# Japanese Suppon Snapping Turtle at Daiichi

- Author: Joichi Ito
- Date: 2003-04-27T21:27:16Z


Mizuka and I went to Daiichi, my favorite restaurant to eat Japanese snapping turtle, or suppon. I've written about Daiichi before here. So I'll focus on photos for this entry...

Here is a 176K MPEG movie of the boiling stew...
										   										Mizuka posing in front of Daiichi.										   										The first thing you see when you enter your room at Daiichi is a Daichi cloth covering your place setting. 										   										Removing the cloth, you find a sparse setting for your meal. 										   										The meal begins with a small portion of stewed, chilled suppon served with a little bit of chilled soup and some sliced ginger. Yum. 										   										The stew arrives. The Stew is in clay pots, some over a century old. The pots are heated with coal to an extremely high temperature and are delivered on wooden boxes. The pots are so hot that the stew continues to boil through the serving without any additional heat. 										   										Here's what the stewed suppon looks when it arrives in MY bowl. 										   										Another very important part of the experience is the hot sake in the suppon soup. This really tastes amazing. Nothing like it on earth. 										   										The suppon bones look kind of strange and I try not to figure out which bones come from which parts of the turtle. 										   										You must finish the soup... Then comes another serving of stew. 										   										Next comes the pickles. They're good too, but you have to sort of sit there and stare at them until the zosui comes which you're supposed to eat the pickles with. 										   										Then comes to zosui. It is another clay pot with rice in boiling suppon broth. An egg or two are broken over the bubbling zosui and stirred. 										   										Then the zosui ends up in your bowl. (Sorry Dr. Atkins!) 										   										As you near the end of the zosui the zosui gets crispy and brown where it sticks to the pot... That's called okoge and tastes REALLY good. 						




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#### Categories

Eating and Cooking, Japanese Culture, Joi's Diary