We've all eaten our fair share of bento (damn you, ever-so-convenient convenience stores and end-of-day sales at depachika), but it may have been, well, a while since you actually tried to make one – let alone one that actually looks nice and fancy like the ones sold at department stores during New Year's.
Instead of diving into the kitchen armed only with a printout from Cookpad, we thought we'd try out some training wheels in the shape of Chagohan Tokyo, who run a variety of cooking classes from their base in Asakusa.
We were kindly welcomed by Inoue-san, Hirano-san and our instructor for the day, Hiroko (Note: if you happen to be Dutch, Hiroko will be very excited, as she's spent some time on exchange there). But first we had the option of riding around town for a bit in a rickshaw – and not the motorised variety. Fun fact: the English word 'rickshaw' is derived from the Japanese 人力車 jinrikisha, or rikisha for short.
This one was hand-pulled by our 'driver', Taira-san, who apparently had only just started working for the company. He was happy to answer all the questions we bombarded him with – no it's actually not too heavy, he could probably carry it for quite some time, most people take tours that last half an hour max, and the foreign/Japanese customer split is about 50-50 – after which we rode around very briefly. After all, we mainly came for the food.
Once back inside, Hiroko started off with an intro to shokado bento (shokado refers to the grid-like style with four separate sections in a lacquerware box, not the actual contents – although they tend to be fancy), and then gave us five pages worth of recipes, all of which would be made from scratch, miraculously fit into the bento and consumed within a few hours. Christ.
The next hour and a half or so were filled with a boatload of information, including when is the perfect time to take the kombu out of the boiling water, the difference in cutting slices of fish for nigiri sushi versus for sashimi, how to make a tempura prawn look a bit more plump, the correct and aesthetically pleasing way to plate things and much, much more.
One of the more complex dishes we cooked was the dreaded dashimaki tamago. Similar to tamagoyaki, but with the addition of dashi to the recipe, it's typically made in a special rectangular pan that requires constant greasing and a moderate temperature in order not to half-burn the layers of omelette.
These are made by frying thin layer upon thin layer of eggy batter and then folding them multiple times within the pan with chopsticks but without tearing a hole in the goodness – no biggie. Let's just say that ours definitely looked a bit more like a rolled, mini-layered pancake than the usually spectacularly yellow, evenly spaced version should.
Slowly but surely, everything came together, and with some minor adjustments (let's just say our chameshi was lacking some salt when we first tasted it), we were ready to plate everything up and finally get to the eating business. All in all, we were quite happy with the result, especially as it came with a complimentary cup of nihonshu and some matcha.
The entire team at Chagohan are very kind and will do their utmost to make you feel at home (and will even pretend your cooking skills are ah-mazing, even if you manage to half-burn your egg). If you're interested in taking a class, check their website for dates and times – besides the bento lesson, they offer (vegetarian) sushi, okonomiyaki and matcha workshops.
Full details for Chagohan Tokyo here
All photos by Keisuke Tanigawa