information as I could.
Hmm... not much to go on... I guess the important things I gathered from this was "cream cheese" and "dashi sauce", but what is dashi sauce??
(Oh, by the way, if you were wondering what Ramen Bar this is, we went to Hinodeya in San Francisco.)
I Googled this:
Laughed at my misspellings:
And immediately clicked on the first site:
Now, if you do the same Google yourself you'll find that none of the rest of the found sites look anything remotely to the first one and by the looks of the picture, it pretty much resembles the dark marinated cheese I had at Hinodeya.
This is the closest thing I could find and I'm so hoping that it does in fact taste similar to what I had.
(By the way, I've been clicking around Japanese-Kitchen and it's a cute little site. I recommend taking a gander at it if you're interested in making/trying some homemade Japanese food!)
I will definitely be trying all variants of this recipe. It's basically just cheese, soy sauce, mirin or dashi sauce.
As much as I love Japan, the best I can do is homemade ramen (that's for another blog entry). I have no idea what mirin is and I now vaguely know what dashi is. Luckily, Yuki from Japanese-Kitchen explains what they are and I can actually just buy mirin from a Japanese store, therefore I will be trying out the mirin version first.
Check out the site for the recipe!
http://japanese-kitchen.net/recipe-items/soy-sauce-flavored-cheese-recipe/
Now to go find a Japanese market...
To be continued...