Will model for food
Saturday, February 16, 2008 at 02:26PM 
Japanese food replicas are made by craftsmen in the mountains outside Kyoto. Yoshi and his friends picked me up at Kyoto station and we drove 3 hours to get to the workshop/museum of food replicas.
Packy and I fell in love with these replicas when we visited Japan for the first time. It's like a delicious dream to see the attention and care that goes into molding, sculpting and finishing everything from nigiri to kare udon.
The workshop consisted mostly of plastic and rubber modling machines - large stoves for liquifying the plastic and large ovens for curing the molded parts. There were also a number of exhaust hoods for all the airbrush painting. I was surprised to find out that half the coloring is in-mold and half is done by hand afterward. The artisans mix up their own secret lacquers and paint colors to achieve the shimmery silver on a mackeral skin or a rich, oily broth for shio ramen.
After Yoshi and his friends indulged me while I pestered them to translate my questions for the artist we entered his workshop and actually got to make shrimp tempura the old fashioned way. Using liquid wax, drizzled very carefully into lukewarm water, I gently formed the batter as it congealed on contact with the surface making what looked like amazingly perfect tempura flakes. Someday soon I'll find the video we took of each other doing this. It's amazing.
Reader Comments (1)
Hi.
I appreciate the time you spent sharing your skills.
Recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
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