Spring dig

Few foods say spring in Japan as well as bamboo shoots. The growing season for takenoko (literally, bamboo children) is usually 4-6 weeks long beginning in late March. The tender shoots are available fresh (or pre-boiled) at the grocery store, but you can also go out and get them yourself. A few years ago I recruited my friends to go digging for bamboo shoots in a nearby forested area called Oma.

In Kitakyushu, where I live, Oma grows the nation’s most prized bamboo shoots. Wow. That sounds a lot less impressive written down. But takenoko really are the most emblematic food of the spring season in Japan, and a medium-sized Oma bamboo shoot at a supermarket in Tokyo can cost up to $20. Anyway, I had so much fun trying to pull these stubborn things out of the ground the first time that I decided to get back out there this spring.

My friends and I arrived at the bamboo park and were given a large plastic bag and two pick axes. Within minutes we found tell-tale cracks in the ground and proceeded to unearth the vegetable treasure. Once the bag was brimming, and we had snapped a few victory photos with our booty (which  seem to have been deleted from my camera—GASP!!), we proceeded to the “checkout” where the intimidating attendant stood behind the scales with a smoke hanging out of his mouth ready to weigh our takenoko. $100 dollars and a small heart attack later, we left the park with the suspicion that we’d been ripped off. (Ya think?) I definitely did not shell out this much money the first time I went digging in Oma.

A week later at the supermarket, when I saw Oma bamboo shoots going for $3 a piece, I realized that this year’s slow growing season was putting the pinch on the grower’s wallets. My friends and I consoled ourselves with the thought that we at least had not paid $20 per shoot like they do in Tokyo. Also consoling, of course, was the fact that the takenoko we’d picked were delicious.

For my next post I'll give you the recipe for arguably the most popular bamboo shoot dish, takenoko gohan (bamboo shoot rice). Check it out!