Rice dishes ── Sushi
Okayama Bara-zushi
a scattered sushi born from dodging an anti-luxury edict
A festival sushi from Okayama mixing Setouchi seafood like Spanish mackerel and squid, plus lotus root, into vinegared rice. Local telling ties its many toppings to a dodge around an old anti-luxury edict.
- Origin: Okayama City, Okayama
- About 540 km west of Tokyo
Lineage
What it's made of
Setouchi seafood — Spanish mackerel, squid, shrimp, octopus, conger eel — is mixed with mountain and field ingredients like lotus root, freeze-dried tofu, bamboo shoot, and burdock into rice cooked with kelp stock. Shredded egg and snap peas finish it, and the lineup shifts with the season: mackerel and bamboo in spring, matsutake mushroom in autumn. More than ten ingredients overlap in a single bowl, so that a different bite turns up more or less every mouthful.
How it's made
Seafood is grilled with salt or glazed, and each vegetable is simmered separately until seasoned through. Everything but the garnish is mixed into the rice, which is then piled high and colorfully in a wide tub-shaped vessel and brought to the table as is for sharing — with seasoning and the exact mix of ingredients said to vary slightly from household to household.
Why it took this shape
Local telling holds that when an Okayama domain lord decreed commoners keep to one soup and one dish, people reasoned that fish and vegetables folded into sushi rice weren't a side dish at all — and packed in more than ten kinds of ingredients. The workaround is said to have become, quite literally, the loaded shape the dish still takes, and a coastline backed by mountains that offered both seafood and mountain produce in easy reach is thought to have made that abundance possible.
Before you go
- How to read a vertical menuIn shops with strips of handwritten menu items on the wall, the top-right spot is often used for recommendations.
- 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.
- 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.
Dishes in the same style
- 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.
- Aichi HakozushiVinegared rice is packed into a wooden frame, topped with shrimp, eel, shiitake, and egg arranged diagonally, and pressed. Placing toppings on the diagonal so everyone gets a fair share of each is said to be a feature of the Owari and western Mikawa style, made for celebrations.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Contrast
- Sawara no KokozushiIn Bizen's Hinase, a sushi celebrating a good catch mixes vinegar-cured Spanish mackerel, shredded aged takuan pickle, and sansho buds into vinegared rice — the pickle said to have started as a garnish before finding its way into the mix itself.
- Kuromame-iri ChirashizushiSakushu-guro, a large-grained black soybean grown in northeastern Okayama's Shoei area, is roasted and cooked into the rice for this scattered sushi, which turns a cherry-blossom pink once vinegared — a version of the barazushi made across Okayama for festivals and family gatherings.
- Mamakari-zushiA small Okayama sushi with vinegar-cured sappa herring laid over hand-pressed rice. Its name — 'you'd go borrow rice for it' — is less a legend than a description of the fish itself.
- Inaka-zushiA Kochi sushi topped only with mountain ingredients — myoga ginger, taro-stem ryukyu, konjac — devised, it's said, in inland areas where seafood was hard to come by. No fish appears anywhere in it.
Root style
- TodomeseA rice pilaf finished with vinegar, from the old port town of Setouchi — said to have begun when sour, spoiled doburoku was stirred into a boatman's rice, and the name itself is a slurring of doburoku-meshi.
- Chirashi-zushiSushi rice with ingredients either scattered on top or mixed straight through. Kanto style arranges raw fish over the rice; Kansai style mixes diced ingredients in, then finishes with shredded egg and other garnish.
Also from Okayama
- Ami to Daikon no NitsukeTiny Setouchi shrimp called ami, richest in early autumn, are simmered with daikon in soy sauce and sugar — a pairing said to have grown from the two coming into season together, with a salted version kept for winter when rough seas kept boats ashore.
- Bachi JiruThe offcut ends of hand-stretched somen, called bachi for their resemblance to a shamisen pick, are simmered with daikon, carrot, and fried tofu in Asakuchi's Kamogata — said to hold a firmer bite than the somen strands themselves.
- Buri ZoniIn southern Okayama, New Year's zoni is built around yellowtail, a fish that changes name as it grows and so is read as auspicious, simmered with spinach, daikon, and other root vegetables — a dish passed down through the generations for the New Year's table.
- Chiya GyuJapanese Black raised in Niimi, Okayama, tracing to one of the oldest documented "tsuru-ushi" pedigree lines from the Edo period — said to benefit from the clear Takahashi river and fertile soil.
- Demi KatsudonA freshly fried pork cutlet is doused in hot demi-glace sauce over rice, a bowl said to have been devised by the founder of an old Okayama City restaurant after being won over by Western-style cooking at a Tokyo hotel — toppings vary shop to shop.
- FunameshiCrucian carp caught in the waterways of the reclaimed Kojima Bay farmland, at their least fishy in the cold season, are minced by hand and simmered with root vegetables, the rich broth then ladled over hot rice — also known as tonto-ko-jiru for the sound of the knife against the board.