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B gourmet (Page 2)

Want to enjoy the health benefits of natto without the smell? Try this natto and ice cream recipe!

Not familiar with natto? Shame on you! Natto is the fermented soy bean “snack” loved throughout the Kanto region for its supposed health benefits that outweigh the questionable flavor and strong smell, which is optimistically described as “cheesy and pungent” and otherwise described by detractors with violent gagging noises.

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Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably had a happoshu (発泡酒）or “low-malt beer-like beverage” if you’ve ever had a night out in Japan.

The taste of a typical happoshu can vary from “pretty close to the real thing” to “yes, this is definitely weasel urine.” Going into a convenience store and blindly grabbing a beer can is thus a bit of a gamble in Japan, so, ever the masculine, barrel-chested and dashingly handsome role model father to our readers, we’ve done the work for you and chosen the five happoshu brands that are worth your time:

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  • Jan 20, 2013

A Very Berry Ramen Experience — “Susususustrawberry Ramen”

Here at RocketNews24, we’ve certainly brought to you our share of stories on unusual ramen noodles, from chilled blue ramen to ramen that’s too disgusting to eat. Well, once again, one of our reporters was brave enough to try another very, shall we say, “interesting” ramen. And yes, as you can tell from the picture, it contains … strawberries. Read More

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Nara Noodle Shop’s Revolutionary and Fun Way to Eat Udon From a Draw String Bag!

As fall turns into winter, Japanese people look to food such as hot noodle dishes as a tasty way to warm up.  Udon noodles, in particular, are great during the winter, and nothing beats slurping up a steaming bowl of udon on a cold day.

We discovered a unique way to eat hot udon noodles at Mentouan, a noodle shop in Nara.  When you order a bowl of udon at Mentouan, you are presented with what appears to be a small pouch floating in broth…but you can’t see the noodles!

Following his report of Kyoto’s gigantic one-noodle udon, our resident foodie Kuzo went to Mentouan to try this “invisible udon” for himself. Read More

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Tokyo Restaurant Serves Sheep Brain Curry, We Investigate

About 95-97% of the population of Pakistan is Muslim, which means there’s not a lot of pork eaten in the country. Pakistanis do, however, eat a lot of sheep. And when they eat sheep, they eat all of the sheep — meat, heart, genitals, brains, you name it and Pakistanis have a recipe for it.

If you know where to look, you can even find Pakistani restaurants here in Japan that serve dishes using some of the more exotic parts of the animal.

One such restaurant is Maruhaba in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, which serves sheep brain curry.

We recently sent reporter Mr. Sato to Maruhaba to try the dish out; after all, he looks like he could benefit from a little more brain.

His report follows below:

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Chilled Soy Milk Ramen Topped With Rayu Ice Cream is Newest Creation at Adventurous Musashi Ramen Shop

The world’s most venturesome ramen shop, Musashi Noodles, fearlessly created a cold ramen dish with soy milk soup and rayu, or chili oil, ice cream.  Musashi Noodles is a Japanese noodle shop franchise.  Their Shinjuku branch held a Valentines special promotion back in February featuring Unique Chocolate Ramen.

Summer in Japan is when ramen shops do a booming business in cold noodle dishes like  hiyashi chuka.   This new creation dubbed ‘tonyu hiyashi men’ or soy milk cold noodles, is available for a limited time only.  Notice the  scoop of red rayu ice cream floating in the white soy milk soup.  A timely creation, full of national pride for all those medals won in the Olympics!   But what about the taste?  One of our reporters went to check it out. Read More

One Man’s Junk Food is Another Monsieur’s Gourmet

There’s this new potsticker (aka gyza, aka dumpling) restaurant that opened in Paris, that people are actually lining up to get into. We wondered what all the fuss was about, so we went there to check it out ourselves. Read More

 

Let me describe a scene for you: a crowd of Japanese are gathered around steel drums in a little shanty of a building open to the summer air. Some are drinking beers in plastic cups, others disposable one-cup sakes. Most are eating from unheated cans of food with plastic cutlery, chasing it with sips of their chosen brew. Around them are shelves of unfinished wood, stacked high with a stupendous assortment of cans, probably enough to last several months. Think this is a scene from a disaster shelter in Tohoku? Perhaps an end-of-the-world movie? Think again. It’s Saturday night at one of Osaka’s most unique “restaurants”, the long-standing and popular Kanso, where there’s no menu except the cans on the shelves. Try to contain your excitement, because this monument to apocalypse-chic may be coming to a city near you. Read More

Like Spicy Food but Bummed by the Summer Heat? Try Some Frozen Kimchi

Summer seems to get hotter every year. For those of us who like spicy food it can be too burdensome to eat after working up enough of a sweat from the cooking alone.

To help this dilemma, a popular Korean Barbeque restaurant, Gyukaku, has announced that it will start selling a new style of frozen kimchi from 20 June.

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Lemony Life Hack – Squeeze More Juice From Your Lemons!

Whether it’s a savory slab of salmon, or a sweet cheesecake, lemon juice can enhance a multitude of foods. But the squeezing of lemons to get their fresh juice is often tedious and seems to bear little reward. How do you all normally squeeze lemons? Most people typically cut it in half and get to squeezing straight away. But there’s a method that will yield much much much more juice, as we present below:  Read More


  • Jun 19, 2012

The RockeNews24 Cooking Class – We Mix and Solidify Ten McDonald’s Hamburgers to create One Huge Hamburger

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You know that we at RocketNews24 love to do crazy things with McDonald’s foods, like cooking a Big Mac Value Meal in a rice cooker or ordering different burgers without the buns.This time, we did a little experimenting with 10 McDonalds hamburgers and a unique cooking product that we’ve been fascinated with, called “Matomeruko Easy” (which would roughly translate to “Easy Mix-N-Solidify Powder” in English). Read More

Pepsi Highlights Underground Worldwide Fruit Trend with Their Newest Designer Flavor, “Salty Watermelon”

The newest in a line of seasonal limited edition Pepsi flavors has been announced by Japanese distributor Suntory.  Set to debut on 24 July is the red-colored Pepsi: Salty Watermelon.  Hopefully this is as awesome as Pepsi: Pink was.

But after reading the announcement I had to do a double-take.  The watermelon’s salty?

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A&G Diner’s “Best Burger in Tokyo” Hijacks Taste Buds, Takes Them for a Wild Ride

Everyone seems to agree that the best burger joint in Tokyo is A&G Diner in fancy-schmancy Jingumae. It tops the lists on Gourmet and B Gourmet blogs and gossip sites and is the first name out of the mouths of my restaurant critic friends.

I decided to check it out for myself to see if the taste lived up to the hype and glam of Jingumae. I went in to attack an A&G Diner burger with abandon, but, as it turns out, the burger attacked me . . .

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  • May 2, 2012

The Super Rice Ball – get four flavors in one ball!

If you’ve lived in Japan, you know that we Japanese love our rice balls, or omusubi as they’re called in Japanese. At every convenience store in Japan, you can find rice balls in every flavor imaginable, from the standard grilled salmon flake omusubi  to more quirky flavors like tempura shrimp or bacon and cheese. But the variety can sometimes make it difficult to choose a flavor from all the options. Well now, you won’t have to settle for just one flavor. Read More


  • Apr 30, 2012

Special menu for McDonald’s staff – plain “salt-flavored hamburger”- is definitely good enough for regular customers!

You may have heard various stories about special food items at McDonald’s eaten by the staff and not on the regular menu. One such item that is rumored to be a staple among McDonald’s staff in Japan is shio-burger, or plain salt-flavored hamburger. Apparently, this item is quite well-known among McDonald’s fans, so we decided to get to the bottom of what this mysterious hamburger is like. Read More


  • Apr 26, 2012

Stuck with left over bacon? Try a heavenly junk food creation – bacon + McDonald’s shake!

You may recall Mr. Sato’s brave challenge against the monster Burger King whopper with 1050 bacon strips. Not surprisingly, we had  a significant quantity of bacon left over after that episode, and we were wondering what to do with it. Well, we came up with a brilliant idea – chop the bacon into small pieces and mix it in McDonald’s vanilla shake for a completely original drink! Read More

A New Convenience Store (Just Probably Not Convenient For You)

The Japanese convenience store chain Poplar has announced its newest store opening in none other than Tachikawa Detention Center. As in the clink, the joint, the hoosegow: jail. Read More


  • Apr 18, 2012

The perfect summer snack – potato chips that are made to be cool, literally

Aren’t potato chips just great? They’re the ultimate comfort food (well, at least they are to me) and they come in a wide variety of flavors to suit your every mood. Well, there’s going to be another novel flavor for potato chip lovers in Japan to try, and the flavor is not the only thing that’s interesting about these new potato chips. Read More

Burger King Japan Offering 15 Bacon Strips for $1 So We Order Whopper With 105 Bacon Strips

Burger King Japan recently launched a promotion giving customers the option to add 15 pieces of bacon to their Whopper for a measly 100 yen (US $1.20).

That’s 500% more bacon for your buck (it’s usually 60 yen for 3 strips). It’s almost as if Burger King is operating under some CIA plot to undermine Japanese longevity by poisoning us with copious amount of cheap junk food.

Well we accept your challenge, America! In fact, we even raised the stakes to make things interesting, sending resident reporter/guinea pig Mr. Sato to eat a Whopper loaded with not 15 but 105 strips of bacon.

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