Lesson Report: Four-Week Summer Course (Part2: 1-week PJD & Yakitori)
Mar 20, 2025
This article features Isabella, a 16-year-old from the United States, who is participating in the one-month Summer Course held in June. In the first half of this week, she will attend the Popular Japanese Dishes (PJD) Session for three days.
The PJD session begins with a Japanese-style curry. We take our time to meticulously prepare the ingredients, ensuring that each one’s flavor is fully enhanced to give the curry a rich, deep taste. Additionally, unlike cooking at home, we need to prepare a large quantity of curry for the restaurant. This style of curry is closer to traditional homemade Japanese curry, in contrast to the one she learned in the Ramen Session the previous week.
One of the challenges she faces during the process is the proper handling of a kitchen knife. Under the guidance of Instructor Obata, she learns how to hold the knife, use it safely, maintain the correct angle and orientation, and adopt the proper posture when cutting ingredients. She practices with such enthusiasm that, by the latter half of the lesson, she is able to cut ingredients thinly and steadily, little by little. She will continue practicing even more tomorrow and beyond.
The focus on the second day is popular dishes commonly prepared at home in Japan. It is important to cut the meat appropriately for each dish. Additionally, cutting meat requires different knife techniques compared to cutting vegetables.
The first dish is tonkatsu (deep-fried breaded pork cutlet). The pork is seasoned and coated with breadcrumbs. However, seeing and doing are quite different. This process requires a good deal of knowledge and skill to enhance the flavor of the tonkatsu.
Next, making shōgayaki (pork fried with ginger and soy sauce) involves the cutting of vegetables she has been practicing. She learns the necessary preparations to make the meat tender and deliciously seasoned.
Next is fluffy omu-rice (stir-fried rice wrapped in an omelet). When the omelet is sliced down the center, it fluffs up and drapes over the stir-fried rice. Isabella practices repeatedly, using dozens of eggs to make over 30 fluffy omelets! She says it is a lot of fun and never gets boring. She is eager to continue practicing the next day.
Finally, she practices cutting vegetables again. She begins slowly and carefully, gradually increasing her speed as she becomes more comfortable with the technique.
Day 3 primarily focuses on chicken dishes. She starts by cleaning and cutting the chicken according to the menu requirements.
Teriyaki chicken is a popular menu item. Did you know there’s a technique to achieve that beautiful shine? You can learn this secret in our Popular Japanese Dishes Course.
Next is karaage (deep-fried chicken), a favorite among everyone. It is important to keep several key points in mind during preparation. A little ingenuity in frying the chicken can make it even tastier!
This is another classic Japanese home-style dish called sukiyaki. Each restaurant or household has its own unique stock for flavoring the dish. Additionally, it is essential to put in extra effort to enhance the sukiyaki before adding ingredients such as meat and vegetables to the stock.
After that, she receives special training in vegetable cutting and making fluffy omelets. She shows remarkable improvement compared to the day before. If she continues practicing at home, her skills will only get better! We are delighted by her positive attitude toward the lessons.
Starting today, she moves to Heiwajima, Tokyo, for a two-day lesson on yakitori. The lesson begins with preparing tare, the essential sauce for yakitori. First, the tebasaki (wing tips) are cut and opened. The wing tips are not only skewered for grilling but also used to make the yakitori sauce. Afterward, stock is made from the cartilage and other parts of the wing tips. For yakitori restaurants, tare is as important as life itself—something that cannot be bought with money.
The next step is cutting various parts of the chicken and skewering them. This is a crucial process that requires a lot of technique. Properly cutting the meat determines how easy or difficult it will be to skewer and grill it later.
When skewering, it’s important to skewer the meat properly and ensure consistency in size across the yakitori pieces. This attention to detail helps ensure smoother grilling later.
After the yakitori lesson, Isabella kindly assists the staff at Instructor Teru’s Aburasoba restaurant named Tombo. She helps with washing dishes, boiling noodles, and draining them in the strainer. She also serves aburasoba to customers, cheerfully saying, “Omatase shimashita. Dōzo!” (Thank you for your patience. Here you are). Although it is an unexpected opportunity to participate in actual restaurant operations, she says with a smile that it’s a lot of fun.
On the final day of the Yakitori Session, thanks to Instructor Teru’s thoughtful arrangement, Isabella gets the opportunity to join the actual restaurant operation at Tombo and practice making ‘yakitori don” (a bowl of rice topped with yakitori) for customers as the special of the day. She begins the necessary preparations in the morning, starting with cutting the meat into pieces and skewering them.
Now, the restaurant opens! Since Tombo is a popular spot, customers continuously come in, one after another, ordering yakitori don. Even when she doesn’t receive orders for yakitori don, Isabella actively serves aburasoba to customers, just as she did the previous day.
Although the Yakitori Session lasts only two days, it turned out to be both intensive and enjoyable for Isabella. She has now become an aburasoba enthusiast. Even after returning to the States, she writes to us, saying that she still misses aburasoba very much.
