6 Must Try Japanese Dishes in Aomori

So I'm just walking, just having a stroll through the city of Hirosaki in North Japan and coming up, just randomly ahead, is a tortoise. It's the sort of exciting, surprising, bizarre things you sometimes see every day whilst walking around Japan. Japan is home to arguably the finest cuisine in the world. Prepared with the very freshest ingredients at the hands of highly disciplined, skilled chefs. I recently won a competition called Tohoku 365 to travel around the entire northern region of Tohoku through six different prefectures in search of the very best local food. So far we've explored local dishes in Miyagi and Iwate prefectures and this time we're going to be travelling around Aomori, the most northern region of Japan's main island of Honshu, where we'll be uncovering an unusual local ramen dish, trying some delicious gyoza with natsuki, as well as the largest pieces of sushi I've ever had with ryotaro and also randomly coming face to face with a shark and a tortoise which sounds like some sort of fable. But our first stop is Aomori city, the capital of the region and famous for being the city with the highest levels of snowfall on the planet. So thank god we didn't come here in winter. Aomori has some of the freshest seafood in all of Japan as it's one of the only prefectures along with Hokkaido that has coastlines on both the Sea of Japan and the Pacific Ocean and our first stop is the Furukawa fish market, the city's main market which has apparently devised an innovative way of getting customers in to buy more fish. So this is Furukawa fish market in Aomori city and it's a fish market with a bit of marketing savvy. They're very clever because they worked out they can get people to come here by having this kind of voucher system whereby you get a book of vouchers and then you can make your own fish bowl. They call it nokedon, noke means in the very beginning, don means a bowl of rice and so you get your vouchers, get your bowl of rice and then you go around the market and pick out the fish that you want to have on your rice then you sit down, eat it and have lots of fun. So got my two bowls of rice, one for me, one for the lovely pleasant cameraman who is anonymous. Used two coupons for that, a bit annoying but still. Got quite a few left, I bought 15 at the end because I'm quite hungry. So now for the fun bit. I'm gonna get one of these, this is a shredded tuna. Earlier on I saw some really good tuna down here but we're down to our last five coupons now so we've got to be careful. I feel a bit like when you have the last hand grenade on Call of Duty. You don't want to use it, you want to save it. Something really special. That was quite fun and I think coupons make everything better, don't they? Look at that, it's beautiful. I'm big on my tuna, I'm a simple man. I just like tuna and salmon and egg. I'm not that daring when it comes to trying fish. Fantastic. Aomori is pretty close to the island of Hokkaido and the dish at our next stop is heavily influenced by its island neighbour. A ramen dish known only as miso curry milk ramen. It may sound like a dish conceived by someone under the influence of alcohol but Hokkaido is famous for its dairy produce and curry soup. Two key ingredients that have gone into this unique bowl of ramen. The soup is mildly spiced with curry and a slice of butter is placed on the bean sprouts and pork which quickly melts away into the soup. It tastes like curry soup, I guess. Albeit not too spicy. It's a sort of dish I'd eat maybe every other week if I lived in Aomori city but it's certainly pretty unique. I've never seen anything like it in my time in Japan so far. Hachinohe on the Pacific coast is Aomori's second biggest city and it's here that we catch up with Ryotaro who introduces us to two iconic local dishes. The magazine called Birders actually chose 12 meals, 12 great meals out of all Japan and this mackerel sushi was chosen as one of them. And mackerel is actually, this Hachinohe is famous for it's the quality of the mackerel and this actually, I can tell you this is the best place where you should eat mackerel. It's ridiculously thick. It is actually, isn't it really thick? Okay, oh it's too thick. It's huge. Like a horror film face. I'm that freaked out of the quality. Freaked out by the quality. This is just as good, you know what I mean? Just as delicious. I was going to say the catch. Just as delicious, you know what I mean? If you're new to sushi, I'd say salmon and tuna are the first level. They're the simplest, easiest things to eat and then mackerel is probably level two. A little bit more difficult to wrap your head around but then there's level three which is like sea urchin. How does it taste like? Describe. Very big. I thought you became a great food reviewer. Oh, it's so succulent and juicy. It's cool because you can actually see the skin of the fish. That's not selling it, is it? Skin of the fish. You don't really talk about skin of the fish. If I was to sum it up in three words? Yep. Soft, succulent and fresh. Five, five, five. The second local dish resting here alongside the mackerel is cracker soup. Yeah, it's cracker soup. Senbei jiru as it's known in Japanese. It may sound like a simple and slightly odd dish but it's a staple food of the region consisting of a broken wheat cracker into a soup of fish, vegetables or meat and given Aomori's disturbingly cold snowy winters, it's hardly a surprise that the warm soup dish is so popular. So why don't they put the rice crackers in? I don't know, it's a bit random. Okay, in the Hachinohe area, traditionally they could not get rice because of this really strong wind. It's freezing in winter, right? That's right. So they decided to grow wheat here and that's how this wheat cracker came out in production and became famous. So it's more than just a dish, it's a case of survival. That's true. Rice cracker is the way of survival. So when this... The rice cracker is the way of survival. Right, wheat cracker, sorry. Wheat cracker is the way of survival. We'll be returning to Hachinohe later on to meet Natsuki but first we head on over to the city of Hirosaki, home to Aomori's most famous export, apples. It's not an uncommon sight to see apple orchards in the fields around Hirosaki along with all manner of apple related products on sale from apple pies to the finest cider in all of Japan. For lunch though, I'm grabbing something a little bit more unconventional from a restaurant residing in the second largest Japanese garden in all of Tohoku region. A stunning garden filled with streams, bridges and enthusiastic cosplayers. The restaurant itself is inside a European style building that seems somewhat out of place given the traditional garden setting. I've just ordered apple beef curry with rice which is good because I've spent the last few days eating nothing but fish so it's nice to have something a bit different although again it's got apples in it because everything in Aomori has apple. There's a lot of apples in Aomori, isn't there? So I'm just walking through the city of Hirosaki and there's a tortoise walking down the street and it's just a really weird thing to see. Apparently the owner is taking him for an afternoon stroll as it's good for tortoise stress relief. Genuinely, I'm not making that up. It's a child as well, it's a child and it's already 40 kilograms. The sort of exciting, surprising, bizarre things you sometimes see every day whilst walking around Japan. Back to Hachinohe where we meet Natsuki at the city's largest indoor market, a cavernous sprawl with over 60 independent vendors. So we're in Hachinohe's Hachoku center. Hach is in reference to Hachinohe, shoku means food and it's a big huge indoor market full of restaurants and seafood, vegetables and something rather worrying coming up. How's it feel? Charming. Charming. Dental, nice dental. Nice dental. Natsuki's done his homework and takes us to a restaurant selling a variety of dishes containing Aomori black garlic, a type of garlic with black cloves and characterized by its sweet and almost vinegary aroma. So garlic is very popular around these parts so nearly everything we've ordered seems to have garlic in it. The gyoza, the rice, the ramen. Garlic, garlic, garlic. So busy, why is it busy today? Maybe holiday. Holiday. Uncle holiday. Are you celebrating your uncle? Celebrate? Yes. No, I have no uncle. Oh no, shit. Thank you. This is the gyoza. So with gyoza you need a bowl of soy sauce and a bit of vinegar and then you dip the gyoza in there and kind of let it marinate for a few minutes. Very garlicky, very garlicky indeed. Oh, garlic. Spicy. Spicy is good and the soup, natural. Oh, hot dancing. Hot dancing. Gyoza, garlic, rice and a big bowl of ramen. After a meal like this you won't need to eat again for about six hours. I'm a bit worried that after this I'll kind of just collapse in the car. I feel a sense of guilt because Natsuki's come all the way up to Aomori just for the day and he's got to drive back this afternoon because he's got work tomorrow. So how long will it take to drive from here all the way back to Yamagata? Gonna chop very long, maybe six hours. Six hours. To die. Six hours to die. That sounds like your album name. He's got to drive through two mountain ranges. Yes. And of course it's Uncle Day. Again, it's Uncle Day. It's busy. Too many uncles. Oh my god. So there you have it, six delicious local dishes to try in Aomori. In the next Tohoku 365 video, we'll be visiting Akita Prefecture. But before then, Ryota and I visited Japan's biggest morning market which happens to also be hidden away in Hachinohe in Aomori. It was one of the best mornings ever, mainly as I got to eat just about everything. But you can check the video out in the description box below. But for now though guys, many thanks for watching and we'll see you next time.