Japanese food culture

RED  RICE

Of course, you know "red rice", right?

I'm sure you have eaten it at least once if you are Japanese, I have some friends who don't like it though.

I like "red rice" very much and my mother cooks it when we celebrate something. I had thought all the Japanese eat red rice put a mixture of salt and parched sesame seeds on it but there are some kinds of red rice in Japan and the taste varies depending on the region. My mother is from Aomori, my father is from Yamanashi. I was born in Chiba and I have brought up in Chiba for 21 years. I have eaten red rice with salt and sesame seeds from childfood but one day, my mother told me that red rice which her mother had cooked was very sweet because she used sugared beans instead of small azuki beans in her hometown! When I heard of it I was very surprised and I couldn't imagine the sweet red rice!!!

That is why I'm going to talk about red rice here:)

First of all, WHAT'S RED RICE?

According to Wikipedia, red rice is glutinous rice (mochi-gome) and some "uruchi-mai" steamed with azuki beans, so it is one of "Okowa."

Red rice is traditional Japanese dish.

WHY RED?

Long time ago, they ate red rice in order to drive devils or misfortune out of them. They believed that red meant driving off bad things, so they had it in misfortune. Now, we usually eat it on special occasion such as wedding or "Shichi-go-san" as a celebratory dish.

This red rice is what I usually eat at my home. It is glutinous rice steamed with azuki beans and we put a mixture of salt and parched sesame seeds on it. Its taste is not sweet. 

My mother tasted this red rice when she went to my father's hometown for the first time and she had thought that that was not red rice, she believed that sweet red rice was red rice. Now she used to this kind of red rice, though.  

This is glutinous rice steamed with sugared beans (amanatto). This type of red rice is eaten in Tohoku-region (Hokkaido, Aomori, Iwate, etc.) and some parts of Yamanashi. Some people steam rice with food red (syoku-beni) to make rice red.

In Nigata, they eat this red rice which is called "soy sauce red rice". They use soy sauce, so the color is not red, but blown, even though they call "Sekihan."

I didn't know that! It's interesting!

Does anyone come from Nigata in our class?

In Fukui, they boil glutinous rice with azuki beans and taro (Satoimo)!!!!! It looks like "chestnut rice"!

I love taro, and I want to try it:) looks delicious!

...Does anyone come from Fukui?

What does red rice that you eat look like?

We, Japanese, have the same traditional dish but its taste or the way of cooking varies depending on where they live or where they are from. We have many things that we don't know even we live in Japan for a long time!