Plates, small dishes, and the pottery styles behind them. How to choose, use, and care for authentic Japanese tableware — from Mino to Arita — without the mystique. Written from Japan.
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 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…
Yes, you can buy a replacement lid for a donabe. That is worth saying first, because the last time I wrote about a broken Japanese lid the answer was the opposite: a kyusu lid cannot be replaced at all, not by the shop and not by the potter who made it. Same material, same country,…
A pressed-sushi mold is sold to you as a size — eight cuts, five cuts, 8.5 inches — and none of those numbers mean what a buyer assumes. The cut count is not a serving count. The length is the least important dimension on the listing. And the shape you are almost certainly about to…
You measure your donabe, get 32 cm, and go looking for a 32 cm trivet. It is not there. The largest rush ring on sale is 24.8 cm. The largest brass one FUTAGAMI makes is 18 cm. Nagatani-en — the Iga workshop that makes Kamado-san, the most famous rice donabe in Japan — sells a trivet for its own…
Buy the one-gō box, about 85 mm square, in plain kiso hinoki, and keep it for cold sake you already know you like. That is the answer for almost everybody, and the reason has nothing to do with taste: a gō is 180.39 ml, the box was cut to hold exactly that, and every other size on…
A yukihira nabe is the small, dimpled, one-handled pan that is in every Japanese kitchen and almost every Japanese restaurant. Buying one looks like a choice between sizes. It is really a choice between three things, in this order: whether your cooktop can heat the classic version at all, whether the dimples on the pan…
Buy the 27 cm square. Not because it is better made — at this price nothing is better made — but because a sheet of nori is 21 cm wide and 19 cm deep, and a 24 cm mat leaves you five centimetres of bamboo to finish the roll with. That is the whole size question. It has one…
Buy the tray that contains the dishes you already own, not the one that matches the number of people you feed. A Japanese tray is not a carrying device with a nice finish. It is the outer edge of one person’s meal, and its size was settled by what goes inside it several centuries before…