17.03.05 Aiba Manabu Highlights - Aiba Masaki [English]

Today Aiba-san learned the skills preparing Japanese cuisine from Nakamura Koumei-san.

He learned how to shred radish and carrot. The chopping board was with the logo of Aiba Manabu. First the radish and carrot were to be cut into strips like toilet paper (rotary cutting, 桂剥き), of equal thinness, and then be shredded. The key of good shredding was to confirm the thinness of cut by eye and feel the thinness by touch. Watabe-san and Sawabe-san praised Aiba-san a lot when he shred the vegetables. Nakamura-san also recognised Aiba-san’s skills. Aiba-san said it was great to learn from Nakamura-san, his teaching was easy to understand.

Aiba-san also learned how to cut different kinds of fish (there are different ways to cut fish of different sorts). He demonstrated his good skills of cutting and slicing fish in this part.

The ice bowl for sashimi is made by injecting water into balloon and then ice the balloon to a designated time so that the outer side was iced while the inner side was still water. And then the ice balloon was put on hot pan to make the bowl shape.

The serving of Japanese cuisine is to depict a scenery of mountain and water because the visual beauty of sashimi bowl contributes to good taste, so it is important to make a beautiful sashimi bowl.

Aiba-san learned how to chop vegetables (乱切り) (gobou, carrot) into equal size and how to put seasoning in correct order to prepare chikuzenni (筑前煮). Aiba-san chopped gobou into equal size skillfully, while chopping carrot looked more difficult. This episode ended with the team enjoying a delicious and beautiful set of Japanese cuisine.