Boil my bags
Yongfook’s Bachelor Chow Showdown
The extent to which Japan provides for those who just cannot be fricked to cook in any way whatsoever, is very nearly frightening in scope. I’ve already mentioned boil-in-the-bag curry in a previous review but extending past this bastion of ready-made cuisine, Japanese supermarkets carry an enormous variety of meals that can be prepared simply by dunking the vacuum-sealed foil bag in boiling water for a few minutes.
Surprisingly, many of these foods manage to keep the fat and calorie content fairly low, but on the other hand the assurance of long shelf life (usually well over a year) has made sure that any nutrition that was once in the individual ingredients has been long since destroyed to almost negative levels from the production process, filling a neat, previously non-existent genre of food - food that might not kill you but at the same time might not necessarily keep you alive.
Sure, the western world has plenty of microwave meals and simple pre-prepared foods but a lot of this involves fumbling with tricky things for the new bachelor such as varying cooking times and non-standardised containers. Its in this area that Japan has levelled the playing ground like a kind of gracefully tap dancing hippo by having standardised packaging for these kinds of meals, regardless of what company created the product or even what kind of food it is. All meals come in a simple foil pouch that you boil for a few minutes.
It is a common traditional stereotype in Japan that the mother of the family does everything. She cooks the food, handles the money, looks after the children, does the laundry and cleans the house, whilst the husband works at Faceless Corporationtronronbishi until 11pm at night only to come home and lie around like a useless sack of jellied armadillos, drinking cheap Suntory whiskey until he falls asleep and she carries him to bed.
Thus, I like to think that this vast array of no-effort foods are made for the average Japanese male when he moves out of his parents’ home or goes to university, sits down in his one-bedroom apartment, alone at the dining table at around 7pm and wonders why the frick there is no dinner on it yet.
After a couple of days of this, the symptoms of starvation set in and with horror he begins to suspect he might have to prepare something himself. In this entry’s Bachelor Chow Showdown, we’ll see the kind of things he will have on offer to him, at the local supermarket:
Delicious Vegetable Slime
The real name of this translates roughly as “Vegetable ankake”. “Ankake” is a phenomenon that crops up in many foods here, most notably in Chinese food. It is basically cornstarch, water and flavourings, occasionally containing tiny flecks of egg or crab meat, or some kind of cheap substitute such as shredded bits of North Korean newspaper. It looks like runny mucus with a consistency similar to that of fresh semen. Cooking instructions:
Put bag in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. Open bag. Gloop lovingly onto rice.
Tasting of little more than msg, this bag meal is quite palatable. Predictably, the ratio of vegetable to ankake mucus is ridiculously unbalanced, and for every spoonful of slime you will be lucky to find a tiny bit of chopped mushroom or some indistinct, brownish grey bit of non-food-group-specific food product that I like to refer to as Soylent Brownish Grey.
At 100-yen a bag though (about 50 of your British pence), you can’t really complain. Chow Factor: 3 out of 5.
Dubious Meat & Onion Melee
Vacuum-packed ready-made meals involving vegetables are one thing, but meat, along with a packaging photo that shows succulent-looking slices of beef, is quite another. Described as “Beef and Onion hotpot” with the tantalising addition of broiled tofu, this product promises so much, yet fails to deliver on an almost cosmic level.
Cooking instructions:
Put bag in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. Open bag. Gloop lovingly onto rice.
Pathetic shreds of a meat-like substance, limp onions and tofu that had “griddle” marks clearly drawn on in some kind of crayon, this dish had all the appeal of a freshly baked placenta, but tasted much, much worse. Chow Factor: 1.7 out of 5.
Oyako don (large pic at the top) A staple favourite of regular Japanese cuisine (the name meaning “mother and child” rice bowl, alluding to the fact that it contains both chicken and egg), its quaint, family charm totally obliterated in this, the boil-in-bag bachelor chow version. I have to admit I was quite curious about this one, in the same way you might slow down to look at a car accident, or give a chimpanzee a gun and send it into a crowded room, since that one of the main ingredients of real oyako don is egg, which is basically beaten then added in at the end, making a kind of runny chicken omelette. This is all very well but for the life of me I couldn’t fathom how this would translate into a long-life ready-made vacuum-sealed package that would not induce death from every cell in your body being poisoned.
Cooking instructions:
Put bag in boiling water for 2-3 minutes. Open bag. Gloop lovingly onto rice.
It became clear to me from the first bite that they had avoided the prospects of costly lawsuits stemming from egg rot poisoning by using some kind of non-egg, egg-like substance that had all the taste and texture of industrial sponge. Combine this with a few measly chunks of Soylent Beige and Soylent Orange and you have a meal that even the most hardened bachelor chow veteran would struggle to not projectile vomit all over his ironic “pop art” poster of Che Guevera or growing collection of tentacle porn. Chow Factor: 1 out of 5.
