Twentythree

Two steps, one piece of cooking equipment, and zero problems.

The SoraNews24 office is, well, let’s call it “creatively cluttered.” That’s especially true at this time of year, when we’re still divvying up the contents of our annual lucky bag shopping spree.

As such, we’re not always able to keep a current tally of all the trinkets, gadgets, and other artifacts in our workspace. Still, we were pretty sure we didn’t have a “curry maker” appliance…or at least we were pretty sure we didn’t have one until a few days ago, when we stumbled across chatter online saying that you can cook curry in a rice cooker. Not only that, according to these rumors there’s virtually zero prep work involved in making the curry, and you don’t even need to add any water to the pot.

With this concept appealing to our base instincts of occasional laziness and consistent cravings for curry, we decided to test it out for ourselves, and procured the following ingredients:
● 2 tomatoes
● 1 onion
● 200 grams (7.1 ounces) of ground meat (we used the beef/pork mix commonly sold at Japanese supermarkets, but any kind of ground meat should work)
● 4 blocks of curry roux (equal to about 100 grams/3.5 ounces)

With those assembled, it was time to start cooking!

Step 1

Place all of the ingredients in the rice cooker.

Step 2

Close the lid and press the start button.

Step 3

Uh…there is no Step 3. That’s it. That’s all you have to do for this recipe.

If you want to get really nitpicky, we suppose you could say “Step 0” is to wash the tomatoes and peel off the very outer layer of the onion, but those are things you’d be doing regardless of what you’re using them for. Aside from that, though, there’s no prep to be done: no chopping, seasoning, or anything else.

However, seeing as how this was our first time making no-water rice cooker curry, and how sometimes our experiments don’t go as smoothly as we expect them to, we did add a Step 4, which was to have our Japanese-language reporter Seiji Nakazawa stay near our rice cooker as the curry cooked.

▼ If you don’t have access to a Seiji, feel free to substitute a Tommy, Sally, or any other good-natured person you can trust not only to make sure your kitchen appliances aren’t destroying themselves, but also not to steal your curry.

As the curry cooked, Seiji kept both an eye and ear out, monitoring for any unusual sights or sounds that would indicate some sort of problem or damage resulting from this unintended use of our rice cooker.

Luckily, no such problems occurred, although it turns out that sitting next to a rice cooker while it’s making curry can sort of mess with your sense of smell. According to Seiji’s notes, he started noticing the scent of curry drifting out of the rice cooker about 30 minutes into the cooking process, but by that point the aroma had already become much stronger to the senses of our other in-office staff that hadn’t been sitting with him in the same room for the whole time.

▼ “Whoa, smells like a straight-up curry restaurant in here!” said our writer P.K. Sanjun when he poked his head in to see how things were going.

In time, the rice cooker completed its standard cooking cycle, and it was time to see how our curry had turned out.

By the way, our rice cooker’s display in the photo above is displaying “0h.” as in “zero hours [left],” indicating that the cooking process is finished. It is not saying a subdued, unimpressed “ Oh “…but, ironically, that was pretty much our reaction when we opened up the lid.

That doesn’t look like curry at all, does it? Heck, it barley looks like food.

But…

…we grabbed a rice scoop and started stirring, and as we did the tomatoes and onion gently crumbled into smaller morsels, their moisture began mixing with the other ingredients. Before we knew it…

…we had curry!

OK, now it was time to see how it tasted! Let’s dish up a plate of rice, then pour on some curry and-

Oh, wait. We just used our rice cooker to make the curry…which means we didn’t use it to make any rice.

Thankfully, we had two easy solutions to this problem. After a quick run to the the nearby 7-Eleven, we had a piece of naan bread to dip into the roux, and we also had a pack of microwavable white rice that takes less than two minutes to heat up.

Now it was time to get this taste-test started…

…and it turns out no-water, all-rice cooker curry is really tasty!

Following our in-office rule of “He who sits by the curry as it cooks gets first taste,” taste-testing duties fell to Seiji, who reports that by not adding water to the pot when cooking the curry, the flavor of the roux is deep and direct. Everything was properly cooked, too, with no unexpected raw bits of meat or vegetable.

The result is a little different than orthodox Japanese-style curry, but honestly the rustic appearance makes it look like something you’d find on the menu at a stylish cafe on one of the backstreets leading off of Harajuku’s Omotesando shopping avenue.

There are, however, a couple things to bear in mind when following this rice cooker recipe. First, while tomatoes aren’t necessarily a must-have ingredient for Japanese curry, they might be mandatory for this cooking method. The curry roux, after all, needs some sort of liquid in order to soften and mix with the other ingredients, and in this recipe that’s being contributed by the interior moisture of the tomatoes, which got added to the pot when we broke them up with the rice scoop. With no tomatoes, odds are the roux wouldn’t “melt,” and you’d have just little curry roux chips and nothing tying the ingredients together.

Also, while the zero prep work is a big part of this recipe’s appeal, making curry this way does involve extra pot cleaning time afterwards, since some of the roux gets singed and sticks stubbornly to the inner surface.

We ended up having to scrub our rice cooker pot three times to get it all off, though in the end it looked spic and span once again.

And really, even if we had to give the rice cooker pot a triple wash, the fact that we had no knives, cutting boards, mixing bowls, or other things to wash means that this is still just about the fastest, most convenient way to cook curry that there is.

Photos ©SoraNews24
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Delicious difficulty added to the classic puzzle.

Of all the puzzles that I constantly get about 80 percent through and then give up, my favorite has to be the Rubik’s Cube. A timeless marriage of elegant design and mental exercise, these cubes have kept hands busy for generations, and now, they come with pictures of potato chips!

MegaHouse, Japan’s official licensee of Rubik’s Cube, has partnered with the country’s leading potato chip brand Calbee for a line of cubes bearing their most famous flavors. All your favorites are here, such as the Calbee Light Salt Flavor potato chips.

And even though they’re technically not “chips” in the traditional sense of the word, the extremely popular Jagariko Salad Flavor sticks and Kappa Ebisen shrimp-flavored sticks are also represented here.

▼ Jagariko Salad

▼ Kappa Ebisen

There’s also the heartier, kettle-fried Kata-age Potato Light Salt Flavor chips, and the legendary Pizza Potato chips that are so beloved a shortage caused resale prices to surge to tens of thousands of yen (hundreds of dollars) per bag.

▼ Kata-age Potato Light Salt Flavor

▼ Pizza Potato

And for those who really like a challenge, there’s one on which every side has pictures of piles of potato chips. Even the most seasoned cuber might struggle to keep track of the very subtle differences in each square to line them up correctly.

Although these are official Rubik’s Cube products, they are mini versions of the standard cube, measuring only 3.4 centimeters (1.3 inches) in height. They also come with key chains, so you can take them everywhere you go.

Die-hard fans of Jagariko might demand their game be in cup form, true to the product it’s based on. Luckily, MegaHouse has that covered with the Jagariko Shock!!! Mini. This is based on the currently available Jagariko Shock!!! game by the same company.

It works on a similar principle to Pop-Up Pirate, in that players take turns flipping up the lid and removing a stick. However, one unfortunate turn will result in all the sticks flying out at once. 

▼ In this version, it looks like you don’t remove sticks each time, considering the size. It’s just opening and closing the lid until it pops.

These games come in a range of flavors, including the Salad pictured above.

▼ Cheese

▼ Potato Butter

▼ Pollock Roe Butter

▼ Bacon Butter Soy Sauce Flavor

As the name suggests, these are also miniaturized versions of the real thing, only four centimeters tall. But they can also be clipped to bags and played anywhere, though I don’t recommend it anywhere since there’s a bit of cleanup involved.

Both mini toys are set to go on sale around the end of February, with the cubes going for 1,100 yen (US$7) each and the Jagariko Shock!!! Mini for 715 yen. If you can’t wait until then, you can always pick up a Calbee Snack Mahjong game for 2,178 yen from MegaHouse right now.

Anyone can enjoy these chips off the old block puzzle, proving that great things can come in small packages. Aside from mini four-player Othello, that is. We wouldn’t wish that on our worst enemy.

Source, images: PR Times
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We go looking for faults in this sounds-too-good-to-be-true Ikebukuro offer.

There’s no shortage of writers with healthy appetites on the SoraNews24 team, and as such we’ve rarely been accused of having eyes that are bigger than our stomachs. Our bank accounts, though, are of more modest sizes, and so we’re always on the lookout for a dining bargain, which is why the sign pictured above, which we came across in downtown Tokyo’s Ikebukuro neighborhood, immediately caught our attention.

There are three important pieces of information written on it:
● 30分 = 30 minutes
● 330円 = 330 yen
● ご飯とカレーが食べ放題 = All-you-can eat rice and curry

Honestly, that last one alone would have been enough to convince us to investigate further, but the offer of all-you-can-eat curry rice for just 330 yen (approximately US$2.10) was so compelling that our feet, almost without any conscious thought of our own, carried us through the entrance to the establishment.

However, it wasn’t a conventional restaurant or take-out joint offering this unbelievable deal, but the Ikebukuro branch of Customa Cafe, an Internet/manga cafe where the main draw, ostensibly, is supposed to be the banks of computers available for online browsing and gaming, plus the racks of collected manga volumes and magazines to read.

And the offer got more enticing still when we saw a poster hanging in the stairwell that leads up to the cafe’s front door, which revealed that you can actually get all-you-can-eat curry rice for just 220 yen (US$1.40) if you sit at an open counter seat instead of a private booth.

But..there had to be some sort of catch, right? As we walked through the door, we braced ourselves for our hopes to be dashed in at least one of several different ways. Maybe Customa Cafe had an exorbitant membership/sign-up fee. Maybe they gave you a tiny bowl, only big enough for a few mouthfuls of rice, and had some super-slow process for refills so you couldn’t get more than one serving in 30 minutes. Maybe the place was so filthy that you wouldn’t want to eat a single bite of the food, let alone enough to fill yourself up.

It only took a second to confirm that cleanliness actually wasn’t a concern, though, as the place was clean and tidy. However, as we walked up to the counter and said we wanted to use one of the open-counter seats (or “opun seki,” as they’re called in Japanese) for 30 minutes, sure enough, the clerk asked if we were Customa Cafe. Members

However, this turned out to not be a problem at all. The only reason they asked is because if you are a member, you can get three percent of your bill back as credit to be used on a future visit. You don’t need to be a member to use the cafe, nor is it a requirement for the 220-yen all-you-can-eat curry rice offer (and if you do want to become a member, there’s no sign-up or annual fee).

With that settled, we quickly made our way to the self-serve curry rice corner. This is when we learned that Customa Cafe actually supplies two kinds of rice: regular white steamed rice, and takikomi gohan, a kind of rice dish in which seasonings and other ingredients are cooked together with the rice inside the rice cooker.

We had arrived exactly at noon, and while the new batch of white rice wasn’t quite ready yet, there was plenty of takikomi gohan, which on this day was a kind of pseudo-fried rice with egg and pork, and the consistency of a rice pilaf. Following the established protocol for plating Japanese curry rice, we put rice on one side of our plate, and the roux on the other.

The takikomi gohan and curry went together extremely well, and we were very happy to find that the curry was properly rich and flavorful, not some watery, bland sham roux. The provided plates, while not huge, aren’t small either, giving you a respectably sized portion but also leaving you with enough space for the fun of going back for a refill, and by the time we were ready for our second plate, the white rice was ready too.

Having quickly gobbled down plates of curry rice, we were, as you might expect, feeling pretty thirsty…and that’s when it hit us that Customa Café’s 220-yen all-you-can-eat-curry-rice is even more incredible than we’d initially realized, since admission to the cafe also comes with unlimited self-serve drink bar privileges!

There’s a wide variety of beverages to pick from too, including orange juice, cola, melon soda, Calpis, coffee, green tea, and black tea. They even had a sweet strawberry au lait dessert drink and corn and onion broth soups, as simple soups are sometimes treated like parts of the beverage category in Japan.

In addition to three plates of curry rice, we got ourselves a cup of orange juice, and polished off our meal with a relaxing coffee. And yes, the total for this was just 220 yen, with no string attached.

There are still a few things to keep in mind if you’re going to grab a bite to eat at Customa Cafe, though. One is that after your initially requested stay time, the charge to extend is 130 yen for each additional 10 minutes. Because of that, if you initially ask for an open seat for 30 minutes, but end up staying an hour, your bill will come to 610 yen. That’s still a bargain for all-you-can-eat curry rice with unlimited drinks, but if you know ahead of time that you’re going to want to stay for a full hour, if you request a seat for 60 minutes right from the start., it’ll only cost you 440 yen. Also, if instead of an open seat you’d like a private booth, prices for those start at 330 yen for 30 minutes of 660 yen for 60. Finally, ordinarily Customa Cafe only has white rice until 5 p.m., but they’re currently running a promotion where they start serving it as noon, but that’s only for a limited, unspecified period of time.

In any case, though, you really can get all-you-can-eat curry rice in downtown Tokyo for just 220 yen, which is a shockingly good deal, and with Customa Cafe also having branches elsewhere in Tokyo, plus in neighboring Saitama and Chiba Prefectures, it’s a great place to keep in mind if your stomach is empty and/or your wallet is light.

Location information
Customa Cafe (Ikebukuro Nishiguchi branch) / カスタマカフェ（池袋西口店）
Address: Tokyo-to, Toshima-ku, Nishi Ikebukuro 1-21-13
東京都豊島区西池袋1-21-13
Open 24 hours
Website

Photos ©SoraNews24
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