Home-style
Imogushi
Imogushi — skewered taro grilled with a miso glaze
Steamed or boiled taro is skewered and grilled with a miso glaze until lightly charred — made from a root vegetable grown since before rice farming, and tied to New Year's and shrine festival gatherings.
- Origin: Tochigi
- About 100 km north of Tokyo
What it's made of
Steamed or boiled taro is skewered, grilled, coated in a richly worked miso glaze, and grilled once more — a ceremonial dish. Sometimes finished with yuzu miso or sansho miso depending on the season, it pairs the fragrance of the seasonal glaze with the taro's soft, starchy bite, a dish long tied to festivals and annual observances in Tochigi.
How it's made
Taro cut into bite-size pieces is steamed until a skewer passes through easily, spread on a tray to cool, then threaded onto skewers and grilled on both sides over an oven or charcoal fire. Miso, sugar, and mirin are worked together carefully without scorching into a thick glaze, sometimes brightened with grated yuzu peel or minced sansho leaves depending on the season. The grilled taro is brushed with the glaze and grilled again briefly to finish.
Why it took this shape
Taro arrived in Japan as far back as the Jomon period and has long been grown across much of Tochigi, offered at festivals and annual events. Eaten around the irori hearth at New Year's, or made by each household for the Inari shrine festival on the first Horse Day, this custom of skewering and grilling taro is said to have taken root deeply in the rhythms of mountain village life.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Osechi and zoni for the New YearA guide to the meaning behind osechi's tiered boxes, the regional differences in zoni (square vs. round mochi, clear vs. miso broth), and the nanakusa-gayu custom.
- Setsubun: ehomaki and lucky beansA guide to ehomaki, the uncut sushi roll said to be eaten facing a lucky direction on Setsubun, and to mamemaki, the bean-throwing custom with roasted lucky beans.
Dishes in the same style
- Agonoko UmaniThe roe of egg-bearing flying fish, caught only in early summer, is simmered in stock and soy sauce as an Oki bar snack. Its large grains and dense, sticky texture are prized as a delicacy said to be scarcer even than the fish's flesh.
- Funa MisoCrucian carp is simmered slowly with soybeans for around five hours, then finished in a sauce of red miso and coarse sugar. A freshwater fish dish of the Kiso rivers' lower basin, made with fatty winter carp simmered until the bones soften through.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Tochigi
- Agemaki Yuba no NimonoFresh yuba sheets are layered, rolled into a log, sliced into rounds, and deep-fried before a slow simmer in a light broth — a Nikko dish built on the region's rippled yuba-making craft, served at New Year's and celebrations.
- Aiso no KanroniDace that gather to spawn each spring in the Naka and Kinu rivers, known locally as aiso, are slow-simmered in a sweet glaze until soft to the bone — food from a landlocked prefecture where river fish once meant protein.
- Ayu MeshiAlong the Naka River and other ayu-fishing streams, unseasoned grilled ayu is cooked into the rice — made for festivals and farm rest days, with any leftover fish skewered and hung by the hearth to keep.
- Bandai MochiIn the Kuriyama district of Nikko, firm-cooked non-glutinous rice is pounded on a wooden board — hence 'itadai-mochi,' board-mochi — and eaten with miso glaze, sweet bean paste, or a perilla-seed sauce depending on the hamlet.
- Battou JiruWheat dough is torn by hand into a miso soup simmered with seasonal vegetables — known by different names, hattou-jiru or dango-jiru, across the region, and long relied on when rice ran short.
- Chitake to Nasu no Abura ItameChitake mushrooms, which weep a milky sap when torn, are stir-fried with eggplant — a summer-only find tied to managed satoyama woodland, and also prized as a broth base for udon and soba.