Speaking at the RHSJ Bramley tour in Obuse 2014

Last week my Bramley apple adventure continued when I was invited by the Japan branch of the Royal Horticultural Society to talk at this year's RHSJ Bramley apple tour in Obuse, Nagano. Readers with good memories might recall my excitement at going along to the same tour last year as a participant, and my report about visiting the orchard there for the first time. It was a real treat to be able to visit the orchard with many friends from the Bramley Fan Club in Japan, thanks for a great day!

This year I was to give a little talk at the orchard, and bring some Bramley-themed treats for the participants to take home as souvenirs. I settled on apple cake and small apple crumble pies (forgot to photo, oops), as well as a whole pie.

On the way to Nagano, the sky threatened rain and by the time we arrived in Obuse it was properly pouring down, just like we were in the UK (Obuse is pronounced o-bu-say by the way, rather than sounding like "abuse." Just in case you were wondering).

View from the train, could be the UK or Japan :)

Chef Ichimura's lunch at Hanaya was as fantastic and creative as it was last year - it's amazing what thoughtful Japanese chefs do with our humble apple pie/apple crumble fruit!

I was particularly struck by the sushi piece of the 3-bite starter. It was so soft and delicately flavoured.

After lunch we dodged a few puddles and went to find the tree that Celia-san (Great Granddaughter of Henry Merryweather, the first person to notice and begin selling Bramley apples in the UK in the late 1800s) planted on her trip to Obuse last year. The young tree appears to be doing very well, and is in a nice spot, visible from the restaurant.

From there to the orchard! The rain had let up a little and so we were able to pick our own fruits to take home. As we were leaving a heavy fog rolled in and that too felt brisk and British. I don't remember seeing fog in Tokyo - it's quite a world away being up in the hills of Nagano.

The talks were to be given in warmer and drier surroundings back at the apple packing plant.

Arai-san

First Arai-san, the gentleman responsible for bringing the Bramley to Japan officially over 20 years ago spoke of how apples of all varieties had been important in his life, and how it was a struggle initially to convince many apple growers in Japan to take a chance on the strange and sour British fruit. It takes a few years from the initial work and investment until the trees will bear fruit and so it's quite a commitment for the farmers to make.

Oshima-san

Next one of those apple growers who did take the plunge, Oshima-san, talked about a year in the life of caring for the Bramleys in Japan, and how one year's crop can differ considerably to another. He'd also brought along a *huge* Bramley. I thought it might be the biggest in the world (that record was in 1997 to a 1.67kg beast), but it must certainly be the biggest in Japan. Amazing.

Me :)

For my talk, I decided to have a few different sections - what Bramleys are to British people, and bit about the history - from the chance seedling growing from a pip planted by a little girl playing in her Nottinghamshire garden in 1809, to the involvement of Henry Merryweather, the extensive planting across the UK in the late 1800s, and the important nutritional role the Bramley (and all manner of home-grown fare) played during the wars - all going some way to explain how they have come to be such a widely loved and commonplace ingredient it is for the UK today.

I also talked about growing up with Bramley apple trees in my garden, and how when I saw ohanami on TV as a child, I thought that people in Japan were picnicking under apple trees.

Finally, I gave some tips on cooking with Bramleys, from the British home baking viewpoint - that we usually cook them down before adding them to pies, as they will cook to a puree anyway during baking, which leaves behind large cavities in your pie if you used the slices raw like for American and Dutch style apple pies.

At the end of the talk I shared the large British-style Bramley apple pie with the participants before they rushed to get the bus back to the station.

This year I was determined to also try visit the Iwasaki bakery, home to the famous Chelsea buns from the book I heard about on the tour last year.  (See the end of this post for the story about the Canadian nurse and the Obuse Chelsea bun connection :) ).

Arai-san was kind enough to give me this monster of a Chelsea bun, and it made a very hearty breakfast the next morning. It was really good with the crunchy nuts on the bottom!

As I left for the day, look what I was given as a thank you for the talk! It's now in pride of place at the shop, at least until I work out what I want to make with it ;) Nyam!

Ginny is pretty shocked at the size too

Are UK and Japanese Bramleys the same?

This is one of the most common questions among the Bramley aficionados here in Japan, and so I thought I'd do a small (and totally unscientific) test.

Lumpy, bobbly fruit vs. beautifully round orbs - which is which?

Here we have four randomly selected apples, roughly the same size. The two on the left are from an ASDA supermarket in the North West of England, and the two on the right are from Obuse, Japan.

At first glance you notice that the UK apples are very shiny - this is the wax that is applied to the skin which doesn't appear to be used on the Obuse fruits. The Japanese apples are also of a more uniform shape, almost perfectly round and much less bobbly.

The visual contrasts could be down to a cultural difference in how they are used. In the UK they are somewhat ubiquitous fayre, but in Japan they are still an exotic treat. Consider how Muji is quite the trendy design brand in the UK with just 12 stores (and is more expensive than in Japan) yet in Japan the 379 'no brand, quality goods' 無印良品 shop is in every medium sized train station and shopping area, and their goods carried in many convenience stores.

Another cultural difference is that fruit is often given as a gift in Japan, and so perhaps fruit is required to look exquisite here, in order to sell. Maybe they use the ugly fruit for wholesale and other purposes.

Incidentally, these bags of Bramleys (below) are of a more common size and colouring that you see in British supermarkets.

They are often bit smaller than Japanese ones and often have a little bit of blush on one side from the sun. They are currently £1.88/kg (just under 300 yen/kg) which is a little over a third of their price in Japan.

Cutting into the fruits you can see that the UK apples on the left seem to be a bit more open in the core - though, being a completely unscientific test, this could just be down to chance.

In the stewing down I found that the UK apples (again, 1st pic) fell more quickly into a puree and were perhaps slightly juicier. The Japanese apples (2nd pic) held their shape slightly longer.

Taste-wise, both raw and cooked, I found something slightly unexpected. The Obuse apples were possibly ever so slightly more tart than the UK apples, at least in these that were tested. I didn't expect this because I thought the warmer Japanese weather would cause for riper, sweeter fruit but this doesn't appear to be the case in this particular test. Again, some of these differences could be accounted for by the difference in starting temperature, as my Japanese fruit came from the vegetable crisper of my fridge.. this is not a rigorous test.

Most importantly anyway, the Japanese fruits definitely have that distinctive Bramley taste and will satisfy that craving just as well as the ones from back home. Very similar, perhaps the same, certainly similar enough!

No soggy bottoms here!

Can Bramleys make it big in Japan?

I've done quite a few posts about how great I and members of the Bramley Apple Fan Club here in Japan think Bramley apples are, and about their story here, but what about Japan in general - what are the chances of these cooking apples being a hit over here?

Indeed, don't I have my work cut out for me in general, starting a business based around British sweets when so many of them are unknown here and not very, erm, 'elegant' in appearance?

Let's begin with the taste - I did a little experiment recently, sending a few pies to friends in Kyushu to see what they'd make of their first taste of Bramley apple pie. The feedback was mixed.. "certainly unique, I think I like it" but "too sour, almost like vinegar! The little kids couldn't eat it" gosh.

True, I'd held back a little on the sugar a little with the idea that Japanese people prefer subtly sweet desserts (甘さ控えめ / amasa hikaeme), but it certainly seems that further experimentation is needed. Comparing a few well known British chef's Bramley apple pie recipes, sugar ranges from 10-20% of the weight of prepared apples, though it of course also depends how tart your particular apples are to begin with and whether you add lemon juice to stop them browning etc.

At the recent Bramley apple lunch I sat next to a master pâtissier, owner of a famous French-style cake shop in Tokyo who has been using Bramley apples for 15 years. He said that using enough sugar with the Bramleys is important as it brings out their 'umami', and talked about how butter also enhances the natural sweetness in the apple.

It's going to be important to find just the right balance, as people with Bramley cravings would be most disappointed to have the unique flavour smothered in a sweetness too syrupy. Challenge!

How the pie is explained to customers will probably be the key to the chance of a positive first encounter - someone expecting American style apple pie might end up a bit shocked tasting a spoonful of British style pie. Like when I first tried kombucha - I was told it was "tea" and expected something astringent and bracing and had quite a shock with a mouthful of salty broth. If it had been described to me as tasting like soup I may have liked it immediately!

Additional challenges for apple pies and various rough-and-ready English desserts in Japan come from their appearance and use. My friends in Kyushu were concerned that people might not be able to cut neat slices out of the pie with the filling being puree rather than the slices of fruit that they are used to seeing in apple pie. Similarly, attendees at the Bramley lunch told Celia that things like the apples cooking down to a puree and juice/jam leaking from the top of the pie are often seen as failures in Japan - all things that are not problems at all for the enthusiastic British family waiting to dig-in after dinner.

Being unpretentious and not too fancy makes these desserts somehow more genuine, certainly more authentically British :) Are we too serious for frills, embarrassed by something too showy? The French friends in this funny and savagely-written article may have a point "This so-called 'baking' is not patisserie, it's masonry".

These kinds of dishes are firstly comfort foods in the UK, good honest treats made at home for sharing. In Japan however, perhaps more of my customers would be wanting to use them as gifts, and perhaps they'd prefer individual portions of something a bit neater-looking.

Still lots to think about and tinker with then, and I imagine that things will need to evolve during the course of the business too.

There is definitely something special about the flavour of Bramley though, and I think it will win many more Japanese fans - that balance of acidity and sweetness is mouth-wateringly craving-inducing once the taste has been acquired. After all, it has been charming people for over 200 years.

So yes, I can see Bramleys being fiercely popular with those people it wins over in Japan, though it might take a couple of encounters with the fruit to get there.

A real slice of Bramley apple history!

Last weekend I was lucky enough to be invited to the annual ブラムリーを楽しむ会 / Buramuri wo tanoshimu kai / Bramley apple lunch held by the Japan Branch of the Royal Horticultural Society, Obuse town and the Bramley Apple Research Group - and there had an encounter with Bramley apple history!

Celia Steven, great-granddaughter of Henry Merryweather who was the first person to cultivate and sell the Bramley apple in the UK, was visiting Japan for the first time and attended the event which was lead by Mr Arai – the person who helped bring the first Bramley trees to Japan in tandem with the RHS 23 years ago.

Celia presents Arai-san with a "Southwell time" apple clock

Members of the Bramley Apple Fan Club who were instrumental in forming the connection with descendants of the Merryweather family were also present (see the fan club's report here in Japanese), along with eminent Japanese pâtissiers, food writers and British food and culture enthusiasts.

Celia is very active in the UK in the promotion and education about the Bramley apple and its history and has now also visited Obuse, the first home of Bramleys in Japan. There with the help of local schoolchildren she planted a tree, which will perhaps come to symbolise the growing bond between Obuse in Japan and Southwell in Nottinghamshire, the home of the first ever (and still living!) Bramley tree.

Celia-san, descendant of Henry Merryweather

Greeting the attendees, Celia gave a beautiful speech in Japanese and went on to talk about how warmly she and her family had been received in Japan, by Obuse town, various Bramley friends and even strangers in the street. It was very evident, she said, that the Bramley was very well loved in Japan by people such as the attendees of the lunch who had already encountered it, and that how it is used in all kinds of dishes here demonstrates its versatility and uniqueness as a fruit.

She was eager to take back to the UK and British schools stories of Obuse and Japan’s growing affection for the Bramley apple, to share some of the novel ways it is being used here, and to use the Bramley to strengthen the bond between the UK and Japan through things like activities with schools and cultural festivals.

Arai-san, the man who helped bring Bramleys to Japan

Another guest of honour at the event was Seiko Hirota a director at the RHSJ, who lead the toast resplendent in a Liberty apple patterned outfit. Hirota sensei was involved in the selection of the Bramley apple from among four possible cooking apple choices to be officially introduced to Japan for cultivation.

The toast was poetic, Hirota-sensei spoke of how the apple has been a powerful symbol in stories throughout history - Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden, the Judgement of Paris using a golden apple, the poisoned apple of Snow White, and now the Bramley with its unique charm and power to connect people.

Despite this power and ubiquity now in the UK much of the Bramley’s journey to-date feels almost serendipitous. Without the little girl Mary planting pips over 200 years ago, and without Henry Merryweather noticing the fruit they would not be around today in the UK, and without Arai-san wanting to bring the apple to Japan and the RHS selecting it above the competing fruit we would not be able to enjoy them here.

Our Bramley lunch menu, and recipe for the soup

Without further ado here are some of the dishes from the day's Bramley-packed lunch at Tokyo Station Hotel's Blanc Rouge restaurant. The menu was carefully designed so that fans of the Bramley could enjoy it in a variety of incarnations and so that Celia and family could try notes of Japanese cuisine and regional Shinshu produce from Nagano. (Incidentally Tokyo Station, rumoured to have been modeled after Amsterdam central station, has been beautifully renovated to celebrate it's 100th anniversary in 2014 and is well worth a look - and do look up!) :)

The starter was smoked salmon and grilled iwana from Shinshu (Nagano) with a Bramley sauce.

The chilled soup was from the recipe in the photo above, with both cooked and raw bramley prepared with yoghurt and white wine - an amazing taste, it was lovely. The main dish was Normandy style quail with dauphinoise potatoes and Bramley used in the sauce.

The dessert was gyuhi mochi forming a very delicate parcel containing Bramley, dainagon and chocolate, which was quite a unique flavour combination.

I was so excited to be there I'm ashamed to say that I forgot to take photos of the brioche amuse bouche and the wine. I talked so much in fact that I kept holding the waiters up..

After lunch those who wanted to hear more decamped to a small room for continued Bramley banter with Celia and Arai-san.

Decamped to a side room for a bit of post-lunch Bramley banter

Topics that came up included questions to Celia about how Bramleys are used in UK apart from pies and whether British men cook ("roast pork with apple sauce, apple crumble" and "some most definitely do" respectively). We also discussed the current 'Food is Great' campaign of the British Embassy in Japan which appears to be designed to address the troubled reputation of British food here.

Celia also gave top tips on how to judge an apple pie, having judged many competitions herself: "the apples are always great, judge the pastry. There are to be no soggy bottoms" It also became apparent that pie filling bubbling to the top of the pie or crumble is not necessarily seen as a baking failure in the UK as it might be in Japan, but rather gives the dish character.

When I first thrilled at my discovery of Bramley apples in Japan, I knew nothing of their fascinating history in the UK (despite having lived in Nottingham!) or their journey over here and who was involved. Imagine having to come all the way to Japan to learn about my own culture. :)

History, culture, and international relations are vibrantly alive in the Bramley story, and with such passionate advocates on its side we can look forward to see how the next chapter in the Bramley apple’s adventure will unfold (or unpeel? Sorry.. :) ).

Looking into the future... I mean, the ceiling of Tokyo station

Field Trip! – Obuse Town, Nagano

A series of posts from visiting interesting little (and large) cafes, food-related establishments and other places of inspiration.

As part of the 2013 Bramley Apple Tour I wrote about previously organised by the Japan branch of the Royal Horticultural Society we got to have a bit of a look around the atmospheric Obuse town centre and it was so pretty and interesting that I thought I’d do a bit of a write-up in case anyone else wanted to make a trip up there. There is also an excellent .pdf guide in English about Obuse here.

Bramley and a friend - the Obuse nasu

Going to Obuse can be a bit of a train geek’s dream – I didn’t think I was a train geek at all, but I was all 'wow!' and 'squee!’ on the way there, first on the shinkansen to Nagano, and then on a cute and dinky “romance car” style train with viewing cars at the front and back. It being during the week I got the whole observation car to myself. It was only a few hundred yen to get to Obuse from Nagano and quite bubble-era luxurious. There are regular trains on this line too, I was just lucky with timing. Oh, and no paying with suica cards on this line! Yes this was a proper field trip, with real tickets to be clipped by real station masters.

We were greeted by the tour leaders from Obuse-ya at the station and ferried by bus to a local restaurant called Hanaya (flower shop) which had a view onto a lush green English style garden, for the welcome greetings and a Bramley-themed lunch.

The food at Hanaya was outstanding, with innovative uses of Bramley apples and other local ingredients, such as a peculiarly rotund type of aubergine that is grown here. The meal started with a delicate salad with prosciutto and what seemed to be Bramley oroshi.

The soup was pumpkin potage with crab and Bramley.

I had chosen the fish course and it arrived as a pie that also contained Bramley apple and was served with a curry sauce and (partially concealed in this photo) a slice of Obuse aubergine painted with miso paste. This course was excellent.

Crepe with Bramley puree and ice cream.

After lunch we visited a miso factory and shop for our hands-on miso paste taiken! I had a vague notion that miso was a fermented bean product, and knew that I absolutely love it, particularly as soup, but I did not have a clue how it was made or that it was so easy.

We squished cooked soya beans into a paste, added lots of salt and malted rice / kome kouji / 米麹 along with some of the cooking water, and mixed well with our hands. We then took turns throwing big blobs of it into the base of a bucket until all our mixture was in the same pot, and this was to be stored for several months to ferment, at which point it will be posted to us.

Barrels and weights used in making miso

The gentleman from the miso shop who lead the activity explained that Japanese people are eating less traditional food than before and that the consumption of soy sauce (which the company also used to make) and miso is in decline. He mentioned various health benefits of miso including a study that suggested that it does not increase blood pressure, despite it being so salty (possibly due to the effect of fermentation with lactobacillus - this is unclear, or perhaps because salt might not actually lead to high blood pressure!). However the only conclusive study I was able to find about miso and blood pressure was done on rats rather than people. Either way it's tasty stuff and well worth eating regardless of possible special health benefits.

With many types of traditionally made miso taking months, even years to mature this is a real ‘slow food’, and with the koji fungus in the kome koji as a kind of 'starter' added to the mix, it struck me as being similar in some ways to sourdough bread. Fermented foods are enjoying a bit of a renaissance in the UK, perhaps miso will be part of the trend there too.

Buckets of different types of miso paste

The shop has excellent miso for sale (and online), indeed you can find Obuse miso all around the town. Speaking of which, in the afternoon after our trip to the Bramley orchard we had free time in the centre of the small town.

Miso shop near the factory

Aside from apples, chestnuts and miso, Obuse is famous for having the Hokusai-kan museum, which is home to many of Hokusai's famous prints and paintings and would be worth a trip on its own. The area around the museum is an extremely pretty and well-designed artistic impression of the historic town itself.

Many of the buildings are in fact new, but they have been made to have a traditional appearance. Some of the shops are a beautiful mix of old and new so it’s a lovely area to stroll about in, trying different flavours of ice cream, tasting sake and buying snacks to take home. I can imagine it would be quite busy during national holidays and certain times of the year. Another particularly nice area is around the sake brewery's 煙突 / entotsu  / chimney, which has a cute courtyard, entotsu cafe and some unique buildings.

We rounded off our whistle-stop tour of Obuse town with a visit to a well known patisserie, Rond-to, where we sampled a delicious French take on a Bramley apple cake. It’s an airy little cake shop with a café and a couple of seats outside in the European style. The property used to be a fish shop and so they had a lovely big kitchen where I could peak through at the staff having fun preparing items for the shop.

Other things in the area that I did not get chance to visit on this trip were the nearby winery, and a hospital with an interesting story connected to a bakery.

The story goes that there was a Canadian nurse working with tuberculosis patients at the Anglican Mission hospital here in Obuse in the 1930s. Apparently she liked English Chelsea buns, and missed being able to have them when she was in Japan. A local baker attempted to make the buns for her based on her description, but they weren't right. He tried many times without success before finally producing something so perfectly ‘Chelsea bun’ that it moved the nurse to tears. The hospital (still functioning) and the original bakery is still there to visit, and there is a lovely children’s book with the story that is written in English and Japanese.

International relations through baking, it's possible! :)

Bi-lingual story of Chelsea buns in Obuse

For even more information about Obuse and a local onsen listing have a look here.