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Yatara
Yatara — chopped summer vegetables and pickles tossed over rice
Cucumber, eggplant, the sharp local chili called botankosho, and miso-pickled daikon are all chopped fine and mixed together, then spooned over hot rice — a staple of northern Nagano said to be named yatara, 'haphazardly,' for how freely anything gets thrown in.
- Origin: Nagano
- About 180 km northwest of Tokyo
What it's made of
Summer cucumber, eggplant, myoga ginger, and the local hot pepper botankosho are chopped fine along with daikon pickled in miso, then mixed together. The vegetables' crisp bite, sharpened by the botankosho's kick, is said to be the point. Piled onto warm rice, it's said to keep the appetite going even on the hottest days.
How it's made
Summer vegetables and daikon pickled in miso are chopped as fine as possible on a cutting board and mixed together. There's no fixed recipe for what goes in -- whatever's on hand gets chopped 'yatara,' meaning indiscriminately, which is said to be where the name comes from. Some households work in okra or mountain yam for extra stickiness, or swap the miso pickle for takuan or rice-bran pickles.
Why it took this shape
With summer vegetables all ripening at once, chopping and mixing them together is said to have arisen as a way to use them up. Using daikon pickled in Shinshu miso rather than plain vegetables is said to give the dish a depth beyond a simple relish. The bite of chili and myoga is said to stir the appetite, while the potassium in root vegetables helps cool a body worn down by heat -- a dish shaped, it seems, to fit the rhythm of summer 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.
- Food for Obon and the harvest moon (tsukimi)A guide to the meat-free shojin ryori and somen served at Obon, and the tsukimi dango offered on the night of the harvest moon.
- At teishoku diners, shokudo, and machi-chukaA guide to the teishoku set-meal format, free rice refills, table placement, and paying at a shokudo-style diner.
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 Nagano
- Anyoji RamenSaku's miso ramen built around Anyoji miso, held to be the root of Shinshu miso.
- Gudakusan Miso ShiruRoot vegetables like daikon, carrot, and burdock go generously into this everyday miso soup of Nagano. Packing it with vegetables is said to allow less miso overall, and wheat dumplings are sometimes dropped in to make it a meal in itself.
- HangoroshiSticky rice, pounded only halfway to a texture called hangoroshi, is coated in sweet bean paste or roasted soybean flour — eastern Nagano's version of botamochi and ohagi, called one name in spring and the other in autumn, a festive sweet that busy farm households could put together quickly.
- Hitashi MameGreen soybeans are boiled until still faintly crisp, then steeped in a lightly seasoned dashi — a dish of northern and eastern Nagano also made with the saddle-marked kurakake bean, sometimes paired with herring roe as part of New Year's osechi.
- Hoshikabocha no EgomaaeKabocha squash, sliced into strips and sun-dried until brittle, is rehydrated and tossed in ground perilla seed — a preserved dish of the Kinasa area born from the need to keep squash, which spoils easily over winter, also used simmered or as filling for oyaki.
- Hoba MakiRice-flour dough kneaded with hot water wraps sweet bean paste, then steams inside a magnolia leaf — a Kiso festival mochi. With no oak trees in the mountains, magnolia stood in, and locals say the leaf's scent settles in best the next day.