Making Plastic Food

One of the favourite things for first time visitors to Japan is all the the plastic food on display in the windows of many restaurants.

In the past we have bought quite a bit of it and it now adorns our Christmas tree each year along with more usual decorations.







 Some of it is incredibly realistic and some of it looks like.....plastic food.






The centre for the production of much of this in Japan is in Kappabashi near the Tokyo fish market. The area of Kappabashi covers many large town blocks and it is exclusively occupied by restaurant supply shops.

It's a most wonderful area to visit, there are shops that only sell every imaginable sort of chopstick rests, others only wooden spoons. With the plastic food you will find shops that only sell a myriad of different onion rings and capers.

For the first time instead of the usual grammar and Kanji grind our class had a school excursion and we went to a company that makes this remarkable stuff. We were allowed to make some ourselves and I made a rather miserable lettuce and a passable piece of eggplant tempura.

This is how the expert did it:



 First making tempura batter. The water bath is at 43 C and the wax is at 60 C. You then do a dip and roll action to coat you piece of vegetable.

The lettuce a truly marvellous thing to make. Thin layers of white and green wax are made by pouring the hot wax onto the water in one go and then spreading in out in a sheet with the bottom of the ladle. You then submerge the sheet, starting at one edge and as you pull it out it turns into a sheet of lettuce. The trick then is to wrap is slowly to the left and right repeatedly.

 Their window display featured this marvellous piece: