What I ate at my first meal in Morioka
In my previous blog entry, I wrote about having had Akita jidori in Kakunodate and possibly also Morioka. While in the capital city of Iwate Prefecture, I also had a dish that's associated with it -- and food associated with the capital city of the neighboring prefecture of Miyagi!
Here's the thing: Morioka is famed for three very different noodle dishes -- but since eating one of them (wanko soba) seems more like a challenge than pleasure and another (reimen) sounds too much like Korean naengmyeong (AKA naengmyun), which I've eaten loads of (in South Korea and elsewhere), I elected to pass up on eating those two noodle dishes while in Morioka. Instead, the one specialty noodle dish I decided I wanted to try while there was jajamen: which may sound like another Korean noodle dish, jajangmyeon, -- that itself is considered to be a Chinese dish by Koreans! -- but actually is quite different from it.
Among other things, whereas jajangmyeon consists of noodles in black bean sauce (and chunks of beef and radish or potato), jajamen is topped with niku-miso and thin slices of cucumber and negi (Japanese leek), and served at the place I ate it at with a slice of pickled radish and some minced ginger. And then there's the fact that jajamen is a two-phase dish! For after you've eaten the bulk of what you're first presented with, you give the bowl back to a staffer at the eatery that you have the dish at (which tend to be specialist eateries for jajamen!); whereupon they'll fill your bowl up with hot water, you crack a raw egg into it and turn the concoction into something akin to egg drop soup that you then are expected to drain for the complete jajamen experience!
While a modest dish (that's meatless), I enjoyed it quite a bit. And, in all honesty, if I lived in Morioka, I could see myself having it monthly, if not more often. But here's the thing: I think that it's one of those regional dishes (like Funabashi's sauce ramen, which I'd never have heard of if not for Funassyi!) that's next to impossible to find outside its home region/city/town! Which, really, is too bad!
Still, I also have to admit that in the (relatively) short time that I was in Morioka, I didn't eat it again. Because, well, there were other things I wanted to eat -- including the regional specialty of Sendai: gyutan (grilled ox tongue); which, funnily enough, I didn't have when I visited that city back in 2019 (because, then, I fixated more on the area's seafood)!
To be fair, I didn't expressly seek out gyutan while in Morioka either. But while scouting out places to eat for my final meal in the city, I passed a place serving up gyutan that had such great smells wafting out of it that I decided that was what I wanted to eat there and then!
And so hungry was I that I went for a deluxe option that consisted of gyutan served on a hot plate and covered in a sauce that appeared to be a blend of tomatoes and garlic and was very yummy indeed; a (smaller) dish of conventionally grilled ox tongue; a bowl of mugi gohan (barley rice); and a bowl of clear oxtail soup. Happily, I was able to do it all justice and polish off the lot! Oh, and all this was nicely washed down with a bottle of nicely crisp and refreshing Kawatabi Cold IPA, produced by the Kibou no Oka brewery in Iwanuma, over in the neighboring prefecture of Miyagi! :)
