Food with placenames often are misleading and not from the placename that makes up the dish: french fries, hamburger, german chocolate cake, danish, wiener, etc. add california roll to that list. [and how could I forget Hawaiian pizza? as noted in sibling comment]
Also, the headline is wrong, it was not a Canadian chef but rather a Japanese chef living in Canada.
>Also, the headline is wrong, it was not a Canadian chef but rather a Japanese chef living in Canada.
According to wikipedia he moved to Canada in 1971 at age 21. It calls him Japanese-Canadian. I'd wager he's become a Canadian citizen by now, though I can't be bothered to research it. Do you have evidence that is he not Canadian?
At the time of his invention, back in '71, I'd say he was pretty Japanese. Today he's likely Canadianized. So the spirit of the invention is Japanese, rather than Canadian.
If I move to the UK and invent something, is it automatically a British invention, or an American invention?
the spirit of the invention is Japanese, rather than Canadian.
This is a pretty silly argument but the spirit (and purpose) of the invention is also clearly to make something more suitable for Canadian tastes of the time.
I don't recall seeing it in the possessive/genitive case like that. Any bakeries I go to have it as 'German Chocolate Cake' even google will autocorrect "german's choco... to german choco...
Just like hardly anyone says "baked Alaska-Florida cake".
TIL. In my defense, the first one I remember having (on my birthday at age 4 or so) was made by a nice German lady who lived up the street from us, so I guess it was a natural assumption.
Ha! That is a funny one. We call those miniature _frankfurters_ Wiener/Vienna Sausages --man, I hope people in Vienna don't even know what those things are.
There is a whole dispute of whether it was France, Belgium or Spain. I think most people settle on Belgium, some France and a minority point to a really old account of fried potatoes (uncertain of cut though) in Spain before they were even grown in France.
The Turkish word for a turkey is hindi, which literally means “Indian.” The original word in French, coq d’Inde, meant “rooster of India,” and has since shortened to dinde. These names likely derive from the common misconception that India and the New World were one and the same. In Portuguese, it’s literally a “Peru bird,” and in Malay, it’s called a “Dutch chicken.”
In fact recent genetic research shows that the "chicken" derives from jungle fowl with genetic diversity centered on the eastern Indian / Myanmar region. So the Turkish name is in fact accurate, with respect to the probable origin of the bird (in a Turkish domesticated context). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31806553
""California" as a modifier to food generally means "with avocado""
I read that quickly, ignored the "to food" component, and then imagined all Californians walking around with an avocado in their pocket at all times...
Change "pocket" to backpack and my word, am I guilty... I have an invented breakfast I call "Breakfast of Champions" – just some plain popcorn with avocado and fresh-cracked pepper. Bonus: if I have nutritional yeast on hand. Delicious, nutrious, vegan, gluten-free, high fiber, etc. If I have emergency avocado in my backpack I can make this happen just about anywhere I spend the night.
Californian here. What, you don't have an avocado in your pocket at all times? Jokes aside, my wife pulled one out of her purse when we were out eating so she could add it to some food that was not already "Californian". You joke, but you're probably not far off....
According to the Chef who was born in Japan, he says they add "California" to names of things as a stand-in for any place in north America because they recognize California but may not recognize Vancouver or Podunk Washington, etc.
That’s so funny because my wife will only eat the California roll but without avocado. She doesn’t like raw fish or avocado. So I will often order “the California roll, hold the avocado (and wasabi and ginger)”
> They serve Taiwanese beef noodle soup. Obvious reasons why they opted for California branding instead.
How depressingly very China of them, what are Hong Kong noodles called: 1 country 1 system illegally annexed under extreme violence and duress noodles?
Keep in mind that this chain is > 20 years old (was there in 2002 when I studied at PKU). There is a lot of Taiwan food in the mainland these days that isn't labelled covertly.
it's not a San Diego burrito. it's never called that on any menu, and dozens of Mexican restaurants have "California burrito", which is fries. avocado is often not in them at all.
But no place in the mission calls them California burritos. It’s just a burrito. Vs I have had California burritos in San Francisco that are called that because of the French fries.
What's interesting to me is that there seem to be a number of "Hawaii" dishes (involving pineapple) that all seem to date back to roughly the same timeframe (1950s) but seem to have very different origin stories.
For example, "Toast Hawaii" appeared in Germany in 1955, consisting of a slice of toasted white bread, one or two slices of cooked ham, a pineapple ring, a slice of processed cheese and a cocktail cherry, baked in an oven. Interestingly, I've read that that dish may be derived from an American "grilled spamwich" (but spam was not availble in Germany at the time). Likewise, "Steak Hawaii" (as well as "Schnitzel Hawaii") involves baking with pineapple rings and cheese.
I'm guessing someone somewhere associated cheese and pineapple with Hawaii in the 1950s as part of the general obsession with Hawaiian-inspired culture (e.g. tiki torches, fake lei garlands, ukuleles and luau-themed garden parties) and it caught on as an "exotic" twist on home cooking internationally (despite Hawaii and pineapples otherwise having no clear relation).
When I was in Australia about ten years back, McDonald's was running a promo called "Tastes of America" with three themed burgers that were about what you'd expect: the California one had avocado and aioli or something, the Texas had salsa and onions, and the New York burger had extra pickles and garlic.
We had a chance to eat at Tojo's while we were in Vancouver and heard the story from Chef Tojo himself. Very nice dude, and the food was pretty good as well!
Interesting... until now I thought it was invented in Germany - because of its popularity there and because of being closely related to Hawaiian Toast (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_Hawaii), which was invented there.
All the references to that Canadian guy being the inventor are to Anglosphere newspaper articles. Given that the German TV chef introduced Toast Hawaii considerably earlier (and TV cooks are a lot more verifiable than single restaurants) I still bet on that origin.
There was a time period in the 1950s where Americans became obsessed with Hawaii vacations (likely due to the affordability of air travel) and companies started using Hawaii themes in all kinds of branding. I wouldn't be surprised if Toast Hawaii was spillover from that (as vacationing in Hawaii was much less affordable to Germans and thus most exposure to it was second-hand from US media portrayals). I'd also not be surprised if the association with pineapple and cheese somehow made it back to the US (possibly by proxy, e.g. via European immigrants to North America) only to be "invented" by some Canadian guy.
Given that a lot of origin stories tend to be created after the fact (e.g. infamously the board game Monopoly's origin story is largely fabricated as it was obviously based on an existing game already widely referred to as "the monopoly game" which in turn was originally based on "The Landlord's Game") I'm cautious about direct attributions without clear evidence.
It's entirely possible that "baked pineapple and cheese" already existed as a niche topping at the time the first restaurant offically added it to their menu. Interestingly Toast Hawaii may have been inspired by the American "grilled spamwich", which also included pineapple and (shredded) cheese but instead of cooked ham used spam, which wasn't available in Germany at the time.
There's an alternative, funny meaning to "dutch oven" so when I read this I wondered who out of the Englishman and the Welshman was the perpetrator and who was the victim :)
1. It was the best sushi I've ever eaten. I love sushi but I'm not really a "sushi snob" - I'm more than happy getting some premade sushi at the grocery store (usually). But the quality at Tojo's was like nothing I'd ever experienced.
2. After I ate there, I wanted to research the "California roll inventor" story, and I remember finding a whole bunch of chefs that had claimed to invent the California roll. Too lazy to re-look up that info, but I distinctly remember being wary of the "California roll inventor" claim after that, mainly thinking it was quite possible a bunch of chefs came up with similar ideas independently.
Tojo is a legend! He was already the in-the-know place to get sushi when I was kid in Vancouver in the 80's. Nice to hear from people here that he's still kickin' it. :-)
The very short version, as I understand it, is that the sauce is different. From interviews I’ve seen of the guy in Seattle who invented it, who came from Japan, he materially changed the sauce primarily to make it much cheaper and easier to produce so that it could be used as an inexpensive, mass market food.
Ironically, my understanding is that the Seattle version flowed back to Japan and became common there. His modifications to the traditional recipe went viral. I’m not a teriyaki aficionado, but this seems to be widely accepted as the history of modern teriyaki. It does make me wonder if I’ve ever had legacy teriyaki.
So, as far as the sources I found go, it seems there's Japanese teriyaki, which is a cooking technique, and there's teriyaki sauce, a pre-made sauce developed in the US by Kikkoman, and they are different things, still to this day. The sauce is also sold in Japan nowadays.
I used to hang with normal Japanese people a lot...like I hung out in tons of very average places, rural danchis, volunteered in rojin homes, etc.
Have seen them doing shockingly un-Japanese things with food. Every "Japanese food" rule that I was taught by Japanese people was broken, again and again.
After a while I realized, America, Japan, the cultural strengths of these nations can be defined as personality types...
So you can personally have that rules-on match with your culture, but also totally not, or different depending on who you're hanging with...
And I ran into lots of Japanese people in Japan who were not very Japanese at all. Traditional Japanese people didn't like them (or their food) either.
So every time I hear about "this is so American" about some Japanese food thing, I have to wonder what that means in various contexts. Especially teriyaki which is not exactly a long shot for Japanese cooking.
Well, those are "Chinese food" as in they were invented by Chinese people, it's just those people came over as miners or laborers and ended up having to open restaurants even though they didn't know how to cook any of their ethnic recipes…
> Also, modern teriyaki was invented by a Japanese restaurant owner in Seattle, and isn't as popular in Japan.
What are you talking about?
Kabayaki [0] has been around for centuries in Japan, and the only thing modern about 'teriyaki' made in Seattle was a likely mispronunciation of the phrases tori and yaki as grilled chicken and is the wide use of a cheap imitation of a tare (with a loose watery sauce) to use over animal/plant protein.
The use of Shoyu, Mirin, Sake as the trifecta of Japanese gastronomy is likely centuries older than that and likely pre-dates the inception of the US by several centuries.
Seems the original Tojo recipe in the article use real crab meat.
Funnily, I am part of the (few?) people that actually prefer imitation crab meat to real crab meat. If only because cracking open crab shells is too troublesome.
You know you can pay other people to do that. Crab meat it also available in a can. Snails too, that always tickles me.
When I eat something someone else has made and I know it came predominantly from cans and jars I'll take something like: "Did you make this?! ... Wow! You sure know how to open a can!".
No offense meant, but if I put effort into serving you a meal and you said that to me I probably wouldn’t be inviting you over for dinner again, no matter what the steps to prepare it were.
you should not. imitation crab is invented to be able to sell low grade crab. they just blend whatever they have, add mixture of aromas and extenders to hide this and to standardize the taste. like chicken mcnuggets basically. it is not poison, and i dont think it's unhealthy, but they rip you off hard
It's distressing to me that your earlier comments made assertions about the contents of imitation crab, yet you're not actually aware of the contents of imitation crab...
It's a type of fish cake, basically. It's white fish meat ground into a paste and formed. Surimi is made into things that aren't imitation crab, too! Fish balls and fish cakes and all sorts of things.
If this is distressing for you, you may need help.
What is enough to know about this, that it is blended paste, which means it gradually becomes composed of the cheapest available ingredients as the cost is continually lowered, while the experience kept up using extenders, like bologna for example. This is about this kind of a food you have to know. Happy distressing!
I realize that food can be a touchy subject, and I hope this doesn't come across as rude, as cultural appropriation (or worse, cultural bastardization), but I've been eating a lot of sushi at home lately in a way that I really love, but don't see anywhere except for one restaurant.
I can't roll my own sushi. I don't have tools or the skills. But I've been making sushi at home in a way that I really enjoy and I thought I'd share. I make what I call a "sushi pile". Or, as my Asian wife and stepdaughter teasingly call "white guy sushi". The closest thing it might come to would be nigiri, but it's not quite that.
We buy frozen fish steaks (usually tuna or salmon). Thaw them out and slice them into small rectangles. Make a bowl of sushi rice. You know those seaweed snacks that come in the small rectangular plastic trays? We take two sheets of those and lay them flat on the cutting board. Put a plop of sushi rice on it. Put the fish on top, add sriracha mayo (made with Japanese mayo). Squirt some Japanese BBQ Sauce (we really like Bachan's), and a dollop of wasabi. If we're lucky, maybe, we have some fresh uni is on the table. Shove the whole thing in your mouth. They're large, so it's ungraceful.
When we have sushi night at home, the ingredients are all on the table and we just "build your own" as we eat. I understand if this sounds like a bastardization to purists, and maybe it's not even fair to call it sushi. But my family and I really enjoy it. Alternatively, it makes for really good poke bowl.
I hate to say this, but I leave that to my wife. She grew up eating sushi rice, so she's very good at making it. I grew up eating the microwaveable rice. I can make a mean bowl of microwaved rice, but I'm pretty awful at sushi rice... This year I'll get her to teach me. What I will say: the rice she makes is just rice and water in a saucepan. Nothing too complicated. It's about selecting the correct rice, the ratio of rice+water, heat, and timing. My goal this year is to figure that out.
Buy good rice. At the very least it has to be round grain. Wash the rice thoroughly. Use a little less water than you think you need. Experiment with different recipes for mixing vinegar/mirin/sugar, and save the one you like.
It's not particularly hard, just takes some trial and error. If you already make good rice you are almost done already, then it's just down to flavoring.
For what it's worth, the closest thing that I've found to my "sushi pile" is the "Toastoba" appetizer at the Sushi House in Ventura, on Seaward Ave. [0]. The toastoba is "deep fried oba leaf, spicy tuna, scallops, masago eggs, spicy mayo, w/avacado and eel sauce" -- essentially my sushi pile, except on fried oba leaf instead of flat seaweed singles.
161 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] threadAlso, the headline is wrong, it was not a Canadian chef but rather a Japanese chef living in Canada.
According to wikipedia he moved to Canada in 1971 at age 21. It calls him Japanese-Canadian. I'd wager he's become a Canadian citizen by now, though I can't be bothered to research it. Do you have evidence that is he not Canadian?
If I move to the UK and invent something, is it automatically a British invention, or an American invention?
This is a pretty silly argument but the spirit (and purpose) of the invention is also clearly to make something more suitable for Canadian tastes of the time.
Well, certainly not European.
But, maybe - wouldn't it depend on where you filed your copyright/ patent/ trademark and possibly who you work for?
You're conflating a geographical area with a political arrangement. Not all Europeans are in the EU.
52 years? No, at best landed immigrant status. With the legendary speed of Canadian bureaucracy I expect he'll be made a citizen posthumously.
it's german's chocolate cake... the guy's last name was literally german
Just like hardly anyone says "baked Alaska-Florida cake".
All the more to his credit that he figured out what the locals could handle back then.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqQCyAQBgXY&t=115s
A quick check shows this is a big improvement in clarity - Outdoorsy Bacon, Outdoorsy Tire.
More ambitiously, there's renaming Canada to The Great Outdoors. The .ou country TLD is available and a lot less confusing than .ca
The Turkish word for a turkey is hindi, which literally means “Indian.” The original word in French, coq d’Inde, meant “rooster of India,” and has since shortened to dinde. These names likely derive from the common misconception that India and the New World were one and the same. In Portuguese, it’s literally a “Peru bird,” and in Malay, it’s called a “Dutch chicken.”
https://www.dictionary.com/e/turkey/
If you get a "California burger" it will have avocado on it
I read that quickly, ignored the "to food" component, and then imagined all Californians walking around with an avocado in their pocket at all times...
[1] https://www.themanual.com/food-and-drink/california-burrito/
How depressingly very China of them, what are Hong Kong noodles called: 1 country 1 system illegally annexed under extreme violence and duress noodles?
California stop - not quite full stop
Slight hint of derision anytime CA is added, I would say.
Though, that makes me wonder what ingredient the other 48 states would add. Suggestions welcome.
I associate it more with meaning "with spam".
For example, "Toast Hawaii" appeared in Germany in 1955, consisting of a slice of toasted white bread, one or two slices of cooked ham, a pineapple ring, a slice of processed cheese and a cocktail cherry, baked in an oven. Interestingly, I've read that that dish may be derived from an American "grilled spamwich" (but spam was not availble in Germany at the time). Likewise, "Steak Hawaii" (as well as "Schnitzel Hawaii") involves baking with pineapple rings and cheese.
I'm guessing someone somewhere associated cheese and pineapple with Hawaii in the 1950s as part of the general obsession with Hawaiian-inspired culture (e.g. tiki torches, fake lei garlands, ukuleles and luau-themed garden parties) and it caught on as an "exotic" twist on home cooking internationally (despite Hawaii and pineapples otherwise having no clear relation).
* texas -> supersized
* chicago (close enough) -> with green sweet pickle relish
When I was in Australia about ten years back, McDonald's was running a promo called "Tastes of America" with three themed burgers that were about what you'd expect: the California one had avocado and aioli or something, the Texas had salsa and onions, and the New York burger had extra pickles and garlic.
* Idaho -> potato
* Louisiana (or just New Orleans) -> Cajun spices
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_pizza
Given that a lot of origin stories tend to be created after the fact (e.g. infamously the board game Monopoly's origin story is largely fabricated as it was obviously based on an existing game already widely referred to as "the monopoly game" which in turn was originally based on "The Landlord's Game") I'm cautious about direct attributions without clear evidence.
It's entirely possible that "baked pineapple and cheese" already existed as a niche topping at the time the first restaurant offically added it to their menu. Interestingly Toast Hawaii may have been inspired by the American "grilled spamwich", which also included pineapple and (shredded) cheese but instead of cooked ham used spam, which wasn't available in Germany at the time.
My favorite was German Chocolate Cake, which is not from Germany but was invented by Samuel German.
"španělský ptáček" (spanish little bird) is egg, gherkin and spicy sausage wrapped in ground meat and baked.
"srbské risotto" (serbian risotto) not quite a risotto, just a rice, meat and vegetables dish
"anglická slanina" (english ham) just normal back bacon
"turecký med" (turkish honey) a sweet nougat and nut thing
"holandský řízek" (dutch schnitzel) breaded pork or chicken schnitzel but filled with cheese
"americké brambory" (american potatoes) potato wedges!
"pařížská pomazánka" (parisian spread) a mayo and vegetable sandwich spread
1. It was the best sushi I've ever eaten. I love sushi but I'm not really a "sushi snob" - I'm more than happy getting some premade sushi at the grocery store (usually). But the quality at Tojo's was like nothing I'd ever experienced.
2. After I ate there, I wanted to research the "California roll inventor" story, and I remember finding a whole bunch of chefs that had claimed to invent the California roll. Too lazy to re-look up that info, but I distinctly remember being wary of the "California roll inventor" claim after that, mainly thinking it was quite possible a bunch of chefs came up with similar ideas independently.
The California roll was created in the 70s by Ichiro Mashita, who worked at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles called The Tokyo Kaikan.
Ironically, my understanding is that the Seattle version flowed back to Japan and became common there. His modifications to the traditional recipe went viral. I’m not a teriyaki aficionado, but this seems to be widely accepted as the history of modern teriyaki. It does make me wonder if I’ve ever had legacy teriyaki.
Have seen them doing shockingly un-Japanese things with food. Every "Japanese food" rule that I was taught by Japanese people was broken, again and again.
After a while I realized, America, Japan, the cultural strengths of these nations can be defined as personality types...
So you can personally have that rules-on match with your culture, but also totally not, or different depending on who you're hanging with...
And I ran into lots of Japanese people in Japan who were not very Japanese at all. Traditional Japanese people didn't like them (or their food) either.
So every time I hear about "this is so American" about some Japanese food thing, I have to wonder what that means in various contexts. Especially teriyaki which is not exactly a long shot for Japanese cooking.
Like what?
What are you talking about?
Kabayaki [0] has been around for centuries in Japan, and the only thing modern about 'teriyaki' made in Seattle was a likely mispronunciation of the phrases tori and yaki as grilled chicken and is the wide use of a cheap imitation of a tare (with a loose watery sauce) to use over animal/plant protein.
The use of Shoyu, Mirin, Sake as the trifecta of Japanese gastronomy is likely centuries older than that and likely pre-dates the inception of the US by several centuries.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kabayaki
Although I don't think the originator of the trend actually changed the recipe very much. I just mean it's popular because he made it popular.
Funnily, I am part of the (few?) people that actually prefer imitation crab meat to real crab meat. If only because cracking open crab shells is too troublesome.
You know you can pay other people to do that. Crab meat it also available in a can. Snails too, that always tickles me.
When I eat something someone else has made and I know it came predominantly from cans and jars I'll take something like: "Did you make this?! ... Wow! You sure know how to open a can!".
It's a type of fish cake, basically. It's white fish meat ground into a paste and formed. Surimi is made into things that aren't imitation crab, too! Fish balls and fish cakes and all sorts of things.
What is enough to know about this, that it is blended paste, which means it gradually becomes composed of the cheapest available ingredients as the cost is continually lowered, while the experience kept up using extenders, like bologna for example. This is about this kind of a food you have to know. Happy distressing!
I can't roll my own sushi. I don't have tools or the skills. But I've been making sushi at home in a way that I really enjoy and I thought I'd share. I make what I call a "sushi pile". Or, as my Asian wife and stepdaughter teasingly call "white guy sushi". The closest thing it might come to would be nigiri, but it's not quite that.
We buy frozen fish steaks (usually tuna or salmon). Thaw them out and slice them into small rectangles. Make a bowl of sushi rice. You know those seaweed snacks that come in the small rectangular plastic trays? We take two sheets of those and lay them flat on the cutting board. Put a plop of sushi rice on it. Put the fish on top, add sriracha mayo (made with Japanese mayo). Squirt some Japanese BBQ Sauce (we really like Bachan's), and a dollop of wasabi. If we're lucky, maybe, we have some fresh uni is on the table. Shove the whole thing in your mouth. They're large, so it's ungraceful.
When we have sushi night at home, the ingredients are all on the table and we just "build your own" as we eat. I understand if this sounds like a bastardization to purists, and maybe it's not even fair to call it sushi. But my family and I really enjoy it. Alternatively, it makes for really good poke bowl.
It's not particularly hard, just takes some trial and error. If you already make good rice you are almost done already, then it's just down to flavoring.
[0] http://sushihousevta.com/