By MIKA OMURA/ Staff Writer
December 7, 2023 at 07:30 JST
Gyoza dumplings with garlic chive and egg (Photo by Atsuko Shimamura)
Editor’s note: In the Taste of Life series, cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.
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Across Japan, folksy Chinese restaurants are popping up with increasing frequency, offering local dishes that give the feel of being on a street corner in China.
Chinese people living in Japan gather to seek the flavors from home, while Japanese customers flock to casually enjoy these authentic dishes.
Ajibo, located in Tokyo’s Kanda district, is a forerunner of this trend. It is run by 60-year-old Liang Baozhang, who came here from the Chinese city of Qiqihar in 1995 and opened Ajibo in 2000.
It has since become known for serving the authentic home cooking of northeastern China, including lamb gyoza dumplings, simmered glass noodles and pickled fermented Chinese cabbage.
Yet Liang was not in the cooking profession from the start. In Qiqihar, he was a painter and used to teach painting.
His mother was a Japanese orphan left in China in the aftermath of World War II. After his grandmother, who raised her while hiding her roots, died, his mother decided to return to Japan.
Liang accompanied her along with his wife and child, his elder brother and his family. This was in 1995 and he was 32 at that time.
Although he worked hard part time, his income was unstable and Liang decided to open a small ramen noodle shop with his wife in Adachi Ward. It was a street corner eatery offering mapo tofu and fried rice as well.
The business was brisk and life became stable, but he realized that, “While Chinese food in Japan taste great, it’s very different from what I ate growing up.”
Hoping to introduce dishes from home to the Japanese, he closed the ramen restaurant and opened a new restaurant in Kanda.
“My mother was a good cook and her dishes form the basis of our flavors. After we opened the new restaurant, she would give us a hand,” he said.
Flour-based dishes were a specialty of his mother, whose gyoza dumplings with the springy wrapper were superb. When Liang was a child, she would whip up some mixture containing in-season vegetables and wrap it nimbly while asking him, “Is there anything you want to eat today?”
“In China, anything can go in the dumplings. Nothing is unfit and we are free to wrap any ingredient,” said the chef.
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Born in Qiqihar city in China's Heilongjiang province in 1963, Liang Baozhang is the owner of several Chinese restaurants. He came to Japan in 1995 and in 2000, opened Ajibo, a restaurant that offers home cooking from northeastern China at a railway underpass in Tokyo’s Kanda. The restaurant became so popular that he now runs 11 restaurants in Tokyo serving local dishes from various regions in China. He has a farm where he grows vegetables and sells lamb products and dim sum online.
BASIC COOKING METHOD
Main Ingredients (About 40 dumplings, serves 5)
250 grams flour, 250 grams garlic chive (nira), 4 eggs, 30 ml oil, 4 grams salt, 5 ml sesame oil, 20 prawns
1. Place flour in a bowl, add 120 ml water and mix. Form into a mass, place on a board and knead well. When surface becomes smooth, envelop in plastic wrap and leave for 1 hour.
2. Finely chop garlic chive.
3. Break eggs in bowl and mix. Add oil to frying pan, place on heat and pour in eggs. Make fine scrambled egg by mixing with chopsticks.
4. Mix (2) and (3) in bowl, add salt and sesame oil and mix thoroughly.
5. Rinse prawns and cut into bite-size pieces.
6. Form dough from (1) into a stick and cut into pieces each weighing about 10 grams.
7. Sprinkle flour on a board, press down on dough pieces by hand, roll out into circle with rolling rod to make wrapper.
8. Wrap (4) and (5) with wrapper and close opening.
9. Bring water to a boil in pot, add (8) and cook for 3 to 4 minutes. Serve with some vinegar.
About 360 kcal and 1.1 grams salt per portion
(Nutrient calculation by the Nutrition Clinic of Kagawa Nutrition University)
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