By: Rénald Fortier
Ingenium – Canada's Museums of Science and Innovation
Oodles and oodles of noodles from the land of the rising sun: A brief look at konjac and shirataki noodles – as well as glue and gunpowder, but I digress
A konjac plant before (1) and during its flowering stage. The flower and corm / bulbo-tuber / bulbotuber, which is edible once detoxified, are identified by the numbers 2 and 3. Henri Coupin, “Légumes japonais.” La Nature, 5 November 1904, 356.
Kon’nichiwa, o genkidesu ka? O genkida to kiite ureshīdesu. Shitsumon ga arimasu. Junbi wa īdesu ka? Atarashī tabemono o tamesu no wa sukidesu ka? Mezurashī tabemono wa sukidesu ka?
In other words, hello, how are you? Glad to hear you are doing well. I have a question for you. Are you ready? Do you like trying new foods? Do you like unusual foods?
Good for you.
I shall be brief today and… Who dares to laugh in our presence? Who? Anyway, let us move on, but there will be a test, at the end of this edition of our astonishing blog / bulletin / thingee.
Like you, yours truly likes to try new foods, unusual ones at times, which is a tad strange. You see, when I was young, in ancient times, before the wheel was invented, I was very finicky. I was the child who insisted that his sandwiches be provided without crust, and that tomatoes with a hard and fibrous core, raw onions and meat fat be banned from any and all food items. To make a long story short, I was a real pain.
As I grew up, I overcame my crustophobia, yes, yes, crustophobia, it is a real word, look it up, but not now. Where was I? Oh yes, I overcame my crustophobia but, to this day, tomatoes with a hard and fibrous core, raw onions and meat fat are not among my favourite things, if I may be permitted to paraphrase, out of context, the title character in the 1964 American musical fantasy comedy film Mary Poppins. I can only stomach bacon that is massively crispy, for example.
Having to pay for one’s own food, especially in restaurants, especially when one is not awash in moolah, is an effective cure for finickiness. I can certainly vouch for that, but I digress.
Oddly enough, as finicky as yours truly undoubtedly is, I have been known to try unusual foods. A case in point would be Näak protein / energy bars made with… cricket powder. I was rather fond of those Québec products, which brought to mind the expression “C’est bon, ta barre Näak,” sorry, sorry (Hello, EP!), but they quickly vanished from the shelves of my favourite organic and health food store. I wonder why.
Mind you, I also wonder why my colleagues at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum, in Ottawa, Ontario, did not share my enthusiasm. After all, is there really that much difference between a big Acheta domesticus and a small Pandalus borealis, in other words between a big house cricket and a small northern prawn?
My apologies for the rather vulgar pun I foisted upon you. Said pun was based upon the fact that the expression “C’est bon, ta barre Näak,” in English it is good, your Näak bar, uses the most profane of the profanities used by many francophone Quebecers, namely t*b*rn*k!, a word derived from the word tabernacle, a fixed and locked box located in a Christian church in which consecrated communion hosts are stored, but back to our story.
At the risk of overstepping the limits of good taste, widespread entomophagy would be a good thing for the planet. After all, crickets need 8.5 times less food, 13 times less water and 21 times less soil than is needed to produce the same amount of bovine protein. Crickets also provide twice the calcium of milk, twice the iron of spinach and 10 times the vitamin B12 of salmon. Anyway, let us move on.
A bowl of shirataki noodles, September 2015. Susan Slater, via Wikipedia.
An unusual food that yours truly first tried several years ago is known as shirataki. Those translucent, gelatinous and chewy Japanese noodles, also known as shirataki noodles / miracle noodles and, in ancient times (1960s) as cellophane noodles / yam noodles, are made from the corm / bulbo-tuber / bulbotuber of a perennial plant known as konjac / konjak / konjaku / konnyaku but also as devil’s tongue / elephant yam / konnyaku potato / snake palm / voodoo lily.
A corm, by the way, is a short and swollen underground stem that a plant uses to store food which it uses to survive adverse conditions (heat, drought, cold, etc.).
Yours truly would love to tell you that the French language contains equally juicy nicknames for konjac but that is unfortunately not the case. Nom de dieu de p… Sorry, sorry.
To quote the Merovingian, an old and powerful computer program, a real rogue in fact, who exists within the Matrix, I love the French language. Fantastic language. Especially to curse with. Unilingual anglophones simply do not know what they are missing, but I digress. Again.
Amorphophallus konjac, to use the binomial scientific name I peremptorily choose to use, is a relative of the Indonesian plant which produces the largest cluster of flowers on planet Earth, the titan arum or, as it is also known, the corpse flower / corpse plant. Said inflorescence, deep red in colour and rather warm to the touch, can be more than 3 metres (almost 10 feet) tall, by the way.
And no, my hyperosmian reading friend, the titan arum is not called the corpse plant because its smells of roses, but we digress.
Half a dozen konjac plants in full bloom, Flower Factory, Stoughton, Wisconsin, April 2012. James Steakley via Wikipedia.
A typical konjac plant is much smaller than its cousin, by the way, having a 1 or so metre (a tad more than 3 feet) stem crowned by a single leaf subdivided in many leaflets. The small and insignificant flowers of the konjac can be found on a single modified leaf known as a spathe which emerges from the stem once the leaf has fallen. They produce equally small and insignificant fruits which happen to be red.
And you have a question, do you not, my reading friend with a very keen sense of observation? That is just what I was afraid of. The konjac plants in the photograph above do not look much like the konjac plant in the drawing at the beginning of this article, you say? That is indeed the case. You see, the plant in the drawing carrying the number 1 was one which had not yet reached its flowering stage, but back to our story.
Would you believe that the various European botanists who came across konjac plants in their natural environments from the 1850s onward gave it a bewildering variety of names? We have already come across Amorphophallus. How about Arisoma, Arizaema, Canophallus, Dracontium, Genophallus, Hydrosme, Iapeinophallus and Proteinophallus?
Were those very respectable Victorian age botanists harbouring certain thoughts when they came across konjac plants, you ask, my facetious reading friend? Yours truly will not touch that with a 3.047851265 metre (10 feet) pole. Let us move on.
Even though konjac likes to grow in shaded areas of warm and moist regions of our big blue marble, in East and Southeast Asia, it can also grow in parcels of poor-quality land where any attempt to grow some rice, wheat or almost anything besides weeds actually, would end in failure.
Interestingly, not too many animals feast on konjac corms, and…
Now, now, my easily spooked reading friend, do not run away. I am not trying to poison you. This being said (typed?), yours truly must admit that konjac corms have a strong and somewhat unpleasant odor as well as a pungent and acrid flavour which causes a very unpleasant and persistent tingling in the back of the throat.
To be blunt, konjac corms contain a toxic chemical which must be removed by mixing the flour made from said corm with water and milk of lime / lime water / alkaline water. Once treated, that flour can be turned into cakes, drinks, noodles, the aforementioned shirataki noodles actually, etc.
Incidentally, in past years, the flour in question could be obtained by drying the corms in the sun, removing their rough skin with a bamboo spatula and cutting them into thin slices with some sort of plane. Said slices were slid on bamboo skewers and dried in the sun. The dried slices were then crushed in small pieces, then milled into a fine greyish powder, the aforementioned konjac flour, in a mortar, using a water wheel. The flour could be sifted, of course. The waste products of the entire process were used as a fertiliser.
Mind you, the process undoubtedly evolved over time.
The flour can be produced from 1- to 5-year-old corms. Older corms are certainly larger, weighing up to 2 kilogrammes (almost 4.5 pounds) in the case of a 3-year-old one, but their quality does not always compare with that of their younger and more tender 1-year-old siblings, which weigh 75 to 100 grammes (2.5 to 3.5 or so ounces).
The translucent noodles we are interested in contain about 97% water and only about 3% konjac, with teeny tiny traces of sugar, starch, protein, minerals, etc. In turn, the konjac contains a water-soluble and indigestible dietary fibre, glucomannan.
As you might have guessed, shirataki noodles contain very little in the way of calories, digestible carbohydrates, food energy, fat and sodium. They also have very little flavour. Mind you, they do absorb a lot of water as they proceed down one’s digestive track, giving their consumer a sweet feeling of fullness.
Given all that, shirataki noodles are said to be of some use to people with allergies, diabetes or weight issues. I cannot say if that is true. I am not a health professional.
Often sold in containers filled with lime water, shirataki noodles only need to be rinsed before they can be doused with your favourite pasta sauce and, presumably, some type of protein.
And yes, I do realise that the dousing in question might be contraindicated for people with allergies, diabetes or weight issues.
By the way, the rinsing washes away the slightly bitter taste and funky smell of the noodles. Bon appétit, everyone!
Incidentally, I am told that shirataki noodles can be provided with a more pasta-like consistency by dry roasting them for a minute or so, over high heat, in a well-oiled or nonstick skillet.
Mind you, in more ancient times and perhaps still today, the noodles could be sold in dried form. Those dried noodles needed to spend 10 or so minutes in boiling water before they could be put to use.
Personally, yours truly much prefers high protein pasta made from chickpeas to shirataki noodles, but that is just me. Actually, it is not just me. There are plenty of people out there who simply cannot stomach shirataki noodles.
Before I forget, you may wish to note that the expression cellophane noodles you came across a few moments ago, a strangely appropriate expression given the final words of the previous paragraph, was used and is still used to describe transparent noodles made with water and starch (mung bean starch, potato starch, tapioca starch, etc.) And yes, my knowledgeable reading friend, such noodles are also called glass noodles.
I first ate shirataki noodles several years ago and still eat some, once in a while, during the (in)famous heatwaves which have plagued Ottawa since times immemorial, when cooking pasta on the stove raised the temperature in my humble abode beyond my level of comfort. Mind you, preserving a modicum of decency was also a consideration.
And yes, I heat the pasta sauce in my trusty microwave oven. I also add proteins to the noodles and pasta sauce.
Mind you, again, I make sure to drink a lot of water when consuming those noodles. At least, that was what I read online and we all know that anything read online is true. The Earth is flat, saurians / reptoids / reptiloids / reptilians / lizard people / draconians / archons rule the world and the current American administration sent hurricanes toward states controlled by its political opponents, profound statements which happen to be illustrations of well-known aphorisms. You know… If people throw enough mud at a wall, some of it will stick and people believe what they want to believe.
To paraphrase, out of context, a mischievous and adventurous 6-year-old American human named Calvin, and at the risk of overstepping a second time the limits of good taste, the people who believe such things are not dumb. They just have a command of thoroughly useless, and thoroughly false, information, but back to our story.
By the way, did you know that the book Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, originally entitled Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, was originally published, in 3 volumes, by the Scottish anthologist / author / journalist / novelist / poet / songwriter Charles Mackay, between October and December… 1841? I kid you not, but I digress.
Interestingly enough, though, konjac corms can be used to produce a very effective glue. Again, bon appétit, everyone!
Mind you, err, again, those same corms have been used or might still be used to produce medicinal capsules, toilet goods, artificial leather, cough medicine, germ growing medium and, I am told, gunpowder. I kid you not.
Incidentally, the glue produced using corms which had not been treated with lime water could be used to produce paper which was said to repel paper-ravaging critters. Better yet, paper treated with that glue could be used in the fabrication of umbrellas and waterproof clothing. Mind you, that same glue could also be used to starch fabric.
Speaking (typing?) of glue, konjac flour formed the basis of a jelly produced by putting said flour in boiling water containing hydrated lime or wood ash. Once desiccated, that jelly was sold in bars of varying size. Throwing one such bar in hot water turned it back into a jelly devoid of nutritional value which could then be eaten.
I would be remiss if I did not mention at this point that the author of the article in which I found the drawing which allowed me to offer you this mouth-watering article, namely Henri Eugène Victor Coupin, was an esteemed, gifted and prolific French botanist / science populariser / writer active between the 1890s and the 1920s. Now back to our story.
Konjac corms were seemingly first tuned into food items in the countries known today as China and / or Myanmar.
Mind you, those corms have been used in China for more than 2 000 years to treat asthma, burns, persistent cough, hernias, as well as blood and skin disorders.
As far as can be ascertained, konjac was first described, as a medicinal herb, in Shennong Bencaojing / Shen-nung Pen-tsao Ching, the earliest monograph on Chinese medicine known to exist, compiled between the start of 2nd century before the common era and the start of the 1st century of the common era (CE).
No one knows precisely when konjac arrived in Japan but it certainly arrived by sea, Japan being an archipelago. Some think that this plant reached Japan before the common era, while others hold the view that it got there in the 6th or 7th centuries CE, seemingly as some sort of medicine. Others still think that konjac reached the shores of Japan during the 10th century CE.
The Japanese seemingly turned konjac corms into food items no later than the late 13th or early 14th centuries. And no, yours truly does not know when the Chinese first turned konjac flour into food items. They presumably did so before their Japanese neighbours, however.
Initially, in Japan, food items prepared with konjac corms were high-quality items given as gifts to samurai and members of the nobility.
According to some, konjac corms began to form the basis of broadly distributed Japanese food products when people associated with the Mito Tokugawa branch of the Tokugawa clan, which ran Japan at the time, developed a method of drying and separating the aforementioned glucomannan from the starch and cellulose of the corms. This allowed the konjac flour thus produced to be stored and distributed to the common people of Japan.
When did that development take place, you ask, my delightfully curious reading friend? A good question. That development took place at some point between the 17th and 19th centuries. Maybe. The name of a non noble by the name of Nakajima Tōemon was mentioned in that regard.
Mind you, some people seem to think that mass production of konjac flour began only in the 1930s. Let us not forget, the population of Japan increased by about 30 % between 1920 and 1940. Worse still, arable land was not exactly plentiful in that country.
And yes, my foodie reading friend, konjac was indeed mentioned in Japanese cookbooks. One only needs to mention Konnyaku Hyakuchin, published in 1846. That cookbook was one of the so-called Hyakuchin-mono, or one hundred recipes of delightful tastes, a series of cookbooks published in response to the amazing popularity of the bestselling cookbook Tofu Hyakuchin, originally published in 1782.
Tofu… Not one of my favourite things, but I digress.
Mind you, konjac cooking methods were mentioned as early as 1697 in a Japanese multi volume herbal medicine book, Honchō Shokkan.
The first mentions of the word konjac, in relation to food that is, that yours truly could find in Canadian newspapers dated from 2004-05. They were linked to a Taiwanese eatery located in Montréal, Québec, and a Chinese vegetarian eatery located in Vancouver, British Columbia.
This being said (typed?), yours truly also found the word konjac in the 1980s, especially in 1982-83, in a great many daily and weekly newspapers published throughout the United States and Canada – and probably elsewhere.
The word in question was in advertisements which extolled the virtues of a miracle compound found in konjac. Absorbed in capsules, glucomannan allegedly helped people lower their blood pressure and cholesterol level, lose excess weight, improve their digestion and skin condition, and become more regular in their bowel movements. I kid you not.
Would you believe that many, if not most of the advertisements in question contained a photograph of a lovely, smiling, tall and thin young woman wearing a bikini?
As was the case with virtually all so-called miracle products, the glucomannan bubble quickly withered, a mixed metaphor I will admit.
This being said (typed?), again, the word shirataki, sometimes described as Japanese vermicelli or as devil’s tongue noodles, was mentioned in Canada well before that.
Would you believe that recipes for items referred to as shirataki sayonara and beef sukiyaki could respectively be found in November 1957 and August 1958 issues of The Calgary Herald of… Calgary, Alberta, and The Gazette, of Montréal? Another beef sukiyaki recipe could be found in a September 1963 issue of the French language newspaper Le Devoir, also published in Montréal.
And if you thought that was early, please note that a beef sukiyaki recipe could be found in a September 1935 issue of a daily newspaper published in what was then the Territory of Hawaii / Panalāʻau o Hawaiʻi.
Mind you, the beef sukiyaki recipe found in Roscoe Conkling Crosby Gaige’s 1939 New York World Fair’s Cook Book – The American Kitchen included a medium tin of shirataki noodles, described therein as yam potato noodles, amusingly mistyped as yarn potato noodles, in the original text.
The tins in question were presumably imported from Japan, until all exports from that country came to a crashing halt in December 1941, when the Japanese armed forces attacked the United States.
By the way, Gaige was a high-profile American epicurean / theatre producer / socialite / writer with several books on food and drinks under his belt.
Any epicurean hailing from the dominion of Canada trying to prepare a meal using the recipes mentioned above would have encountered some difficulties, however. Shirataki noodles were not exactly easy to find in the great white north in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Indeed, they were probably not easy to find in Canada before the 2000s, and then only in large cities. The absence of those noodles in many locations presumably forced our epicurean to use other types of noodles – or pick another recipe.
Before I forget, the shirataki sayonara recipe mentioned above was provided by the American actress Miiko Taka, born Miiko Shikata, best known for her co-starring role in the very popular 1957 American romantic drama film Sayonara, a moniker which explained the name given to her recipe. Taka’s love interest in the film was none other than the far better known American actor / activist Marlon Brando, Junior.
And that is it for today. As promised, yours truly was indeed brief.
And now, the test. You thought I had forgotten that, now, did you not? Well, gotcha!
What does the word shirataki mean? Humm, humm… What does it mean? To quote, out of context, the diminutive Jedi grand master Yoda, do or do not; there is no try. Still nothing? The Japanese word shirataki means white waterfall. Poetic, is it not?
Ta ta for now.
Rénald Fortier
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