00:00:01 John Daub: Hello everybody, welcome! We are about at Pyonpyon-sha. How you doing? We're here in Iwate Prefecture, Morioka City. This is a really famous yakiniku restaurant, but they're famous for a noodle, and today we're going to be introducing you to reimen (冷麺, cold noodles). Reimen is not ramen. It's reimen. It's a completely different kind of noodle, and I'm pretty excited to introduce this to you. A lot of people might never have heard of this noodle before. It's very famous here in Iwate.

00:00:34 John Daub: So we're going to go inside and taste it, and actually get a chance to go inside the kitchen and watch them make it. Let's try it. I'm so excited about this live stream here.

00:00:57 John Daub: Alright, I want to introduce you to Cody. Cody has an Instagram and YouTube called Ramen Guide Japan, right? Yep. Yeah, I run an Instagram and a YouTube called Ramen Guide Japan, and I write about ramen and other types of noodles around Japan.

00:01:16 Cody: Awesome. Today we're going to be trying this. I think we got here some reimen, right? Yep.

00:01:23 John Daub: Oh, there it is right there. Oh, wow. So this is a completely different kind of noodles. It's not made with wheat. It's made with regular flour. It's a Korean-style noodle. I think it originally is from North Korea, and it got brought over to Japan probably about 50-60 years ago. And a little bit of the ingredients have changed over time to adjust with available ingredients that you'll see in Japan. But yeah, it's mainly a Korean dish, and it's something that's looking forward to eating.

00:02:00 John Daub: I'm getting up and I signal Cody because we're going to go right into the kitchen now, and we're going to watch them make reimen from the start. Masks on. Here we go. Konnichiwa. Whoa, you can see that they're boiling the noodles over here. So first, in this bowl here, they're going to be mixing the flour in with some water. So it's pretty basic, isn't it? Inside of here. Yeah, and everything's made from scratch as well. I love that. Made to order. You can see there's the kitchen right there. Oh, they're going to start just like right now. Look at this. Oh, this is awesome.

00:02:53 John Daub: Just a quick little plug on the JR East Welcome Rail Pass 2020. I'm here in Morioka on this pass. It's really cool. It's available until the end of February, and that's my passport into getting into Morioka here. Nothing like a Shinkansen ride and some reimen. I'm really excited about this.

00:03:18 John Daub: Look at this. So right now we're in the process of making reimen noodles. So basically it was the flour that you saw there, and it looks like a kilogram of flour and then 500 cc of water. Oh, that's simple. It's pretty simple. And you can see here, I noticed this before. Look at the power move, right? You have the foot in the back pushing the power into it. The technique is really neat to see to put that effort in there. Freshly made noodles folks. This is a real treat here. Chomp. I think the chomp takes a lot of muscle. I think it does and you can stay in shape making noodles. Making noodles is not an easy thing when you do it by hand like this. Again, there's no machine at this restaurant which makes it so special. And again Morioka is famous for having three noodles. This is one of them: reimen.

00:05:05 John Daub: Okay, so it was about 750 in here. Next it goes into this press. This is awesome. So on the wall here, I don't know if you had noticed it but the timer has started. Two minutes 45 seconds. And it's very strictly done as soon as you cut and put it in there. Turn it a little bit start the timer. So it's about three minutes in total. This is how amazing it is from flour and water to your mouth. The whole process in general takes about eight minutes to get from making it all the way to eating it. And I think you're going to experience a level of freshness that we are not used to being city boys.

00:06:53 John Daub: Hey, the Panda photographers here. Thanks for joining us and thank you. I'm so happy you guys can join us for this. John Wakamatsu is in the house. Somebody's hungry. I see Brian de Paula was here before. I'm doing pretty good, kind of hungry. He's adding a little bit of water over there to cool it down. But what is really interesting about reimen is the next step here, the next step involves that tub of ice. Okay, so that's going to be coming here. So we have about a minute left on this thing here. Cody let's switch. Here's the soup, right?

00:07:45 Cody: Yeah, that's the beef bone soup. We'll explain that in a second.

00:07:50 John Daub: Is this gluten-free? I don't think so. Yeah, it's very interesting here. This is a beef bone broth, which is unusual for ramen. I guess you would find this only in reimen or some of the other noodle dishes here in Morioka. Everything is very regional. This is very famous here in Morioka. And in fact, I would say like reimen pretty much is exclusive to Morioka. You can find it elsewhere, but this style is a Morioka exclusive. This is the Morioka style of reimen, right?

00:08:46 John Daub: We seem to be at the end here. Thanks so much. If you guys want to see us get click the thumbs up button. Let's see if we get the thousand likes during this livestream. Again, this is a mobile livestream 720p. That's what we're limited to for everybody joining us. You're watching this live the making of reimen not ramen, reimen. Now the word "rei" actually it's used as like reitōko (冷凍庫), which is a freezer. So "rei" means kind of ice. So that's how we get the name reimen, which means it's a cold noodle dish.

00:09:52 John Daub: Joining me on this adventure over there is Cody from Ramen Guide Japan. This isn't soba flour. It's just normal flour, right? With a little bit of a gelatin in it. All right, we can see it. It is shocked now. It's been boiled and now they just quickly want to cool it down. And this is shocking the noodles here. Now this is the centrifuge get rid of some of the water there. And now we get to this step here. Looks like they got a lot of bowls to make it is now lunchtime here. So a lot of customers are coming in here, but we have access to get in here before the lunch rush, which is pretty exciting.

00:11:15 John Daub: Oh, the presentation is so good. Look at this. I love this. Then the ingredients we have here a hard-boiled egg some cucumbers. This looks like some beef here some beef chashu steak right there. Some negi (green onions) and nashi pear (梨梨, Asian pear) and that's these are seasonal fruits that they add in there and then some beef dashi on top of it. Whoa, beautiful and some sesame and on the side there we have some kimchi that you can add yourself as you like with spice.

00:12:05 John Daub: I think it must very cool to get a chance to take a look inside of the kitchen and how they make the reimen wasn't that pretty interesting?

00:12:13 Cody: Yeah, that's it.

00:12:18 John Daub: Now we get to eat it. Cody, we want to eat it here, right?

00:12:22 Cody: Yeah.

00:12:24 John Daub: All right. Let's have a seat. Welcome. Thanks for joining us for lunch everybody. All right, beautiful restaurant. Hi Rosa. I'm so excited. All right, just a little note. We've been taking our temperature for 14 days and have been tested. So we're all good temperature checks. This reimen is really really special again. It's really famous here in Morioka. So that's why we come all this way because I travel for food.

00:13:36 John Daub: That's somebody else's line. Is that Mark Wiens? I don't know. I travel for food. Am I going to get sued for saying that but it's true. There we go. The hard-boiled egg and then I want to show you the noodles here Cody. Go ahead and mess it up. And I said we talked about this earlier is that it's so beautiful. I feel guilty almost sticking in the chopsticks and messing it up.

00:14:02 Cody: Yeah, I mean to fully enjoy the dish you have to kind of mix it up and get all the soup and noodles together. That way you get the full experience of the beef bone broth and with the chewy noodles.

00:14:15 John Daub: Yeah, let's mix this all together. Good if you guys like this content, give us a thumbs up encourage us to do more and maybe if we get a thousand likes I will stream the wanko soba challenge.

00:14:29 Cody: Well, you're going to eat a hundred, right? That's the goal, right?

00:14:32 John Daub: Right. A hundred. We need a thousand likes for that to happen.

00:14:40 John Daub: Cody, you can have the big bowl this time. Actually last time I filmed this before for another episode and I ate the big bowl and Cody ate the small bowl. But this time I'm going to give Cody the big bowl. Japan food always an art. It is indeed. Japanese cuisine presentation is important. All the little details are always important and oh, that's right. I didn't eat the chashu before you did didn't you?

00:15:14 Cody: I did. So this is why you're giving me the toppings because you ate it last time.

00:15:20 John Daub: This is a North Korean dish initially originally. Yeah, it's more traditionally eaten in North Korea. But yeah, it somehow got its way down here to Japan. I think the owner said that one of the original shops was in Kansai Osaka area. And yeah, it got brought up to Morioka and a little bit of the ingredients have changed just to adjust with the readily available ingredients here in Morioka. But the concept and the idea of name it is still stemming from the original North Korean style, the Pyongyang style North Korea. Interesting.

00:16:01 John Daub: All right, let's give this a try here. No, you can add the kimchi to it to give it more of a spice and flavor to it test a taste to it, but we're just going to start off with the noodles. Now you go in for the broth. I always make that mistake. The broth is on. I mean, it's a really deep beef bone broth. So I think you're going to have a really good flavorful soup. Oh, wow. Noodles. So with that I can taste all of the ingredients. There's cucumber. There's sesame. There's the beef as well in there. It's interesting because it's all mixed up. It just but it separates on your tongue, which is I don't know. You have to eat this. The broth in itself is as special as the noodles.

00:16:48 Cody: I'm going in for the noodles here.

00:16:53 John Daub: Pan down. Do you have to slurp down? Oh, do you slurp this the same as you do with ramen?

00:16:59 Cody: Yeah, of course.

00:17:00 John Daub: All right, let's do it. All right, springy, very chewy, very, very chewy. Not I don't know. It's like at first I thought it was mochi mochi kind of like a gooey, but it's not because it doesn't really break apart in your mouth. It's very rubbery. I guess it's very gelatinous. There's like a gelatin content that you don't normally see in Japanese noodles like soba or udon or somen or ramen.

00:17:46 Cody: Really? It's a very unique kind of texture. And yeah, it's something that's really good.

00:17:52 John Daub: Now here is this more of a yakiniku restaurant, which again is a top 100 yakiniku restaurant from Japan. The countertops are actually for grills for yakiniku. But why is reimen at yakiniku restaurants? Is there something to it? Like this is I know when you eat certain dishes at teppanyaki, they'll sometimes have yakisoba as like a finisher, right? Kind of like that game over noodle, but noodles in Japan they call it the shime (締め, finisher), which is like the end kind of like the finisher. So a lot of Japanese meals tend to finish with a certain noodle dish. And yeah, that kind of idea kind of leaked over with the Korean restaurants that open here in Japan. And they would most likely serve reimen as a shime and that way you could finish your meal off with some noodles to kind of soak up any alcohol that you may have drinking during the meal or just fill up the extra space in your stomach and leave very fulfilled.

00:19:01 John Daub: It's doing that to me right now. I feel very very fulfilled. Take a look at this piece of very thinly cut beef here. I'll turn it around in the camera. You can get closer. Look at it. It's beautiful. I guess you would find a piece of chashu in ramen, but this is beef chashu would be pork. This is Iwate's local beef the wagyu he said and again this area is so natural. It's got really good beef as well, but not as famous as Yonezawa and some of the other places. It's a newer brand. Oh quite tender. Hmm. I didn't think it was going to be as juicy. It looked like a kami more red and not so much fat in there, but it was it looks like a dry piece because of how thin it is and how kind of like density is but it's almost like a beef jerky that soaked up a lot of soup. It feels like you kind of get that condensed flavor of the beef, but then it soaks up the nice soup flavor as well and just really is like a flavor bomb in your mouth. Flavor bomb.

00:20:10 John Daub: I love that we have we have some kimchi here. And I guess you just add as you like right? And I think what he had mentioned was that the difference between I guess the Japanese style kimchi and the Korean style reimen of the kimchi is that in Japan the kimchi is a lot spicier from what I've heard. It's because the chili pepper in Japan is spicier. Interesting. So from what I heard it's because the chili peppers they are grown in a temperate that makes for a spicier chili in Japan and because the chili peppers are a lot cheaper using the chili peppers that are grown in Japan the kimchi turns out to be a little bit spicier. And then so the kimchi that you add in Japanese reimen here in Morioka is a lot spicier than the kimchi that you would add let's say in North Korea. Wow. It is a little bit spicy and I guess they said the difference was kimchi. Kimchi is the way you would say it in Japan, but really they're good in both places just different.

00:21:26 John Daub: They put a nashi pear in there. And again, I guess in the summer you'd have a piece of watermelon. So you would have a little seasonal fruit to it and it does add some complexity some character to the broth. I think having different ingredients. So if you came here in the winter spring summer fall you're going to get maybe a different flavor but reimen in general is a winter food, which I was very interested curious about because you saw that they shock it. So this is a cold dish eaten in the winter. That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I mean, it's kind of like how in Japan they say that you want to eat ramen during the summer. It makes you sweat and that sweat helps you cool down in the summer heat, right? So I guess it's like the backwards thinking work if you're cold on the inside. You might feel warmer against the outside weather. And so having a lower body temperature kind of equalizes the coldness that you feel outside. And yeah, Japanese people like to eat cold things in the winter. Sometimes it's a weird concept. I don't know if I truly believe it especially here in Iwate because it's cold here in the winter. They get a serious amount of snow. In fact, Aomori which is a neighboring prefecture where we're going to be going to the day after tomorrow they have the most snow in Japan. More than Hokkaido is in Aomori just because of the way it's positioned like right between three bodies of water. So they get a lot of snow here, but they like to eat cold stuff in the winter. Weird but cool. I guess if you're going to be under the kotatsu (炬燵, heated table) the entire time, you might want something to kind of chill with.

00:23:04 John Daub: And there's a lot of acidity to it. And I think you could kind of tell with the acidity he's added from both vinegar and the reimen. And from the kimchi and that vinegar kind of ups your internal body temperature as well. So helps you heat up during the winter. Yeah, you can see I guess when you look closer at it, you can see the glutinous part of it. It's got a little bit of that potato that you would have it. Yes, starchiness to it. So saw it look like flour, but there was more than just flour in there, huh?

00:23:34 Cody: Yeah, he didn't want to go deep into the specifics of what goes in. That's where the secret is.

00:23:39 John Daub: I knew the chef had some secrets. He wouldn't tell us exactly what is inside that flour looking stuff. But yeah, it's a mixture of flour, a little bit of gluten, kind of like a gelatin kind of construct. And they're all mixing together with the water and it gets this kind of chewy texture. I think that's why this is so good. I don't think if I ever had reimen again, I'll be comparing it to this place in particular. And I don't think it'll ever be as good as right here. This is a very famous place for reimen in the entire country of Japan. And if you're thinking of trying different kinds of noodles, Tohoku here is stacked with different places to go. And again, one more time, just to pitch because I'm so thankful for it. This is the JR East Welcome Rail Pass 2020 that's available now until end of February. And it's only 12,000 yen and I can use the Shinkansen for three days unlimited, which is really cool because I'm a resident of Japan and you have access to this if you are not a tourist. You can use this pass. And if you are a tourist, you can use this pass. I like what they're doing.

00:24:49 John Daub: All right, folks, it looks like we're short of the 1,000 likes required for us, Cody, to eat the wanko soba challenge. So I guess you're off the hook. All right, so no 100 bowls of wanko soba for me.

00:25:01 Cody: Really?

00:25:03 John Daub: You guys can't click the like button? Really? I'm so disappointed. We would need about a thousand for that. We're going to be eating around 2 p.m. And around 2-2:30, I'll set up this live stream. Wanko soba is one of the really interesting soba challenges here in Morioka. They bring out, I guess you're not a man unless you eat a hundred bowls. I can already tell you I'm not a man. I'm like a boy. Okay, I'm like between boyhood and manhood. I don't know, but I could probably get a hundred. They're like really small. They can't be that hard. We'll see. It's up to you. It's quite a lot of noodles. Maybe we should hold off on finishing this.

00:25:47 John Daub: All right. I'm going to shave it. If you have some questions, leave a comment below and we're happy to respond to it. I want to introduce you to new types of noodles, new types of food, new types of cuisine here in Japan. Traveling is a reason to eat, right? There's amazing foods all over the place. Tohoku, these three prefectures that we're going to be going to, which is Iwate, Akita, and Aomori next, have some amazing foods, regional dishes, not just ramen, but they do have ramen. And they found a way to elevate the ramen here and make it different, special for this region and super delicious and famous. And we're going to be going to a couple of those really famous places as well on this ramen trip.

00:26:33 Cody: Any last words? Yeah, stay tuned. We have some soba. We have some udon. We have some ramen. We have a Chinese-style noodle dish. Oh, jajangmyeon. Yeah, jajangmyeon. So yeah, stay tuned and hopefully you'll catch us eating those as well.

00:26:54 John Daub: Again, leave a comment below. Hit the like button if we get to a thousand likes. We will live stream that wanko soba challenge, a little bit of it, to give you a taste of what that's like live. It's different. It's crazy. And yeah, I'm so thankful that you guys can join us. Stay safe wherever you are in the world. You just saw kind of like how you could make your own reimen. Maybe it's like something you could do at home, right? You gotta really put the effort in there. And if you're watching in the live, go back in the playback and we show you inside the kitchen how they make it. I think it's really special to get that kind of inside look on how they make the Japanese food. Again, the presentation of this was incredible. I'm so happy.

00:27:34 John Daub: This place is called Pyonpyon-sha. I put a link in the description. If you're in Morioka or you're thinking of coming up to Tohoku, please do. Hit this place up. It's about a 10-minute taxi ride from the station. It cost us about a thousand yen. They also have a location right near the station. And both locations are considered a top 100 yakiniku restaurant in East Japan. Yeah, you can get more than the reimen. You can also get yakiniku here. One of the top 200 in Japan. East Japan, which is actually pretty amazing because there's a lot of yakiniku places.

00:28:15 John Daub: All right, folks. Have a good day. Have a good night wherever you are in the world. We'll be back in a few hours for some wanko soba. It's a lot of food. I don't know if I should be excited or I should be nervous. Am I should I be nervous? A little bit scared. A little bit. WRX Turbo. And is that Irvin or Vaughn? Thanks, mate. We're gonna put that to some good use here. Have a good day. See you guys. Bye from a yakiniku restaurant here Morioka. That was pretty fun.

00:28:50 John Daub: Are you still hungry?

00:28:51 Cody: I'm not hungry.

00:28:53 John Daub: You work up an appetite. We'll see how it goes. We'll see how it goes. I can live with that.