Getting started with bento making: Are bentos right for you?

[Note: This is my New Year’s message from 2008, but it’s just as applicable this year. I’ll be posting a brand new New Year’s post tomorrow later on, but in the meantime, if you are thinking of making bentos part of your routine this year, this is worth a read I think!]

If one of your New Year’s resolutions is to incorporate bento lunches into your life, this is the first part of a mini-series on how to get going.

Are bentos right for you?

I know that a lot of people get seduced by the idea of jewel-like little boxes of food greeting them for lunch. But before you embark on the bento route and start collecting bento boxes and cute supplies and so on, ask yourself these questions:

• Do you have the time? Do you really have the time to make bento? Even with the speed bento tips that are featured here and on other bento sites, there’s no denying that making bento lunches on a regular basis does take a bit of time and effort. If the idea of waking up 20 to 30 minutes earlier in the morning to assemble your bento just sounds unrealistic to you, you may want to consider if bentos are really for you.
• Does your lifestyle or workstyle allow for bentos? I’ve already talked before about the benefits of making bentos if you work from home [1]. But what if you have the type of job where you are always taking clients out to lunch? Is lunchtime an important socializing time, where you spend time gossiping with coworkers? Do you have a good cafeteria already? Perhaps you will just want to make a bento once a week or so, or concentrate on picnic bentos for outings on the weekend.

Reasons for making bento lunches

If you answered yes to the questions above, let’s look at the main reasons for making bento lunches:

• For healthier eating, or to meet specific dietary needs. Bentos are great if your main goals are to eat healthier, to keep up with your specific dietary requirements (dealing with allergies, vegetarian/vegan, etc.). The best way to achieve this is to cook most things from scratch, rather than relying on pre-made foods, so expect to dedicate a little more time to your bento making than people with other goals.
• To lose weight. Related to the above, making your own bento lunches is a great way to stick to a weight loss plan, as I’ve written about [2] already. If this is your main goal, make sure your bento box is the right size [3] to start with, and also be prepared for a little extra effort to prepare fresh vegetables, whole grains, and so on. Also, beware of high calorie prepared foods, even if - or especially if - they are Japanese! Things like korokke (breaded and deep-fried potato or cream croquettes), tonkatsu (breaded and deep-fried pork cutlets), gyoza dumplings, shuumai, and so on are featured quite a lot in bento books and blogs, but just because they look cute tucked into a box doesn’t mean they’re healthy! (There are ways of incorporating these goodies into your bentos, but that’s a bit more advanced.)
• To save money. Making your own lunch can save you a lot of money compared to eating out at restaurants or buying fast food. If this is your primary goal, you do want to be careful not to go overboard on ingredients, cute bento supplies and such. Also beware of prepared Japanese foods, which are cheap in Japan but not really elsewhere.
• To learn new cooking skills. Perhaps your main goal is to learn more about, or refine, your Japanese cooking knowledge by making bentos. Not many restrictions for you here, but again, those beautiful jewel-like bento boxes take some time and effort, so be prepared for that.

The bottom line is: committing to making bento lunches regularly does mean you will have to invest some time. But the payoffs are worth it!

Incidentally, the main goals I have for my own bento making are the above, in the order they are listed. So chances are that this site will suit you fine if they are your goals too.

Getting started with bento making: Aim for balance

One of the best reasons to make bento lunches is that you can eat a lot healthier than eating fast food or restaurant food. However, it doesn’t happen by magic. It’s just as easy, or even easier, to make a cute box full of unhealthy food.

The main thing to keep in mind that you should always aim for a good balance between the main food groups: carbs or starches, protein, and vegetables and fruit. I always try for a 1:1:1 ratio between carbs, protein and vegetables - if there are more vegetables, all the better, but never too much carbs or protein.

Let’s look at this in practice. Here is the first bento featured on Just Bento [4].

It’s quite easy to see the balance here. The brown rice takes up about a third of the box. The protein components, the quail egg and the fried tofu, take up another third or so, and the rest of the box is filled up with vegetables.

In Bento no. 6 [5] the balance is a little harder to see, but it’s still there.

The carb component is the pita breads. The proteins are the mini bean burgers and the yogurt. The veg/fruit are the salad and the mixed apple and pear chunks. (Note that I try not to use fruit instead of vegetables most of thee time, since fruit does contain sugars, though it’s still good for you!)

Balance your sandwich lunch

If you’re not ready to try making a full-on rice based bento yet, you can still ease into it by balancing your brown bag sandwich lunch. Let’s say you have a peanut butter and jelly (jam) sandwich. If your usual accompaniments to that are an apple and a brownie, that’s not very balanced since it’s too carb-heavy. The sandwich has bread (carb), peanut butter (protein and fat) and jelly (sugar, which is a carb). It’s quite carb-heavy still, so you need to balance it out. For example -

• PB and J sandwich + small container of low-fat or fatfree yogurt + steamed broccoli stalks left over from dinner
• PB and J sandwich + Mini Babybell cheese + readymade mixed salad
• PB and J sandwich + a few almonds or other nuts + carrot sticks with a non or low-fat dressing for dipping
• PB and J sandwich + roasted chickpeas [6] + baby spinach with a lemon wedge to squirt on

Adding these extra things doesn’t take that much effort (the roasted chickpeas do take a little effort, but they can be made in advance). And the health and satiety factors for your lunch are given a bit boost. Taking it a step further, if you make the sandwich from whole wheat bread, it becomes even more nutritious with no extra effort on your part. Changing the innards of the sandwich also takes no extra effort, beyond having to buy the ingredients.

So, try practicing balance with your usual bag lunch first, and see how it goes!

Don’t forget to cast your vote in the poll [7]!

Getting started with bento making: Easy diet bento rules

Bento box lunches are a great tool to use within an overall weight loss program. Just the fact that the box is quite compact makes portion control a lot easier. However, just packing your lunch in a cute box doesn’t automatically make it ‘diet food’ either. Here are some simple rules to follow to maximise the weight-loss benefits of your bento lunches.

Figure out the total calorie count goal

There are several sites out there where you can calculate the total amount of calories you need to consume in a day based on your age, height, current weight and activity level (here is a handy one [8]). My base rate is around 1800 calories, so I usually aim for a bento lunch that is around 500-600 calories. Sometimes I add some treats, especially on my more active days, and occasionally (i.e. ‘The day after’) I make something that is even lower in calories.

See also: Selecting the right bento box [3].

Start with the carbs

I do not follow a low-carb diet (my body just doesn’t react well to it) - I go for a balanced eating approach. All bentos start with the kind and quantity of the carb component. For most of my bentos, the carb component makes up 1/3rd, or about 200 calories, of the total. That’s about a cup of rice, a bit less than a cup of pasta, or 2 to 3 slices of bread. I add to that protein foods that do not exceed the carb calories if at all possible. The rest is made up of vegetables, fruit and oils.

There are other formulas out there for ‘bento dieting’, but I find this one to be the easiest to remember by far.

If you’ve been following the Getting Started series, you’ll notice that this principle is really Aim for Balance [9] with a little bit of calorie restriction. Balance really is the key!

Watch the salt

Most Japanese bento okazu (the foods other than the rice/carb) recipes tend to be on the salty side, because they are meant to be eaten with a lot of plain, white rice. Since your diet-bento will have less rice, you will want to reduce the salt in your okazu or you’ll crave more rice. What I often do is to make the protein component the usual way, but make vegetables with little or no added salt, so that it all balances out.

Keep the fat low

This might go without saying, but try to keep the amount of fat in the bento fairly low. You don’t need to eliminate it entirely, but don’t have a liberal hand with it either. Use cooking methods that don’t se a lot of fat. One of my favorite methods is ‘water sautéing’ - where I stir-fry things in a non-stick pan, adding a little water to prevent it from sticking if necessary. I use oil as a flavoring ingredient, and so I use the types of oils that do have a lot of flavor - sesame oil, extra virgin olive oil, pumpkin seed oil, argan oil, and various flavored infused oils.

Use prepared foods sparingly, even if they are cute and Japanese (or Asian)

For Japanese food fans, a typical Japanese grocery store can be hard to resist. The foods are so cute, and colorful, and exotic - you want to try everything. But just because it’s Japanese and cute doesn’t mean it’s really good for you either.

If you look back at the virtual bento shopping trip [10] where we cruised around the prepared-bento departments of various stores, you’ll see that many of them feature deep fried and breaded foods. These are quite common in Japan. Room temperature fried and battered or breaded foods are surprisingly tasty, but aren’t too good for your waistline. If you must, include them in your bento as occasional treats.

(One of my weaknesses when it comes to deep fried breaded food is kureemu korokke, croquettes made with bechamel sauce, usually mixed with crabmeat or shrimp. Mmm, fried creamy sauce. I have them maybe once a year.)

Another more insiduous high calorie food category is dumplings and dumpling-like foods, the kind you encounter at a dim sum. Gyoza dumplings [11] for instance, another one of my favorites, when steam-fried in ‘potsticker’ fashion, are about 100 calories apiece. Can you be happy with just one gyoza? Not me. So again, these are treats that I have occasionally.

Steamed shumai dumplings have a bit less calories, but still, use them sparingly.

You should also watch out for the salt content in prepared foods like pickles and furikake. Salt doesn’t make you ‘fat’ per se, but high salt items in your bento will make you want more rice. In fact, things like pickles are intended to make you consume more rice (the phrase used is gohan ga susumu, “rice goes more”). My homemade furikake [12] are lower in salt content than commercial kinds.

These are the basic tenets to follow for a balanced diet bento. They shouldn’t be hard to stick to, and are pretty easy to remember. And, the very fact that you need to put everything into a compact container makes it more difficult to ‘cheat’!

Going to the next level

The following points take a bit more effort, time or change in habits, but if you can incorporate them, all the better.

• Use whole rice or grains instead of white. When it comes to grains, white is bad and brown is good. They have more nutrients and belly-satiating fiber. Cooking brown (or whole) grains takes more time, but you can pre-cook and freeze it [13].

• Beans beans beans. Japanese people generally love beans, which are usually cooked so that they are a little sweet. Incorporating small quantities into the corner of a bento. Even scattering a few pre-cooked frozen beans into your bento is not bad - it adds color, protein and fiber. If you can’t give up the flavor or white rice or white bread, one way to compensate for the loss of fiber and nutrients is to add a small amount of beans or other legumes. Example: I mixed some leftover firm lentils into fried rice [14].

• Make your vegetables colorful. I always try to use at least two kinds of vegetables in my bento. The more colorful the vegetables, the better - the darker the green, the better. Bright red/orange vegetables (carrots, peppers) are good too. I also like to cook the vegetables - a brief blanching or stir-frying reduces their bulk while losing little of the nutrition. Raw salads may taste healthy, but a big bowl of pale lettuce has little nutrition, while a small handful of blanched spinach has plenty.

• Use ‘no calorie’ foods. Many vegetables have virtually no calories worth counting. There are also some foods with almost no calories, such as konnyaku and shirataki [15] (see this beef bowl bento with konnyaku [16], or spicy shirataki noodle bento [17]).

Bento ‘dieting’ is not magic, but it’s fun and it does work! (You do have to watch your intake for the rest of the day too of course…)

See also: How it’s worked for me so far [2]. (I’ve fallen off the wagon a bit over the holidays, but I’ve gotten back to balanced-bento making this week, and already feel a lot better!)

Getting started with bento making: Variety and saving money

A main reason many people like to, or want to, make bento lunches is for more variety, to save money, and to have some fun too. In my mind these aspects are quite interconnected.

There are three sources for filling your bento box. One is food that you make specifically for it, usually in the morning or perhaps the night before. The second is leftovers from other meals. The third is with stock or staple items (aka johbisai). The key to keeping a good variety in your bento meals is to use all three sources in in a smart way.

Limit the number of things you have to make from scratch in the morning

Certain foods are just better when they are made fresh. Raw vegetables for example, which need to be crisp. Some protein based foods go bad fairly quickly unless they’ve been cooked in a way that preserves them, so it’s safer to eat them as soon after you’ve made them as possible. A good example of this is tamagoyaki (Japanese omelette) [23].

Unless you have a lot of time to spare though, you’ll probably want to limit the number of things you just have to make fresh in any given bento box. Once you get more experience with bento making, your speed and efficiency will increase. But if you’re just starting out, try to plan bentos that may have at most 2 to 3 items in it that have to be made in the morning.

Learn the art of repurposing leftovers

Using up leftovers for bento is a great way to both increase the variety of what goes in there and to save money. You save a lot of money by bringing a bento vs. buying something or eating out anyway, but you can really maximize your savings by using leftovers. The first and easiest step is to just set aside some of your dinner and to put in your bento box the next day (or freeze for later use).

To go a step further, try to think of varying the flavor or texture of the leftovers. I love to think of how to make something ‘different’ to have in my bento whenever I’m making dinner. Here are some ideas to get you thinking about your own repurposing variations:

• If you’ve made spaghetti with meatballs, set aside a few of the meatballs after browning them and before putting them in the tomato sauce. Cook them in a little soy sauce, etc. or just use them like mini-hamburgers with a bit of ketchup.
• Bake or boil an extra potato to use sauteed or in a salad in your bento.
• If you’ve cooked some vegetables in a soup or stew, e.g. carrots and broccolli and so on, take out a few to use in next day’s bento. You could lightly stir-fry them with a little sesame oil and red pepper flakes for example, or make a boiled salad out of them by adding dressing.
• Boil an extra egg - boiled eggs are always nice to tuck into the corner of a bento, for color and variety.
• A common way Japanese people re-purpose leftover tonkatsu [24] (fried pork cutlet) is to turn it into tonkatsu don. Make some stir-fried onion, add the tonkatsu pieces, add a beaten egg and cook until soft-set. You could use this method with any kind of meat, as well as veggie options like cooked tempeh or tofu.
• Reserve some of the meat from a roast chicken. The breast meat in particular is nice in a salad, and shredded dark meat is great in a stir fry or in fried rice.

Safety note: Always re-heat leftovers before putting them in your bento, or else freeze them and defrost - especially things with protein in it!

See also: Top 7 things to do with leftover food scraps [25] on Lunch In A Box.

Build up your stock of staples or johbisai

The final part of the bento variety puzzle is a good stock of staples. Every Japanese bento maker relies on a stock of johbisai (joubisai) or staple items. These can be homemade or bought. These are items that can be kept for a period of time and pulled out and used on short notice. They can be stocked in the fridge, in the pantry, or in the freezer.

There’s a growing list of johbisai recipes here on Just Bento [26]. You don’t have to make everything you stock though. Here’s a list of some readymade foods that are great to have on hand. (I’ve classified Japanese staples as ones that you would need to go to a Japanese grocery store for. Things like edamame are now getting stocked at non-Japanese markets like Trader Joe’s too, which is great)

The pantry:

• Canned fish - tuna, mackerel, salmon, crab etc. that can be used as-is or turned into something quickly
• Canned meat (corned beef, Spam) - if you like them! (I like corned beef, but Spam…)
• Canned beans of all kinds (I hate canned green beans, but cooked dried bean cans are great)
• Canned corn
• Instant soup packets, stock cubes
• Sauces and preserves - Worcestershire, ketchup, chili sauce…
• Crackers and long-lasting breads like Wasa rye crisps
• Japanese pantry staples include nori seaweed sheets, dried wakame seaweed, kombu seaweed tea (kombu-cha), instant miso soup packs, furikake, gomashio (sesame seeds and salt), ready-to-nuke rice, panko, canned or vacuum packed foods of all kinds.

The refrigerator:

• Cheeses of all kinds
• Ham and other deli meats
• Vegetables that keep well - carrots, celery, cucumbers, etc.
• Tofu products (if they are vacuum packed they usually keep for a bit - see the expiration dates)
• Olives
• Japanese refrigerator staples include miso, umeboshi, pickles of all kinds, pickled red ginger (beni-sho-ga)

The freezer:

• Frozen, ready-to-cook vegetables: green beans, corn, carrots, edamame, spinach, mixed vegetables…
• Frozen minute steak and veggie burgers (cut up burgers into small pieces for bento use)
• There are tons of Japanese freezer staples! All kinds of dumplings (gyoza, shumai), fried foods, fish, vegetables (frozen kabocha squash pieces are very handy), etc. It can be quite bewildering looking through the frozen food section of a Japanese supermarket.

One important thing to remember though - don’t get carried away with stocking up on staples, especially if you’re trying to save money! Even long-keeping foods do go bad eventually.

This wraps up the Getting Started [27] series. I hope it’s given you lots of ideas to get going. For even more info, see the Bento Basics [28] series too.

Next week I’ll be back posting actual bento step-by-steps and recipes. Enough theory, more action!