Cooking Young Bamboo Shoots with Joi Ito (score by Ryuichi Sakamoto)
Boing Boing tv passes the 150th episode mark today, and we're celebrating by cooking up some delicious takenoko (竹の子), young bamboo shoots, with Joi Ito -- and original music by Ryuichi Sakamoto.
You may know Joi as a serial entrepreneur, a twittering globetrotter VC, a World of Warcraft junkie, or the CEO of Creative Commons, but he has a more traditional side, too.
In this video, Ito welcomes us into his back yard in Japan, where he and his partner Mizuka teach us how to hunt for and prepare this traditional seasonal delicacy from a lush bamboo forest.
The episode is accompanied by an original score composed by Grammy, Academy Award, and Golden Globe-winning composer, Ryuichi Sakamoto. The legendary electronic music pioneer is also an outspoken environmental advocate. His recent reforestation initiative, “More Trees,” supports the planting of trees around the world to help offset carbon emissions. To-date, 2 billion trees have been planted mostly through work with country governments including Turkey, Ethiopia and Mexico. Link to English-language PDF with more info on the project.
Sakamoto co-founded the seminal synthpop trio Yellow Magic Orchestra, and has scored or contributed to movie soundtracks including The Last Emperor, Merry Christmas Mister Lawrence, Babel, and the work of director Pedro Almodóvar. Boing Boing tv thanks him for generously contributing this beautiful, evocative score.
After the jump -- Joi Ito's family recipe for yummy takenoko just like mom used to make. Special thanks to the Ito family for sharing their traditions with us.
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Update 2: Here's Joi's blog post about his background with Ryuichi, and here's Joi's post from today about how this video came together.
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RECIPE: TAKENOKO (Young Bamboo Shoots)
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How to slice:
Cut tip of takenoko at an angle. Cut vertical to down middle to front.
"Akunuki" process to remove bitter taste:
In a large boiling pot add:
* Dried Chili X 3Add takenoko with the cuts and husks. Full heat from water for approximately 20-40 min (until you can stick a chopstick into the takenoko). Lower heat as it comes to a boil. After completed, cut heat and leave over night.
* Rice "Nuka" husks 2 handfuls
Cold water 2 liters
The next day, remove husks and cut to smaller pieces and boil for 10 min.
Making "Wakatakeni":
Make 2 cups stock from "Kobu" (seaweed) and "Katsuo" (Bonito flakes). Add Thin Soy Sauce - 3 table spoon, Sugar - table spoon, Sake - 2 table spoon. Add takenoko and boil for 8 min. Add "Wakame" (seaweed) and boil for additional 2 min.
Top with "Kinome" (Japanese herb) and eat as it is OR
Make Takenoko rice:
Make stewed Takenoko above but use "Oage" (dried tofu) instead of "Wakame". Take the sauce from Wakatakeni" and add as flavor to rice in a rice cooker and prepare rice normally. After rice is done, add the stewed takenoko and oage and mix. Enjoy.
Note: "cups" are Japanese size cups which are 200ml or 200cc.
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OMG! - A mashup of two of my favorites - Ryuichi Sakamoto and traditional Japanese cooking! Wh00t!1!!
Thanks for this - and what's the story behind Joi Ito and his connection to Ryuichi Sakamoto? I'd love to hear about that.
BBTV is like a Flintstones Gummy vitamin - it's good for me and it's yummy. Thanks!!
Is there a way to isolate the music for download?
Deweyeyed, we will ask about that. It's incredible, I'd love to share it with the world as a standalone if the composer is comfortable with that.
Did anyone else expect something jump out of the bushes and attack the harvesters because of the suspenseful music?
Great video, and great music...the combination was slightly unsettling. ;-)
Xeni I am so jealous of you right now! Forget Tokyo. My idea of cultural exchange is exactly this.
My sister for some reason knows people all over the place. She and her husband spent a month on the island of Hokkaido a few years back and spent exactly one night in a hotel when they went south to Tokyo to look around.
Great piece. Can't wait for the next one..
Stu:
Here's a post about my background with Ryuichi: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2007/07/30/ryuichi-sakamot-1.html
And a post about how this video came together: http://joi.ito.com/weblog/2008/05/20/video-of-cookin.html
(waves!!!) Hi Joi! (waves!!!) We'll add that to the blog post, thanks for stopping by!
Just a couple of notes: the seaweed for the stock is actually "kombu" (or "konbu"), and the stock you make with that and the katsuobushi is generally known as "dashi". You can get instant dashi from Japanese and Korean food stores, but it's hard to get the stuff that isn't full of msg (and if you can get kombu and katsuo, you're better off making it that way).
I've never seen kinome for sale anywhere (sometimes it's hard to track these things down in the antipodes) - I wonder if a smidge of Vietnamese mint might be a reasonable substitute.
You can get rice bran from healthfood stores (and pet stores, but I wouldn't use that for human food!)
Ito-san, thank you for the link, what a sweet and culturally important story. I never knew about Mr. Leary and Sakamoto-san. I wonder how his composing was effected by Mr. Leary's philosophical teachings and discussions. Did they ever work together on art?