Chicken Dust
A bento is a square or rectangular box with various compartments that hold little amounts of different types of food. A bento can contain anything from sushi to potato salad to spaghetti or multiple variations of each and their existence is vital to the very fabric that binds Japan together. A bento is something to get excited over. It is something that people order in during work, buy during lunch, eat on trips, and fantasise about what items there might be inside it (unless they specified exactly what they wanted). There are shops dedicated entirely to bentos - whereby you pick up an empty tray/box and choose your own little titbits to put inside.
In reality, a bento is what we would call a lunchbox, and this in turn is something that is normally only associated with children and builders. So for some foreigners in Japan, it is difficult to get as excited as our hosts do, about the humble bento.
The average bento is chilled which often negates the point of some of the items held within the bento - these items being those that are delicious when hot but, concurrently, utterly disgusting when cold, such as tempura or hamburg steak with demiglace sauce.
Actually (sidetrack), I never really understood the Japanese people’s annoyingly casual attitude to crispy food items. Tempura (deep fried battered items such as shrimp and vegetables) is quite frequently found in a bento box but when tempura is cold it transforms from being something delicious, crispy and light, to taking on the texture of something not unlike a chewy dog toy. Japanese people also routinely chuck tempura into hot bowls of noodle soup. To anyone who has ever dropped a french fry in their drink at mcdonalds, or perhaps urinated all over an open bag of Doritos - the effect is quite similar. Whilst not outright disgusting, you have to wonder - when you are left with a limp bit of prawn that has had most of it’s batter dissolved away by the hot soup - why the frick anyone would do such a thing.
End sidetrack.
So, to help people prepare their own bentos at home, there is a huge market for pre-cooked bento food that comes either chilled or frozen. There is a spectrum of individual deep-fried freezer-aisle bento items so wide that it encompasses every possible combination of food item in the world several times over. Things like curry wiener surrounded by fishy potato - deep fried in batter - or black pig shumai with edamame decorative green been - deep fried in batter - are the relative norm, compared to the stuff that I can’t even begin to think about reading the Japanese before I go completely insane. The idea is that you buy a 6 pack of these little goodies, then when the time comes to make a bento, you heat one of the 6 up and also take a few other items from your 6 packs of other things, and tada you have a bento.
But that stuff is for amateurs. Why? Because all of that stuff actually looks like food. Today we are going to take a look at something which most certainly does not. This is the kid’s bento version of “torisoboro” which is a kind of minced chicken dish with a sweet miso flavour.
First, lets take a look at the packaging, which should be the first proxy by which the grossness of this product can be gauged. Here is an item that is clearly aimed at children, or made from them, as the picture depicts a happy child, drawn in a child-like fashion. We are also given a tantalising small window to see what the actual product on the inside looks like - which is a perhaps one of the downfalls of this product’s marketing in that they let you SEE what is inside before you have bought it, which is always a mistake when your product looks like-
CATFOOD.
Yes, those nondescript, brown chunks of a meat-like substance were all too familiar having lived with 2 cats in England, previously. Opening the bag proved only to amplify the appearance of catfood as the odour of mechanically-reclaimed meat hit my nostrils like a kind of organic steel mallet at several thousand parsecs a second.
Choosing the safer option of nuking it in a microwave before serving as opposed to eating it cold, I also prepared some rice.
Tipping out the contents of the plastic wrapper onto my rice seemed to make a noise that sounded almost like “colooostommy baaaag” but I ignored it and took a bite. Rather good. A bit like eating a brillo pad or that grey lint stuff that your washing machine collects in a compartment, except more chickeny.
Japanese chicken dust. A snip at 100-yen per bag
LOL! This post is hilarious. So why did you buy the chicken dust anyway if you can see whats inside the packet?? Come and see my bento too!!
http://spaces.msn.com/members/felixcheung/Blog/cns!1psCo5xV_FqC7J8ccn2gdudg!1019.entry
Maybe if you eat the tempura very soon after you put it in the soup, it takes on some flavor from the soup while being crispy. Like eating Frosted Flakes before they soak up the milk and become a bowl of mush. Were you being sarcastic when you said the chicken dust was rather good? I mean, you compare it to a cleaning pad or lint, so it seems like a no, but it’s hard to tell with you.