A natto bowl is a mixing tool, not a serving dish. Buy one with fine grooves inside, something to brace against while you stir (a handle or a thumb rest), and a lip or spout that can reach into an ordinary 11–12 cm rice bowl. If a bowl has all three, it does the job….
If you are about to buy a plate for Japanese curry, buy an oval about 24 cm long and 16 cm wide, with at least 3.5 cm of listed height and a rim that climbs instead of flaring out. That is the whole answer. The rest of this page is why, and how to read…
Buy 16 cm, and buy it because of your bowl, not your stove. An oyakodon pan has one job that an ordinary small saucepan cannot do: the set egg has to leave the pan in one disc and land on the rice intact. That only works if the pan is narrower than the mouth of…
The paper. Almost always the paper. If you make matcha at home and you want to know what the sweet sits on, the answer is a folded sheet of kaishi (戈紙) — washi, 14.5 × 17.5 cm for the common size, about $7 a pack from Ippodo. Not a plate. English shops file it under…
One Japanese shop I checked this week sells a bowl called an Indigo Blue Rabbit Children’s Large Japanese Rice Bowl. It measures 12 cm across. Two rows down the same children’s page is a cat-and-yarn bowl with no mention of children anywhere in its description, and the shop says plainly that it holds “an average…
A donburi lid is not a warmer. It is a steamer with no heat of its own. Every English shop selling one says the same short thing. Akazuki, selling a pair of Hasami bowls with matching lids for $54.95, puts it as “Keep food warm at the table with matching ceramic lids.” That is the…
A hinoki cutting board is a surface you are supposed to remove. That single sentence separates the board a Japanese household buys from the one sold to you in English, and almost nothing in an English listing says it out loud. In Japan the ordinary household board is 26 mm thick, and there is a small…
The short answer: probably not as a separate purchase. A matcha sifter is 60 to 80 mesh, which means its holes are 250 to 180 micrometres wide. A matcha particle is 5 to 10 micrometres. The mesh is roughly twenty to fifty times wider than the powder it is supposedly straining, so it cannot be…
The 1.6-litre Japanese pickle press sold in the United States comes with one instruction and one claim. The instruction: “Twist the press down on your vegetables, firmly press and soak with the force of springs and screws.” The claim: it “makes Japanese pickles or even sauerkraut.” Both are on the same listing, and the second…
A Pacific saury is about 30 cm of fish. The plates sold in the United States under the name sanma plate measure 26.6 cm, 28 cm and 29.3 cm. Every one of them is shorter than the thing it is named after, and none of the listings mention it. That is not a scandal, it…