Ski Jiru: Japanese Ski Soup
The prefecture where I live, Niigata, has heavy snowfall in the winter, and accordingly, here, there are a lot of ski resorts.
Every year when wintertime comes, from various places in and outside of Japan, many skiers come to the ski areas and enjoy skiing.
Ski Jiru (スキー汁: Ski Soup)
As for history, Joetsu City in Niigata is where the art of skiing was first transmitted from abroad by Major Theodor Edler von Lerch from Austria in 1911.
During ski training in the year 1911, a bowl of miso soup called Ski Jiru (スキー汁: Ski Soup) was served to the trainees to warm up their bodies and satisfy their hunger.
The ski soup is a variant of Ton Jiru (豚汁) pork soup, and even now, it is available in and around the Joetsu region.
vs. Ton Jiru
Ski Jiru is primarily different in ingredients from Ton Jiru.
The pork soup usually contains white potatoes, whereas the ski soup uses sweet potatoes instead of white potatoes.
Ingredients
Strictly speaking, according to the official recipe set in 1999 by the Joetsu Culinary Association Takada Branch (上越調理師協会高田支部) that reproduced the taste of the original Ski Jiru,
the ingredients prepared for the Japanese ski soup are as follows,
- Pork belly
- Sweet potato
- Daikon radish
- Carrot
- Burdock roots
- Tofu (bean curd)
- Leeks
- Tsuki Konnyaku (thin stripes of Konnyaku)
Cooking
Using the ingredients listed above, the cooking of the Japanese ski soup is essentially the same as Ton Jiru.
But in the official recipe, carrot is supposed to be cut into rectangles like ski boards.
(Reference Pages: Wikipedia スキー汁, joetsutj.com )
