Chanko

I forgot about to tell you about "chanko nabe". It is great dish and originally a dish for Sumo wrestlers. Nabe means a pot. In Japan, we have so many nabe dishes. When you are talking about a nabe dish, it usually is a big ceramic pot stew kind of. We eat supper family style all the time, and nabe dish is a really family dish. You share the pot, nabe, and you directly serve from it so your family surround a table, picking up the food inside of the pot in the center of the table. We talk, share the tasty food, and hot stew nabe warms us up. It is very popular in winter, that is the season you should have. Cold outside, steaming nabe pot, having good friends or family together....sounds good, isn't it?

Popular ingredients are chinese cabbege (hakusai), shiitake, enoki mushroom, shungiku/mizuna, tofu, chicken, fish (white fish, salmon), scallop, thin sliced pork, chicken ball, fish ball....I can't write them all. It depends on what kind of nabe you want to make. Mizutaki is one of the basic style nabe. The soup does not have any seasoning except the broth from konbu seaweed. You dip those into ponzu, Japanese citrus soy, and eat. Well, by the time you eat all the broth from ingredients coming together and just tasts great. Nothing greasy and with refreshing ponzu, you can eat A LOT. So many differnt nabe dishes, there are basic ingredients but you may creat your own. Putting crushed sesame, use soy milk as broth, miso base broth...so much option to creat. Some people put spicy kimchee, Korean pickled chinese cabbage, to make it spicy and it became so popular, Kimchee nabe. It is fun to find so many unique recipis on a magazine in winter.

Anyway. Chanko. I already mentioned this is a dish for Sumo wrestlers. They need to have good nutricious food and put weight on them. The dish is not fatty or anything, I think you can just eat far more than you are supposed to. Chanko has everything in it. All the above I mentioned probably. Its soup is already seasoned. We went to Chanko restaurant a day before, the famous place here in hokkaido, I have heard a lot from my co-workers. The greatest of all is this soup!! Your serving bowl comes with sesame in it, there is a wood to smash the sesame. A very strong fragrance comes up as soon as you smash the sesame. The combination of this just smashed sesame and deep flavor broth....mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!m!m! After you ate all the ingredients, waitress would add more broth since we already comsumed a lot, then put udon noodle in it. We ordered ramen noodle too. The ramen was so heavenly! Hokkaido is famous for ramen, but this ramen soup was as great as those famous ramen places. Attached is a picture of ingredients they brought to our table. Even though the bottom is a little bit up than it seems since they put some kind of wooden mesh in the middle, this is for 2 person. You can imagine how much we can eat!