Machiko Chiba smiled at the familiar face, and it was mine.

In 2014, we met at a dinner hosted by Maritess Lopez, wife of the Philippine ambassador to Japan, Manolo Lopez. We met again last week at Restaurant 9501 of ABS-CBN, where Chiba demonstrated her patented cooking pot, Cook Zen, which allows food to be cooked in the shortest time using a microwave oven.

It is like a pressure cooker but is made of polypropylene, a kind of plastic that can withstand high heat. After a few recipes, it was easy to surmise that the steam is what cooks the food.

Yet the emphasis by the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan, which brought Chiba here, was on Washoku, the term for traditional Japanese cuisine, including the styling of the food on the plate, food served according to season, and a well-balanced and healthy diet.

Washoku was registered in 2013 with the Unesco Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, a program that identifies certain practices that keep alive a country’s unique culture and traditions.

Shorter cooking time

How does one marry tradition and new technology then?

Chiba said she studied the old way of cooking Japanese dishes in the different regions of Japan. What she noted was that the dishes took a long time to cook.

In today’s world, she said, when people are too busy doing other things, cooking time shouldn’t take that long. This led her to design the Cook Zen with the help of scientists and designers.

Not one of the dishes she demonstrated took more than 10 minutes to cook, whether vegetable, meat or fruit. The short cooking time also preserves vitamins, color and texture.

Chiba’s daughter, Akiko, herself enjoys the advantages of her mother’s cooking pot. It’s for those with a fast-paced lifestyle like she has in New York.

A Juilliard School graduate, she is a concert pianist who sometimes collaborates with her mother in events, where she plays the pieces of famous composers while her mother cooks the favorite dishes of those artists. That should be interesting to witness.

Speed cooking

But that day, there were seven dishes that were cooked so fast that sometimes the dish was done before the spiel was over. Not all ingredients were brought in from Japan, and Chiba also used olive oil, just a teaspoon, for many of them.

Whenever there is a demonstration, I take note of procedures, and one thing I learned is that when using dried kombu or kelp (seaweed)—an ingredient of dashi, the basic broth in Japanese dishes—cuts have to be made at the edges until just short of the middle rib.

Included in Chiba’s dishes is her version of pork adobo on which she used rice vinegar, Japanese soy sauce and a Korean hot paste (Yanninjyan). She was taught in Hong Kong by a Filipino woman, she said.

There was the basic adobo taste, but overall it was different because of the ingredients used. And the sourness hinted at how the vinegar hadn’t cooked through (we call that hilaw or uncooked), maybe because the short cooking time and the sealed cooking pot didn’t allow it to.

Is the Cook Zen pot available here? Sadly, it isn’t. One may order through Amazon, but a check with the site showed the product isn’t available yet.

Chiba said all recipes in her book, including those cooked that day, can be made using traditional pots and pans. It will take longer, she said. Which is exactly the point of using her Cook Zen pot—to save time and preserve the food’s important vitamins and color in the spirit of Washoku.

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