Build a Bento with Hatcho Miso: Nagoya's Own Fermented Kitchen

Nagoya food tastes different from the rest of Japan and there is one reason: Hatcho miso. Made in Okazaki, twenty-odd kilometres from here, it is pure soybean miso — no rice or barley — fermented in cedar barrels under stacked river stones for two years or more. The result is almost black, thick, and far less sweet and far more savoury than the pale misos most people know. Nagoya puts it on everything: katsu, oden, udon, dengaku.

This class puts it in your hands. You cook a set of simple Japanese home dishes using Hatcho miso and traditional soy sauce, and arrange them into a bento — which is its own discipline, since a bento is packed cold, eaten cold and judged as much on how it looks in the box as on how it tastes. Balance, colour and how tightly things sit are all part of it.

The tasting is the educational core. Several misos and soy sauces side by side, so you can taste what a two-year soybean ferment does against a lighter rice miso, and why a Nagoya kitchen behaves differently from a Kyoto one. Most people leave able to shop for miso with actual intent.

If you want character or anime rice art in your bento — the arranged nori and vegetables that turn a lunchbox into a face — tell the operator in advance and they will prepare for it. This is popular with children and, in our experience, with adults who will not admit it.

Groups cap at eight and instruction is in English. The studio is in Izumi, central Nagoya.