Kyoto Fair (1) - Variety of soy products

Kyoto is the former capital of Japan and has many cultural heritages including food. I’ve heard that there are many vegetarian restaurants in the city, which may be partly because of Buddhist tradition. Though many Buddhist monks eat meat nowadays, there are still temples where you can have vegetarian meals. Their dishes feature a variety of soy products that help them obtain protein.

Entetsu Department Store has Kyoto Fair now. I was looking forward to it, because I expected to find many kinds of traditional vegan-friendly food there.

The fair was crowded with people when I went there during lunch time yesterday. It was unexpected because it was not a holiday. As I strolled through stands, I heard elegant dialect of Kyoto from several shops. One of them was Kyonoyukihonpo (京乃雪本舗) that sold various soy products, and I bought ganmodoki for dinner.

I have already introduced them before as “pseudo-goose” in this blog. They are fried tofu balls with vegetables. The ones I found in the fair were rather big and had hu or wheat gluten inside. They looked like this. The pink things are the wheat gluten, which has a shape of a cherry blossom.

Last time, I grilled ganmodoki and ate them with soy sauce and garlic. But this time, I cooked it with tomatoes, garlic, and salt.

They were not bad. The flavor of tomatoes matched them, and the wheat gluten inside was soft and elastic. But I still thought that it was better to grill them. Fortunately, there are still two pieces left.

In the fair, there were some other shops that sold soy products. One of them was Yubaya (湯葉弥) that specializes in yuba or soy milk skins. They provide raw yuba, dried yuba, yuba cooked with other ingredients, and so on. I bought fried rolled yuba with pickled plums and shiso or Japanese basil.

I ate them with soy sauce. The flavors of the plums and shiso were not so strong. I thought they might be suitable to eat with beer though I can’t drink alcohol so much.

Yesterday was March 15, the day of “FridayForFuture.” It is a school strike movement that was started by a Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. Many young people in more than 120 countries in the world participated in it, responding Greta’s call. They required world leaders to take actions for global warming. In Japan, people gathered in Tokyo and Kyoto. It was inspiring. I wish those participated in FridayForFuture are or will become vegetarians or vegans because it is inevetable to reduce consumption of meat if you really want to stop climate change. Greta is a vegan and travels to other European countries by trains instead of airplanes. She is a girl of her word.