Your kyusu does not dribble because you are pouring it wrong, and in most cases it does not dribble because it is faulty. It dribbles because of the shape of a strip of clay on the underside of the spout lip, roughly a millimetre wide, which either ends in a corner or rolls over into…
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 chawanmushi cup is a serving vessel, and almost everything that decides whether the custard comes out silky or full of holes happens somewhere else — in the steamer, at 85–90 °C, with a cooking chopstick wedged under the lid. Buy the cup for the table and for the arithmetic: 200–275 ml, filled to eight-tenths, and a…
Buy a miso soup bowl by its diameter, not by the millilitres beside it. The everyday size is 11.7 to 12.1 cm across — 3 sun 9 bu to 4 sun, in the unit the Japanese trade still uses on the tag. The capacity figure is close to useless here: a 12 cm owan is listed at 340 ml, and a…
On the oldest English-language tea forum there is a thread titled “Tokoname Replacement Lids?” Somebody had broken the lid of a Japanese teapot and wanted to know where to buy another. The thread is still there. It has no answer. That is not neglect. It is the answer. For almost every Japanese kyusu worth owning,…
Two shops in the United States will sell you a tonsui today. One files it under “Tonsui Dipping Saucer”: 4.53 inches across, 5.2 fl oz, $3.80. The other calls it a hot-pot bowl for individual portions: 13 cm, porcelain from Gifu, $28. Both are using the word correctly. Neither page mentions that the other kind exists. So the first…
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…