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Special dishes to be eaten at the start of a new year can be found the world over, and Japan is no exception. Japanese traditional New Year’s fare is usually eaten for breakfast on the first three days of the new year. A typical new year menu will include osechi ryori (an assortment of cold foods usually served in multi-tiered lacquered boxes) and toso (spiced saké), but perhaps the most indispensable and favorite New Year’s menu item is zoni, a special soup with mochi (rice cake) and a variety of other ingredients.
There are a number of regional variations of zoni, which is so popular throughout Japan that the term is practically synonymous with “New Year.” Tokyo zoni consists of grilled mochi squares, chicken pieces, and leafy greens in a clear broth made from a soup stock of kelp, bonito, and soy sauce. In Kyoto, the mochi is round, the leafy greens are replaced with some kind of long radish or other edible root, and the soup is a milky white miso (fermented bean paste) broth garnished with dried bonito shavings. Other variations include a sweet bean zoni made with red adzuki beans; a white miso-based zoni with sweet bean-paste-filled mochi rounds, a variant common in the Shikoku region; and seafood-based zoni using yellowtail, sea bream and sometimes salmon roe. Ayao Okumura, a professor at Kobe Yamate University and an authority on traditional Japanese cuisine, says there are four basic types of zoni: clear soup-based, white miso-based, red miso-based, and adzuki bean-based. He further classifies zoni into five sub-groups by the type of mochi used: grilled mochi squares, boiled mochi squares, grilled mochi rounds, boiled mochi rounds, and mochi rounds with sweet bean paste filling. These basic groups are combined in different ways in different regions of Japan. The addition of region-specific ingredients makes each local variation unique. |
