Ontama

One of my eating habits on the weekend is having brunch in the city. I am too lazy to wake up early and make my breakfast on weekend and my tummy wouldn't compromise till lunch time so having brunch around 11 AM is just perfect for me. One of my favorite places in the city for light meal is Mappen and last time I ended up slurping Ontama Soba, hot soba with Ontama (onsen tamago).

(Menya Mappen)

Talking about Ontama, a half-cooked egg originally cooked by dipping it into an onsen spring that's why it's called 'onsen tamago'. When you slurp an onsen tamago, the milky white egg and slightly set yolk would smoothly slide down your tongue and throat with a warm feel and you'd say 'oishii..!'. You can find the easy way to cook onsen tamago on the web, such us cooking it with rice cooker.

Talking about eating raw eggs, it was 6 years ago when I visited Japan for the first time, staying at my friend's house in Seki when his family prepared a dinner for us, it was the first time I ate raw egg, the Japanese way.

Get a hot bowl of rice, pour the egg over the steamy rice and dash it with a bit of soy sauce then mixed them all with a soup or Sukiyaki!

In Japan, eggs are specially checked to make sure that they are safe to eat raw. A high-tech machine taking care of the whole process automatically: cleaning the eggs, checking them for quality, sorting them for size and finally packaging them and sealing the carton. The latest machine can process 120,000 eggs in an hour! Take a look at the machine in action on Web Japan