What is This? 7

Spotted: At Nishiki Food Market, Kyoto's ancient heaven for gourmet foodies and restauranteurs. What could thin, translucent sheets hanging in a messy room filled with creamy puddles of mysterious liquid be doing in a place that became famous for selling the food used to feed the emperor?


Answer: I took this picture in the back room of a 200 year old "yuba" shop in Nishiki Food Market. Yuba is a type of soy product made from very thin sheets of congealed soy water/tofu that is skimmed off the top. The process starts with raw soybeans that are soaked in water overnight and then put in a machine to grind them into a paste. The paste then goes in to another machine and is made in to very soft tofu that is taken out and put on top of those copper basins to be heated. Under the surface of each copper basin flows boiling water and steam that heats the tofu so as not to burn it. When the tofu boils down, it starts to congeal again after a while (kind of like the grease on the surface of Campbell's chicken noodle soup). The workers then take the thin sheet of yuba off the heat and hang it to dry it out. It takes less time to dry it out during the summer than in the winter, but most people eat yuba in the winter when the dried pieces are thrown into boiling "nabe" pots and become soft again.


Women rolling up the dried yuba into attractive and easily transportable bundles


The wonderful staff at Yubakichi Kyoto, est. 1790