My Kokoro Care Packages Sake and Snack Pairing Adventure

The full Kokoro Care Packages “Otsumami” Care Package, as it arrived at my door.

At a recent wine dinner, a new acquaintance at my table revealed that he doesn’t like to eat while drinking wine, because food is a distraction, preventing him from evaluating the wine on its own merits. I am the exact opposite. Whether I’m drinking wine, beer, or sake, I enjoy them most when they are accompanied by food. It doesn’t have to be a full meal; I’m partial to sake with bar snacks or izakaya-style small plates, which guests can enjoy over the course of a long, convivial evening.

So I loved the idea of a curated packate of artisanal Japanese snacks specifically designed to pair well with alcohol. Such a thing actually exists (!), dreamed up by Kokoro Care Packages, a Japanese foods care package company that ships to more than 35 countries around the world. Co-founder Lillian Hanako Rowlatt, like me, has lived in Los Angeles and New York and is now based in Toronto. It feels like we were destined to meet in one city or another. When our planned Los Angeles meeting  didn’t materialize we connected several months later in Toronto.

Lillian and her Tokyo-based co-founder Aki Sugiyama are both defectors from the world of finance who share a reverence for traditional Japanese foods. The “Otsumami” Care Package of snacks to serve with alcohol contains products from artisan makers across Japan, from Hokkaido to Okinawa. They are of such high quality that I happily agreed when Lillian suggested  that I come up with sake pairings to go with the snacks.

Tasting a selection of Kokoro “Otsumami” Care Package snacks (center middle) at a beautiful dinner with my friends at Toronto’s Mika Fleur.

I created 21 sake pairings, or three different sake recommendations to match with each of the seven snacks in the box. These recommendations can be found in the full-length color brochure filled with product descriptions and producer stories that is included in each package. Some of you may know that I cannot consume large quantities of alcohol in one sitting (bad things have been known to happen). So it took me many months to taste enough sakes with enough snacks to come up with the final 21 pairings. I had to go through two snack boxes before my mission was accomplished, but I learned so much and had a lot of fun. It helped that I was able to enlist my sake-loving friends in the exercise. In fact I highly recommend that you try this type of focused pairing event. You not only gain new insight into sakes that you thought you knew, it also makes for a highly entertaining evening.

One of my favorites from the “Otsumami” Care Package: brown rice mochi okaki rice crackers from Chiba Prefecture. Try them with a snow-aged Hakkaisan Yukimuro sake. Photo courtesy of Kokoro Care Packages.

Hakkaisan three-year aged Yukimuro. So good with savory dishes.

Several of the snacks paired well with many different types of sake. This is not surprising because as we explain in Rice, Water, Earth: Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake, the high levels of glutamic acid (responsible for the magical “fifth taste” that makes foods like parmesan cheese and grilled, roasted, or stewed mushrooms so delicious) in sake positively dwarf those of wine or beer. High-umami sakes tend to pair well with high-umami foods. And when you pair an umami-rich sake—junnmai, yamahai, and kimoto sakes tend to be the richest in glutamic acid—with another form of umami in food, the pairing synergy is even more explosive.

The magical Daships okara snacks.

Smoked Island Tofu and Kamikawa Taisetsu Kitashizuku tokubetsu junmai: perfection!

So it wasn’t surprising that for example, the Daships okara (soybean pulp) snack, seasoned with an umami-forward dashi of dried mackerel and dried bonito, would be super-easy to pair with a wide array of sakes. The snacks are made by a Shizuoka Prefecture dashi company headed by an award-winning “dashi sommelier.” I recommend pairing these with a rare and slightly savory Okunomatsu Omachi junmai daiginjo; the light, clean and floral Ugo no Tsuki Aurora genshu; and the richly textured, sweet and crisply acidic Kikusui Perfect Snow nigori one-cup sake. The lovely cheese-like Smoked Island Tofu from Okinawa, likewise, went well with sakes as disparate as the rich and brightly tart  Kamikawa Taisetsu Kitashizuku tokubetsu junmai and the bold and darker-toned, Tedorigawa Silver Mountain junmai.

The Sansho Teriyaki Sardine Jerky was surprisingly challenging to match.

Yet there were a few snacks, also rich in umami and pairing-friendly soy sauce flavors, that were surprisingly tricky to pair perfectly. One was the Sansho Teriyaki Sardine Jerky from Aichi Prefecture. It was hard to really nail this pairing, I think, because of its powerful, distinctive, and herbal sansho pepper note. Other more challenging pairings included the Crunchy Baked Konbu (kelp) chips from Hokkaido and the Fried Brown Rice Mochi okaki from Chiba Prefecture. Since konbu (dried seaweed) is off the charts in umami, and actually the food that led to the discovery of umami in 1908, it was fascinating to learn that it wasn’t an automatic free pairing pass to the sake universe. Same with the okaki, or sticky rice crackers, which are lacquered in a coating of soy sauce, mirin, and kibizato (a combo of Japanese brown sugar and molasses).

Akita Prefecture’s favorite pickle: smoked Iburigakko. Photo courtesy of Kokoro Care Packages.

Naturally, the Iburigakko was a perfect match for two other Akita specialties, Taihaizan Kimoto Junmai sake and the regional special hot pot dish, kiritanpo nabe.

I also found that heating a sake could alter the equation and turn a bad pairing into a good one, or vice versa. These challenges demonstrated that simply pairing a high-umami food with a high-umami sake is not an automatic win. My Kokoro Care Packages pairing adventure made me realize how complex are variable sakes can be, and how much I still have to learn.

If you would like to order the “Otsumami” Care Package or any of Kokoro Care Packages’ wonderful offerings (a vegan package, a Japanese cooking essentials package, and a Japanese tea package, among others), or from its wide range of excellent a la carte products (spices, condiments, noodles sauces and snacks) please click on this link. Happy snacking and drinking!