Okinawa Cuisine

What’s to eat in Okinawa?

My personal favorite is called yasai yakisoba, or vegetable and noodle stir fry.
The thick, curly noodles are boiled before they go into the wok with cabbage, bean sprouts, carrot slivers, and a green vegetable that comes from the sea (notice I don’t call it seaweed). There are also bits of sliced pork to give it flavor, and speaking of flavor, a soy-based sauce also goes into the wok.

Probably the most famous noodle dish is called soki soba. The soba part is (did you guess?) noodles again, this time slender brownish ones that get boiled before they go into the soup. Soki refers to a bone-in pork rib. It’s served as a hot soup.

For a snack—and don’t eat these more than once a week if you want to keep your slim, trim figure—there is a lump of fried dough called saataa-andaki. Well, that’s a little like calling toast a paste made of grass seed that has been baked and burned. It’s shaped like a beignet, but not sticky-sweet. It tastes like a donut, but it’s not a circle and it doesn’t have a hole through the middle. Try it, you’ll like it.

The signature Okinawa dish is goya champuru. Goya looks like an oversized cucumber with warts. I know, as descriptions go, that sounds unkind. To make matters worse, the goya is cursed with an extremely bitter taste. However, good cooks know how to scrape out the pith and use liberal doses of salt to kill off the worst of the bitter taste. The goya is sliced into half moon shapes and tossed into the wok with eggs, tofu, and maybe some carrot slivers and a few bean sprouts. Liberally seasoned, it comes out of the wok transformed into something not only incredibly healthy but also tasty.

Lots of vegetables, lots of soup, skimpy doses of oil and fat, and every taste from sweet to bitter in moderation—a minimum of 18 different foods per day is typical Okinawa cuisine. PS Don’t forget the fruit.