This week, my friend took me on a night out to try as many exotic foods we could find, snapping photos and faking culinary expertise the entire date. We ended up eating at a Japanese restaurant and finishing with dessert and coffee in a small café-like restaurant known for serving locally grown food. The next few items will be a few foods we found that night. Our first comes from a sushi roll we tried partially filled with the Japanese vegetable oba.
Oba is the Japanese name for perilla, a plant and herb common in Asian foods particularly in Japan. It is used to spice Japanese dishes with its sweet yet bitter taste. It is also very common rolled into sushi. My friend and I tried some at a sushi restaurant in a “ume shiso” roll with cucumber and plum paste. The plant could be taken out of the roll and tasted more bitter than sweet, and gave the roll an overall kick that it needed in comparison to its more blander components.
Sources:
http://www.herbsarespecial.com.au/free-herb-information/perilla.html
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