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YuzuMura.com is closed for the foreseeable future. See details on our home page. |
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Food & Beverage: When I travel to urban centers in Asia, I tend to make a few pilgrimages to the basements of department stores. Sometimes these places can make the work of the best cookbook food stylists look bad. In Japan, you can find foods made with obsessive attention to detail, from freshly made taiyaki (a kind of fish-shaped waffle filled with bean paste) to high-end European pastries to Kyoto-style Japanese sweets, to high-quality teas and beautifully packaged snacks, to flawless melons packaged with protective netting to prevent any bruising. You can even find ready-to-eat meals. In Hong Kong, Taipei, Seoul and elsewhere, you can find similarly extravagant foods made with a level of quality that rarely makes it to the shores of the U.S.
When I founded Yuzu Trading Co., I wanted to bring some of those experiences to North America. Of course, many of these kinds of foods don't travel well, so initially, I'm focusing on really high quality products that are made for local markets but have enough strength to survive at least a few months of storage.
One of the first such products, Dragon Beard Candy by Bamboo Garden, has a 2000-year history as a candy that was once served to Chinese emperors. Bamboo Garden's candy has a distinctive icy-crispy texture that is completely unlike any sweet you've ever tried. It takes years of practice to learn the technique to make this candy, and typically only survives only an hour or so before losing its refined texture. Bamboo Garden made it possible to store the candy for several months and packaged it very elegantly.
We've recently started offering Bamboo Garden's Chinese teas, which are as elegantly packaged as their candy. You'll love the quality of their Tikuanyin Oolong tea, savor the sweetness of the "Monkey pick" Oolong, and enjoy the earthy flavor of the Yunan Pu-Erh tea.
-Jason
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