A sumo wrestler can eat up to 10,000 calories
per day, and a lot of those calories come from a combination of rice and chanko nabe a stew served in the sumo training stables of Japan. So thank you to Vite Ramen for sponsoring this video as we sup on sumo stew this time on Tasting History. Chanko nabe has been a daily favorite of sumo wrestlers or sumōtori for over a hundred years. It's typically eaten at least once, sometimes twice a day along with a lot of rice, up to 10 large bowls at a time. Now there is no one recipe for chanko nabe because
it's often made with whatever vegetables are in season and whatever ingredients are available at any given time. Plus each heya, or sumo training stable has its own version and they don't seem to share the recipes. Now during tournaments they typically make it with chicken, partly because chicken is considered good luck to the sumo at that time because chickens are agile and they stay on two feet which is what a sumo wrestler is supposed to do, should stay on two feet and be agile in the ring. Whereas something like cow or pig, well they're not particularly agile and they are usually on all fours, and if a sumo wrestler is on all fours then they probably just lost. So I'm going to be making a chicken based chanko nabe recipe and I am going to look at descriptions of the dish
from the first restaurant Kawasaki to ever serve chanko nabe. One description of their version says "Pieces of chicken meat and chicken liver are added to an earthenware pot containing chicken stock. The dish also includes carrots, onions, Chinese cabbage pieces of fried tofu and shirataki..." This is Shirataki, they are noodles that are sort of gelatinous and somewhat translucent and gluten
free and they are actually made with a yam called konjac. They often come like this in a package with water so they need to be drained and then rinsed before they can be eaten and they have a very
very interesting texture unlike any other Japanese noodle that I've ever had like ramen from today's sponsor Vite Ramen. Vite's motto is fast fuel, peak health, easy noods. That's noodles by the way. Vite's mission led by their CEO Tim who not only stars in all of their ads and is extremely entertaining, but he's also a nice guy too, their mission is to help people eat healthily easily, and a lot of times you don't associate noodles with healthy eating but Vite has packed their noodles with nutrients and vitamins to make it so that they are a healthy option. They take about five minutes to make, are wonderfully filling and they have lots of great flavors like Massaman curry, white miso, and pork tonkotsu. You can even get them just as plain noodles, naked noods, and use them as the base for another meal like to make chanko nabe. So to try Vite Ramen yourself go to viteramen.com/tastinghistory and use my code TASTINGHISTORY10 for an additional 10% off. That's viteramen.com/tastinghistory or
just click the link in the description and use my code tastinghistory10. Now as I said you can use those noodles to make chanko nabe because there aren't a lot of rules when it comes to making this dish. There are so many different variations on this dish that while this is my version it is not necessarily THE version. But to make my version what you'll need is: 6 cups
or 1.5 liters of chicken broth, 1 tablespoon of Dashi powder. This is essentially a stock and it's often made from kombu or kelp and katsuabushi or skipjack tuna, and I made my own Dashi from scratch in the video on Japanese noodles so I will put a link in the description to where you
can watch that if you want to make it from scratch. A quarter cup or 60 milliliters of mirin which is
a sweet rice wine for cooking, 2 tablespoons of white miso paste, 1 tablespoon of soy sauce, and 1 teaspoon of minced garlic. So heat the chicken broth in a pot until it's boiling and then add in the Dashi powder. If you're using homemade Dashi you'll need about two or three cups. Let it cook for about a minute and then lower the heat to medium and add in the mirin and the miso paste. Stir in the Miso and let it begin to dissolve. This can take a couple of minutes but once it's
fully dissolved and the broth has become cloudy add the soy sauce, and the garlic. Stir it all in
and then let it simmer for 30 minutes. And while it simmers you can gather all of the rest of your ingredients and this is where you can really be creative because you can add pretty much anything. I mean don't add like a chocolate bar but any kind of meat, or vegetable, or mushroom. You can
just toss them all in, whatever you want. Now using the restaurant's description for my base I'm going to start with 4 boneless chicken legs and 4 chicken livers, a half cup of chopped carrot, a half cup of chopped onion, some Chinese or napa cabbage, 2 packs of drained shirataki noodles,
and several slices of abura age. This is the fried tofu that is mentioned in the description, and according to legend this food was a favorite of the Kitsune who are shape-shifting foxes in Japanese folklore often depicted with nine tails. Now that's everything that's in the description
but you can add other things like mushrooms or daikon radish. I'm adding both raw daikon as well as some pickled daikon radish because one I love this stuff and two it makes a pretty yellow
color on top and just makes it look lovely. So once you have all of your ingredients gathered and
your broth is well simmered it is time to assemble your hot pot. Now ideally what you want to use is a Japanese earthenware hot pot that you can eat out of as well as cook out of but if you don't have that then any pot will do, you can transfer it and eat it out of something else, whatever you got is going to work. So bring the broth to a boil in whatever pot you're using and then add in the chicken. Also the chicken along with everything else should be cut up into bite-sized pieces, something that I forgot to do when I added it to the broth but luckily you could just take it out once it's cooked a little bit, and chop it up then you're not going to notice the difference. Once it's cooked for about five minutes, add in the carrots and onions, and in my case the daikon radish or anything else that takes a little while to cook. Let it all simmer with the lid on for 10 to 15 minutes and then go ahead and add in all of the other ingredients. Now some people let these cook for a while sometimes just a few minutes and sometimes they reduce the heat completely and then just put them in and let them kind of warm up in the broth. It's really up to you, so many different ways of doing this. Personally I'm going to cook mine just for a few minutes namely so I have time to talk about the history of sumo. Legend has it that the very first sumo match was between two gods, and the stakes were mighty high, it was the world. The kojiki or records of ancient matters written in the year 712 tells us of two deities the Heavenly deity Takemikazuchi god of thunder and the sword, and the terrestrial deity Takeminakata, god of wind, water and farming, and leader of the common people. Well the two gods ended up having a little dispute
over some land in Japan, and so Takemikazuchi came down from heaven to settle the matter via wrestling match. The two gods met on the coast of Japan and there they had it out. In the end the heavenly Takemikazuchi defeated Takeminakata by crushing his arm, and he took over as leader of the common folk. Now while this is considered the first sumo match, clearly the rules have changed because you're not supposed to go breaking people's arms in sumo today. The rules were also different for the first human sumo wrestler. His story is told in the Nihon Shoki, written around 720. There was a man named Kuyehaya who was going around boasting about how strong he was. And Emperor Suinin did not appreciate that so the emperor got another man Nomi no Sukune to challenge Kuyehaya to wrestling. Well "the two men stood opposite one another. Each raised his foot and kicked at the other, when Nomi no Sukune broke with a kick the ribs of Kuyehaya and also kicked and broke his loins and thus killed him." Again today's rules are more about pushing your opponent out of the ring rather than breaking his loins. There was also probably less loin busting when sumo went from myth to history, and it did so as a Shinto ritual to foresee the results of upcoming harvests. The ritual was also enjoyed in the Imperial Court during the Heian period not only as part of harvest festivals but also as
a form of entertainment for aristocrats. During the first shogunate sumo became a way for samurai to train as well as to kind of show off for the higher ups, show how strong you were. The 16th century Shincho Koki tells of the Daimyo Oda Nobunaga holding numerous tournaments. In 1578 he "summoned three hundred sumo wrestlers from throughout Ōmi Province, Nobunaga watched them compete at Mount Azuchi. Twenty-three of them were choice wrestlers, and he gave a folding fan to each. Among them, Hino Nagamitsu drew Nobunaga's special attention. He was called before Nobunaga, who gave him a
fan with gilt ribs- the ultimate in prestige and honor." Now this was during a period of intense warring across Japan and so as a samurai it was important to keep in shape and show off your skills, but in the 17th and 18th century during the Edo Period there was a lot less fighting and it was a time of relative peace, and so the samurai were less necessary and didn't need
to keep sharpening their skills through sumo, so sumo ended up becoming more of an entertainment.
Kind of the beginning of it as a sport, and the rules then haven't really changed to today. They were no longer warriors training for battle but rather elite athletes, and just like athletes today many of them were celebrities. Perhaps the most famous was a giant of a man named Raiden Tameemom who stood six foot six inches, nearly a foot and a half taller than the average man in Japan at the time. And this is around the time that sumo wrestlers become known for their size and namely known for how much they eat. In 1895 the Scottish-born writer and engineer
William Kinnimond Burton wrote about the eating habits of the wrestlers who he refers to I hope lovingly as "the most good-natured and kindly lumps of humanity that I have ever come across..." I hope I'm never referred to as a lump of humanity... <_< Regardless he says that "The manner in which they
made away with anything edible or drinkable that was put before them, in any quantity that might be offered, was simply phenomenal, and might have roused the envy of the most robust European. Drinkables, even the right potent kinds were valiantly consumed, yet to my great astonishment these huge men seemed not to be affected in any way. Their conduct was most decorous throughout." And it was around this time that chanko nabe became a staple in the sumo stables of Japan. Now where that term chanko nabe comes from is a matter of debate. Some say that it comes from the dialect
in Nagasaki that means Chinese pot stew, chanko nabe. Others claim that as chan- could be a term for
father and -ko a term for child that it referred to the kind of master and apprentice relationship within the stables, chan-ko nabe. Yet another claims that in the late 19th century a retired wrestler began making this dish for the younger sumo wrestlers in the stable, and since they looked at him as a
father figure, chan, then they named it like father's hot pot, chanko nabe. Again who knows. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ But it was likely former wrestlers who started making this. One, because they were trying to make large amounts of food for the younger sumo wrestlers, even though a lot of the actual cooking was done by the youngest of the sumo wrestlers, still is today, but also because most of the early restaurants that served this were started by former wrestlers, including Chanko Kawasaki which opened in 1937, and is the basis for the chanko nabe that I'm making today. And here we are, chanko nabe, the stew of the Japanese sumo. Here we go. Hmm. Those noodles, the texture is so interesting. It's like- kind of gummy? But a not in a bad way, just a
very, very different texture from most noodles Japanese or otherwise, but the flavor, it just soaks up that broth. You get the Miso, you get the- you know I don't know if you necessarily get
the chicken but it's just- it's such a complex flavor, any kind of broth like this with the Dashi and all of these different kind of savory flavors coming through
I want to try a piece of the of the tofu. So the flavor is good for me, I don't like the texture. And that's not surprising, I'm a weird texture
kind of person. So that texture is not for me but that's the cool thing about the chanko nabe is there are so many different ingredients in here, you can take out whatever you want, leave
whatever you don't want, and often that is how it's served. You take out certain ingredients and put them kind of in a side bowl, or sometimes the ingredients aren't intent at all and
you just dip them in and then kind of drink it with the rice. There's lots of ways to enjoy this. I'm gonna try some of the chicken. Oh, that's really hot. Hot pot! So I won't be tasting anything
more because I have burned all of the- all of the taste buds off of my tongue but
the flavor is is actually really wonderful. I think a little bit more- I can have some broth but really really hot so be careful when you're eating this. There's so much heat still kind of underneath there and I pull out a piece of chicken from the
bottom and uh still scalding, shocker. The flavor is just hm! So complex. There's just enough saltiness from the miso and from the soy but it's not overly salty but you know it's just that
Japanese flavor, I don't know it's hard to describe. If you've ever had miso soup, if you've ever had
something that's been made with Dashi you know those flaors. They're wonderful and they're just quintessentially Japanese. So now unlike a sumo I'm probably not going to eat this entire thing with 10 bowls of rice all in one sitting, but the nice thing with a hot pot like this is you can
reheat it over and over and over again. Obviously the texture will change of everything that's in
there because it's being cooked again but it heats up really, really well. So try out some chanko nabe
and I will see you next time on Tasting History.
