Dec 14,2023
Cafe more hapi is a café along a leafy path in Kodaira, Tokyo, that opens one day a week and focuses on rice flour and fermentation. The café is run by Yamaguchi Saki, an expert on rice flour and fermentation recipes. Just as nutrition education has garnered much attention lately, Yamaguchi encountered rice flour and fermented foods while paying more attention to food ingredients while raising her kids. What motivated her, after starting with cooking classes, to open a café?
Kodaira is a peaceful municipality with lush greenery located just 30 minutes from the core of Tokyo. A verdant walking path called the Kodaira Green Road begins from near the Kodaira train station. Along this path is a restaurant called Share Kitchen Sakura. The building was originally a model house for Wood Ship Co., Ltd., a local construction company. It is now a space rented out on weekdays to local women as a place to support their dreams of opening their own shops. Yamaguchi’s cafe more hapi, which serves rice flour and fermentation lunches, has opened here every Wednesday since September 2023.
Terrace seating along the leafy path lets you enjoy cherry blossoms in spring and autumn colors in fall
Cafe more hapi has only one menu item — the rice flour & fermentation lunch plate — which is made with seasonal ingredients that are available at the time.
“I start prepping from 9 in the morning I after I send my kids off to school. I load all the ingredients I’ll be using on the day on my bicycle and haul them to the café. It’s a lot to carry. Both the front and back baskets are totally packed full. (laughs) When I opened the café, what was important to me was making a menu that would please everyone in the local area. At my cooking classes, most of the customers are mothers and their kids. But because this restaurant is located along a walking path, all kinds of people pass by, from young men to older people. So my first thought was that I had to make sure the meals wouldn’t be insufficient. I also decided to use local delicious vegetables whenever I could. What I’m particular about is the use of different fermented seasonings, which determine the flavors. I’d like people to know there are many kinds of seasonings, such as fermented combinations of mirin rice wine and saké, soy sauce koji [rice malt], salted koji, amazake [a sweet drink made from koji], and mirin lees, to name a few. I make sure that I use various kinds of fermented seasonings in one plate.”
Yamaguchi Saki runs cafe more hapi
We next had Yamaguchi describe today’s lunch, starting from bottom of the plate and working our way around counterclockwise.
“First up is tandoori chicken in salted koji with lemon slices placed on top of the chicken. Just marinating the chicken in salted koji for 30 minutes results in delicious, tender chicken. That’s the power of fermentation. I use soy sauce and yogurt too to make it very juicy. It’s one of my kids’ favorites at home too.
“In the bowl is potato and onion potage soup, but its secret ingredient is tofu. I make it without using fresh cream, and it comes out with a taste that is creamier than soy milk and is more filling too. For the flavor, I use salted koji and soy sauce koji.
“On the rice are carrots stir-fried in mirin and turnips and radishes stir-fried in soy sauce koji. The carrots are seasoned with a fermented seasoning made from a combination of mirin and saké. Just a quick stir-fry deepens the taste and gives the carrots a rich flavor. I cut the turnips and radishes into thin slices and season them with sesame oil, grated garlic, soy sauce koji, and amazake. Then I stir-fry them and garnish with shiso leaves. Amazake has a mellower sweetness than sugar. I really just quickly stir-fry both of these and then dress them in the seasoning. Fermented seasonings are of course good for your body, but their ease of use is another attraction.
“The cabbage in the fresh salad is from Hokkaido, but all the other vegetables I sourced at a local farmers’ market.
“The renkon lotus root and sweet potato with mirin lees is another hit with my kids. After steaming the lotus root and sweet potato, I season them with butter, soy sauce koji, and mirin lees. Mirin lees is sweet with less of a particular taste than saké lees and can be used as a seasoning for sweets. You can think of it as a substitute for sugar.
“Finally, today’s dessert is rice flour chocolate sauce. I use rice flour to thicken the sauce. I pour the sauce over yogurt and serve.”
With her one-plate lunches, Yamaguchi creates meals that make the most of fermented seasonings and feature rice flour in a multitude of ways. Her hope is to make people more aware of the benefits of fermented foods and rice flour.
“People know that koji and rice flour are good for them, but I think many still don’t know how to incorporate them in their meals or else feel the threshold is too high. By serving a variety of dishes using many different fermented seasonings on one plate, I hope that people will not only find them visually appealing, but also learn that they can be easy to make at home. Fermented seasonings are the easiest fermented food to incorporate into your diet. I also hope that people will understand that fermented seasonings are not only good for your health; they make your food taste better too.”
Yamaguchi does her prep work on the mornings of the days her café is open, so her dishes can be easily replicated at home
Fermented seasonings are attractive for their ease of use: just add them to the ingredients, dress them up, and cook
Yamaguchi’s profile includes the title of a rice flour and fermentation recipe expert. How did she get interested in rice flour and fermented foods in the first place?
“In truth, there is no qualification called a ‘rice flour and fermentation recipe expert’; I thought of it on my own. But I love both rice flour and fermentation, and I’ve long been interested in food and cooking. I studied nutrition science at university and my first job after graduation was at a food-related company. The first real turning point in my life was after I got married and we moved to Shizuoka because my husband got transferred there. I was thinking about what new thing I could start on my own in this new place, and that’s when I decided I wanted to get involved in something that was important in my daily life, and that was food and cooking. At the time, my older child was going through her terrible twos stage. I didn’t have any time for myself, but I wanted to feed her homemade meals. That’s when I discovered a wheat-bread-making class that lasted only an hour. And while I was learning at the class, I was able to earn a qualification that allowed me to teach. So I started teaching bread-making at home and at culture classes. Incidentally, the reason why the classes lasted only an hour is because the fermentation time is so long. You let the bread ferment slowly for eight hours or so overnight in the refrigerator and then you bake it in the morning. It’s the perfect recipe for busy mothers who want to feed their kids homemade bread, even though they are rushed for time.”
Yamaguchi’s second turning point came when she returned to Tokyo in April 2020. It was triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic, which made in-person lessons impossible.
“With the state of emergency in place, I decided to rethink the style of my lessons, since it wasn’t possible to have in-person lessons. I figured that since I was teaching, I should expand the scope and depth of what I taught. I’d incorporated fermentation and rice flour into my bread-making classes, and I had attended fermentation cooking classes on my own when I was living in Shizuoka. But I wanted to study the subject more thoroughly and try to truly incorporate fermentation into my life. Thinking back now, I think I first took note of fermentation after my child was born and I started giving more consideration to the importance of food. I wanted to ensure my child’s mind and body were in good shape by feeding her healthy foods. As for switching from wheat bread to rice flour, I did that for myself. I love wheat, but sometimes I found it hard to digest. My stomach would feel bloated and my intestines felt heavy. I heard around that time that rice flour was good for digestion, and when I tried it, my long-standing problem of constipation cleared up. I thought rice flour might be good to introduce into my lessons, but before I did, I experimented on my family through our daily meals. (laughs) My younger child has a similar constitution to mine and tends to suffer from constipation, while my older child’s movements tend to be a little loose. Once I really started incorporating rice flour and fermented foods into our diet, the intestines of the whole family improved. As a bonus, my skin condition got better and my hands stopped getting dry so often. So I really felt the change in my body and mind.”
Kids love tandoori chicken too. The café features the home-style tastes of the Yamaguchi family, which uses a lot of fermented foods.
Yamaguchi turned the adversity of the COVID-19 pandemic into an opportunity to further her education. With confidence in the power and potential of fermented foods and rice flour, she looked for a new way to communicate this message.
“I shifted my previous in-person lessons to an online salon format. I named it the Wakuwaku Komeko Lab [Thrilling Rice Flour Lab] because it had originally started as a bread-making class. In the lessons, I taught how to make rice flour bread, of course, and recipes for snacks made with rice flour, as well as fermented foods. All the recipes are simple enough for mothers raising kids to easily implement. Some students said they wanted to learn more, so I offered more advanced classes. The scope of my classes is expanding.”
Even after in-person lessons became possible again, Yamaguchi decided to continue the online lessons and not restart the in-person lessons. She had the following thoughts about this.
“There was something uniquely attractive about the online lessons. Students can participate from anywhere, and they can follow the lessons in their spare time while looking after their kids. The lessons are archived, so there’s the benefit of studying at your own pace. For these reasons, I decided to continue with the online lessons. At the same time, I realized that my favorite part of the in-person lessons was the tasting sessions. Around this time, we moved to this place called Kodaira. Being here, I thought that I could recreate the fun, lively tasting sessions I enjoyed in the in-person lessons in a place like a café. Since my kids are still small, I was looking for a rental space to use about once a week, and that’s when I found this place.”
Sakura House was originally a model house. Now it offers a space with a shared kitchen on weekdays to support the dreams of local women of opening their own shops
The interior of the rental café is imbued with the warmth of wood
While raising her kids, Yamaguchi promotes the benefits of rice flour and fermentation in two venues: her online lessons and her café. She says that her motivation is to support other mothers like her with kids and to contribute to the local community in which she now lives. In fact, Yamaguchi, who was a finalist in a Mrs. Universe Japan contest, entered the contest with the same motive.
“I got a chance to hear a talk by a representative of the Mrs. Universe Japan contest, and I found out that the contest’s principle is that your endeavors bring happiness to both you and those around you. I had no interest in the contest itself, but I felt this principle aligned with me, because I’d always valued taking on challenges. So I knocked on the door. The café donates a portion of its sales to charity. The impetus for this was the community and social contribution activities I took part in during the contest. I was involved in volunteer-run cafeterias for kids and beach clean-up activities. This experience got me to want to integrate the wonderful future-facing parts of these activities into a café. My future ambition is to visit the areas where members of my online salon live and help promote their activities, instead of just staying put in Tokyo. Until I opened the café, I tended to do everything on my own. But with the creation of this place, I have been supported by people who volunteer to help out and others in my neighborhood, which has greatly expanded my community. Thanks to these people, the range and possibilities of what I can do have grown immensely. I want to continue sharing happiness with many people while communicating the benefits of fermentation and rice flour.”
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