This was the sight that greeted us the other day when we returned home. Rather than a brand new iPad (see earlier post), an anonymous friend had left us some free bamboo shoots. Particularly for a veg-lover and panda-observer such as myself, you might think this was a blessing, and it was, although a slightly more mixed one for Mrs M.
You see, transforming a bamboo shoot from its state in the above photo to one in which it is edible is a very laborious process. First you have to cut the shoot into pieces small enough to fit into a saucepan, which is not easy because it has a hardness somewhere between a fennel bulb and an iron bar. You then have to perform what is known in Japanese as akunuki (アク抜き). In the dictionary, this is translated as ‘removal of astringent taste (e.g. by cooking),’ although with bamboo, it is also to remove a toxin that would otherwise render the shoot inedible.
The shoot needs to be boiled for at least one and a half and sometimes up to three hours, often with the leftover water from washing rice (you can pay extra for musenmai – pre-washed rice – but most people wash the starch from rice themselves before cooking it), rice bran (nuka, which I will tell you about another time), and/or chili (unlike the first two, which help remove the astringency, this acts as a kind of disinfectant). You can then cut up the shoot – which even at this point is still pretty tough – into smaller, more bite-sized chunks and prepare it for actual human consumption, often with yet more boiling.
As explained in this news report, the price of bamboo shoots has risen by about 50% this year because of an unusual phenomenon. The hachiku variety of bamboo only produces flowers about once every 120 years, whereupon the bamboo plant itself dies off, and this has led some news stories to describe 2025 as a ‘Bamboo crisis!’ year. As you might expect, this is something of an exaggeration, as the new hachiku seedlings grow back pretty much straight away. Also, bamboo is such a fast-growing plant that as well as being a more eco-friendly material than wood (for this reason, when I lived in London, I had a bamboo floor installed on the entire ground floor of my flat), it’s seen as a nuisance by many farmers and landowners.
Incidentally, once she had prepared the bamboo, Mrs M made a Korean-style nimono (various ingredients boiled together in stock, although not enough stock to call the end result a soup) with tofu, other vegetables, and a generous dollop of gochujang chili paste. For some reason, no one else in the Muzuhashi family wanted to eat this, so I had it all to myself and gave thanks for the gift of fresh, free bamboo shoots as I ate.
