Mr. Teppei Kawase once ran a bakery café in his hometown Ogaki City in Gifu prefecture. He moved to Sicily in order to learn Italian cuisine. After returning to Japan, when he went to Hokkaido to find delicious organic wheat and tasty natural wines, he decided to run his own restaurant there. This is why he opened “Tepp’s.” He cooks and offers dishes with a variety of textures, flavors, temperatures of serving, and so on, which all are “easy on your stomach” because he himself has a delicate one. Since he is also a skilled baker, he bakes breads using his own yeast made from strained lees of wines, which are very popular among customers. French Toast made of his bread is especially favored by regular customers who even describe it as “addictive.” They say that they like the nice sour taste from the yeast and can’t get enough of it.
When you order the French Toast, the chef’s wife Mariko-san may show you the special eggs used in the dish before cooking. They come from an egg farm in Naganuma named “Mochitsu Motaretsu (give and take)”. When Mariko-san ate their egg for the first time, she was surprised to see the lemon-yellow color of the yolk as well as finding that it didn’t have the typical egg smell unlike others. She is willing to tell her experience to guests as a customer service when time permits because she hopes to share her excitement with them.
The eggs produced in “Mochitsu Motaretsu” are called “hiragai (cage-free) natural sperm eggs.” However, Mr. Kazuki Takai, the owner of the egg farm, said, “Hiragai doesn’t always mean that the farm’s eggs are delicious,” and added that the taste of an egg depended on the freshness of the egg itself, the feed given to the hen, and freshness of the feed. He gives his hens fresh feed sourced from suppliers including neighboring farms, such as wheat, raw rice bran, toasted soybean flour, malted rice, etc. Furthermore, he makes sure to always obtain freshly polished rice bran in order to avoid the oxidation of oil, and uses neither vaccines nor antibiotics for chicks. Usually, egg farms buy and start raising 120 days old young hens called “oobina (bigger chick)” while Takai’s farm admits chicks as young as zero days old. He does so to avoid the administration of antibiotics to them as much as possible, though he said with a laugh, “Raising [such young chicks] is really troublesome, you know.”
Tepp’s uses the eggs from “Mochitsu Motaretsu” for dishes featuring half-boiled eggs so that customers can enjoy their unique tastiness. Teppei-san makes his specialty French Toast by soaking the bread in egg, cream, and sugar mixture for a longer time and then cooking it with a generous amount of butter in a frying pan until crisp. You may sense the change of textures – first it feels crisp and then becomes soft and juicy – and enjoy the bitterness of the caramelized granulated sugar, the sour taste of the bread, and the delicate sweetness of the egg mixture. It can offer you multi-layered deliciousness in one plate and is a perfect dessert to finish your course dinner.
