Can someone please tell the me the usual contents of a bento lunch?
And something sweet to add also?
Thank-you!What foods do you use for a Japanese bento box lunch?
If you're making this for school, you'd probably not want to put anything too exotic in it. Here are a few suggestions:
Grilled teriyaki chicken or beef, sliced.
Pickled cucmbers - slliced and marinated in rice vinegar, a little soy sauce, grated ginger and salt.
Steamed rice with a sprinkling of black sesame seeds and salt.
Sliced oranges - i've never seen a bento box with cookies or sweets.
If you want it to be simpler, you can make soba (buckwheat) noodles topped with thin nori slices and serve it with a little container of dipping sauce.What foods do you use for a Japanese bento box lunch?
Usually bentos have a bed of rice usually with an ume (japanese pickled plum) in the middle or a sprinkle of furikake over the rice. If not a bed of rice, then usually one or two musubis (I usually wet my hands and sprinkle a little bit of salt onto one hand. Then use your hands to form a small rice ball if you don't have a musubi maker press), then wrap it all the way around with a strip of nori, and maybe put an ume in the middle.
I've also seen bentos with noodles instead of rice, but usually the noodles are thick and kinda like chow fun, and usually cooked with veggies.
Then there's usually some kind of meat. Traditionally fish. But you can put anything from teriyaki meat to fried shrimp to fried chicken drummets (marinated in korean/teri sauce, floured and fried, garnished with sesame seeds and green onions)to anything else you can think of. I've even seen bentos with just rice and some hot dogs. What tastes better is if you cut up the hot dogs (diagonally sliced 2" long) and cook them in a ginger garlic soy sauce and brown sugar mixture, or cook them in teriyaki sauce. My favorite bento are the ones with deep fried croquettes. In the japanese frozen section of the supermarket they usually carry premade deep fried croquettes but I heard stores on the mainland don't really have a japanese section to the supermarket. A trip to an asian market might help.
Then bentos always have some kind of veggie, usually just a small amount, especially if it's pickled. Even just a pretty carrot fan would do.
For something sweet there's usually some kind of fresh fruit like orange slices or strawberry slices. Traditionally they often have "an" which is a sweet azuki bean. If you can find it at the asian grocery in a can then just use that, maybe spread some of it on a shortbread cookie or something.
The great thing about bentos is that they're usually very cute and urges you to eat with your eyes first, so to speak. Try to make the bento visually appealing. Even if the food doesn't taste good, at least they'll remember the bento looking cute.
Also with bentos you can basically put anything in there, as long as it follows the basics of a bento which is that there's usually an assortment of stuff, all arranged in an attractive manner. I've even seen ppl make sandwich bentos.What foods do you use for a Japanese bento box lunch?
Rice is a given.
Usually there's some kind of fish on top. My favorite was grilled eel, which usually has a sweet sauce on it.
A side of a few different varieties of pickles is common: pickled spinach, pickled daikon, etc. These are actually pretty easy to make. In many cases the recipes are as simple as: wash veggies, roll in pickling salt, stick in fridge with a weighted plate on top so the salt presses in overnight.
For a bento box like you'd get from a street stand in tokyo, one or two other small sides might be included. These might be the chef's own specialities, distinguishing his bento from those a block away.
There are many websites devoted to bento.
Cooking Cute: Bento Recipes: http://www.cookingcute.com/recipes.htm
Just Bento: (This one has a more vegetaria do-whatever-you-want feel): http://justbento.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment