Japanese convinience stores are in their own right legendary and on top of that sesonally
they have extra legendary things!
Oden!
Many people don't know how to approach it, how
to order it, how to eat it so that's what we're gonna explain today! And you can't
blame them cuz it looks like... well... you'll see in a second!
My first two years I was kinda scared of it
To me the ingredients in oden look like decorations from the bottom
of an aquarium so I absolutely do not blame myself!
Trying to be cute?
Yeah, I'm trying to get my instagram photo
In our region, in Tokyo, it's based on dashi, bonito flakes,
conbu seaweed, so it's the basic Japanese soup stock that you can find
and in this soup
stock you have many different ingredinets and this depends on the store you go to
The items in oden,
they're soaked for an extremely long time so they take on the flavour of the oden
so for example, you have egg in here it's not just normal egg anymore it's now
egg that tastes deeply like oden
How would you describe the taste of oden?
Umm I'd say it's very light
It's not screaming like...
TASTE ME I'M REALLY SPICY!
It mainly warms you up then leaves like a lot of umami flavour in your mouth
So this is the classic type
of umami soup that you can find in Japan You can kinda forget that you're having a convinience
store meal because it can be pretty deep!
In general, convinience store food in Japan
is WAY better than convinience store food in ANYWHERE else in the world
So in some convinience
stores it's self-service, in some the staff does it for you in which case we're gonna
teach you the words for what to order! If it's self-service, you have prongs and you
pick up the items and put them into a container There's usually a choice of size, we've got
the biggest one cuz we wanted to show you as much as possible
And then afterwards you
pour the soup stock in with a ladle
It's gonna be a little awkward if you don't speak Japanese
because they actually expect you to list what you have inside but then the person working
in the conbini just gonna look into your bowl and kinda eyeball how many things you have
but if you have a lot they're gonna be confused and you're gonna be confused
it's slightly awkward!
My tip is if you self-service make sure that all of them are visible, so that
the staff can just count it up for you
For example, in ours today we have a WIENER at
the bottom here that the guy couldn't see and we almost stole it!
You want a WIENER?
Yea!
But then I told them that we have it at the bottom
It's a deep fried tofu pouch
it's held together like this little type of coin purse! With more tofu, it's like
This is my favourite...
not true
it has literally not calories or nutritional value so it's
basically empty volume that you're putting inside your body
this thing usually has absolutely
no flavour so soaking it in a soup stock is the only way of having it taste like anything
This is egg!
So it's different than a regular egg obviously it's like a egg omelet
Egg is my favourite so I could not not get it
The most basic ingredient is the daikon radish
is if you wanna be a traditionalist about your oden bowl, you can take it
Here's yudetamago,
tamago means just EGG in Japanese but yudetamago is like marinated?
FISHCAKE! You can remember
that 'yaki' in Japanese means cooked or grilled
This one is konbumaki, konbu is
part of what makes up the dashi favour in the soup stock and it is usually very very
hard so this one is super soaked and you can actually bite into it
This is shuumai, like
a Chinese dumpling with some minced meat inside
This is shirataki, konnyaku pasta or noodle
Wiener!
Sasuage is not that great
Let's be honest, most of these things taste
kinda similar because they've been soaking in the same soup for the last twelve hours...
or more I don't know
If you're in Japan, remember that you can get oden only between September
and March more/less at some point, the oden stalls just disappear and you just won't find
them in the summer don't look for them
don't!
don't
in the summer... just don't!
Don't be going around asking questions about oden in the summer