Rice dishes
Chagayu
Chagayu — rice simmered thin in roasted tea, Nara's everyday breakfast
Cold cooked rice simmered thin in brewed roasted tea, an everyday Nara dish. A forerunner of it is said to appear in the menu for Todai-ji's Omizutori rite, and it is so tied to breakfast that a local saying holds that morning in Yamato begins with chagayu.
- Origin: Nara
- About 380 km west of Tokyo
Lineage
What it's made of
Cold cooked rice is simmered in brewed hojicha tea into a thin, watery porridge. Also called "okaisan," it combines the toasty aroma of the tea with the faint sweetness of rice in a dish eaten daily for breakfast in Nara.
How it's made
Hojicha is brewed, then cold cooked rice is added and simmered in the tea. Sweet potato, kabocha squash, taro, chestnuts, or dried mochi are sometimes added to make it more filling.
Why it took this shape
In the Yamato region, where many households cooked rice at night, tea porridge is thought to have spread as a way to reheat leftover cold rice. The menu for Todai-ji's Omizutori ceremony reportedly includes a dish called "gecha," rice simmered in hojicha, suggesting something like tea porridge was already eaten more than twelve hundred years ago. The saying "morning in Yamato begins with tea porridge" reflects how deeply rooted the dish is in daily life.
Before you go
- How to use a convenience storeA quick guide to choosing rice balls and hot snacks, buying coffee, paying by cash, IC card, or tap payment, using the eat-in corner, and sorting your trash — the basics for a first visit.
- Station food and ekiben (station bento)Where and when to find ekiben (station bento) before it sells out, etiquette for eating on board, how standing soba and udon stalls work, and where to find souvenirs sold inside the station.
- Soraben and airport diningA guide to what soraben means and how it differs from ekiben, whether to buy before or after security, etiquette for eating on board, airport restaurants, and things to check before buying food souvenirs to take home.
Dishes in the same style
- Aburafu DonDeep-fried wheat gluten, shaped into a log, is simmered in a sweet-savory broth and set with egg over rice, katsudon-style — a Tome City bowl said to trace to a tofu shop's shelf-stable gluten product, later turned into a bowl dish by a local innkeeper.
- Aburi-zushiNigiri with just its surface flash-seared by torch or hot iron. Unlike Edomae's shigoto curing for keeping, the searing here is done purely for the change in aroma and fat it brings — a relatively recent way of eating sushi.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Nara
- Amago no KanroniRiver trout, called the queen of the mountain stream, first grilled plain and then simmered in roasted tea before being finished sweet and savory in soy sauce and mirin — a dish of the Yoshino and Uda districts. The fish is said to have little of a river-fish's usual edge, and the dish is remembered as a mother's home cooking.
- Asuka NabeA hot pot from Asuka Village of chicken and seasonal vegetables simmered in milk and dashi. It is said to trace to a dairy product brought from Tang China in the Asuka period and later reworked by monks who simmered their chickens in milk, taking its present form around the early Showa era.
- Ayu ZushiA whole sweetfish pressed onto vinegared rice, made along the Yoshino River. Sweetfish, raised on river-stone algae, are called kogyo, 'fragrant fish,' and the sushi is said to have become known in part because a sushi shop featured in a kabuki play actually existed in Nara.
- DengaraA sweet from Higashiyoshino and Kawakami villages: bean-paste mochi steamed inside magnolia leaves. It is made for Boys' Day, wishing a son success and safe growth, and because each leaf on a single branch is wrapped around its own mochi, the finished cluster hangs like a bunch of fruit.
- Ei no NikogoriRed stingray simmered sweet and savory in soy sauce and sugar, a Nara dish. Its own gelatin dissolves into the cooking liquid and sets into a jelly once cooled, giving the dish its name, nikogori. It is said to have been eaten together with noppei at Kasuga Shrine's Wakamiya festival.
- Hangesho MochiA Nara Basin mochi pounded from cracked wheat and glutinous rice around hangesho, the eleventh day after the summer solstice. It is made at the point when the wheat harvest and rice planting both wind down, and is also called sanaburi mochi for the rite that sends off the rice-field deity.