Mukogawa school kitchen serves students a taste of home

Karaage, a Japanese-style fried chicken, drew a gasp of approval from Ai Fujita, but an orange-colored mochi fell short.

Fujita, a student at Spokane’s Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute, had joined a focus group last week to give feedback about campus meals. This spring, Mukogawa’s kitchen staff began adding more Japanese comfort foods into menus, alongside typical U.S. dishes.

“Karaage was so good,” said Fujita, who with other students didn’t like what Mukogawa served recently for mochi, a rice cake. “They’re kind of weird,” she said.

That drew a shrug and smile from Doug Cole, Mukogawa’s food service director. “Really? We buy it from a Japanese company,” he said. Cole added later that he gets the subtleties. “They’re not liking the mochi. She thought it was from China.”

Mukogawa staff prepares food daily for just over 200 Japanese students, who visit Spokane for four months to learn about American culture and the English language. Menus have American dishes ranging from spaghetti to ham sandwiches, along with some typical Japanese meals.

Successfully preparing traditional foods that students eat all the time is the tricky part, Cole said, so this past February he traveled to Japan in search of recipes and ideas. He and Rich Reidt, marketing and events manager, visited the main Mukogawa campus in Japan. They also ate in restaurants and sought out street food.

“There’s details to Japanese cooking that are sometimes difficult to understand,” Cole said. For instance, Japanese curry has a different flavor than India-style curry common in the U.S. “We’re not here to serve Japanese food all the time, but we try to make some good comfort food for them. We try to hit on something their parents would make at home.”

“It’s intimidating as a chef to do dishes they do so well in Japan,” he added. “It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re trying to cook food they were raised with.”

Cole and Reidt returned from Japan with food preparation ideas that Mukogawa’s cooks here ran with, Cole said. Some recipes came from Mukogawa’s main campus, where employees asked about American cooking. “They wanted to learn how to cook fried chicken from us.”

From that trip, the Spokane crew learned a successful way to prepare miso cod with rice, along with soba noodle soup, a meal served April 8. Soba is another dish that easily can go wrong, Cole said, which happened here about a year ago.

“We failed at it before,” he said. “It was embarrassing. The noodles were mushy because we mass-produced it. Until I went back to Japan and I got a little more encouragement, I realized that this isn’t too difficult. It’s so easy to overcook these noodles. The way we do it now is you have to precook it almost al dente, and then heat it up fast for the girls.”

The new way to prepare soba proved popular. “We had students who came back for three cups,” he said. “When we went to Japan, we realized soba is a big part of their diet. It’s hard to get the right type of noodles here in America, but it’s not that complicated.”

Other recent Japanese menu items include tonkatsu, breaded and fried pork strips served with a sauce, and a dish called oyakodon that’s served with rice, chicken and eggs. The kitchen also has prepared ponzu sauce to go over a ponzu burger, which is like a meatloaf.

Cole said many Japanese home-cooked dishes have similarities to American comfort foods. Differences are often in sauces or seasonings. “Nikujaga is very similar to our beef stew, except they use soy sauce and ginger. There’s beef, potatoes, carrots, but it’s not as thick.”

Other adjustments are in preparation and quantity. Students take smaller meat portions and request larger quantities of vegetables and fruits.

“Our salad bar is definitely different than our American salad bars,” Cole said. “They can’t understand why we eat raw broccoli or raw carrots. We have to blanch a lot of vegetables.”

For U.S. foods, students said they liked a meal of turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy, while corn dogs got mixed responses.

“Corn dogs, yes, but too often,” said student Momoko Tamagawa.

“I like the turkey with potatoes; it’s so tasty,” Fujita said. “I like tuna (sandwiches), but I’m half and half with ham.”

Rice comes with most meals, Cole said, and the school goes through industrial-sized bags quickly. A freezer holds a large quantity of another student favorite, green tea ice cream.

Mukogawa will mark 25 years in Spokane this fall, opening here in 1990 as a branch campus of Mukogawa Women’s University in Nishinomiya, Japan. This spring, the school started construction for a dining hall remodel and addition, expected to open by September.

Reidt said the school has to special-order some Japanese food ingredients, but that’s part of making Mukogawa students feel more at home.

Added Ashley Poole, catering manager, “Sometimes all they need is some home-cooked comfort food.”