The Japanese Food Report

Grill Time! Need Recipe Testers for New Cookbook

2010-03-17T14:52:37Z

Dear JFR readers: Thank you for your overwhelming response to this post! We now have our testing team in place, folks from around the world. Very exciting. Thank you again -- Harris (March 19th)

Calling all friends of the Japanese Food Report! Just in time for summer grilling (or winter grilling south of the equator), my coauthor Tadashi Ono and I are in the thick of writing an exciting new cookbook for Ten Speed Press called, appropriately enough, "The Japanese Grill." We're now organizing a team of volunteer recipe testers to evaluate our dishes, and need your help.

What does this mean? As a recipe tester, we'll send you grilling recipes along with a response form. You'll cook them, and tell us what you think. Do the instructions work for you? Did the dish turn out delicious? (But, of course.) Anything confusing or unclear?

Tadashi and I have been grilling everything from classic yakitori and shioyaki (salt grilling) to contemporary Japanese-style steaks, burgers, fish, veggies and more. We want to make sure these recipes are as good as possible, and would love to have you try them out.

No prior recipe testing experience required. All you need is a standard outdoor charcoal or gas grill (a Weber is perfect). We're looking for enthusiastic home cooks who hunger (so to speak) to learn more about Japanese cuisine and grilling. We ask that you commit to cooking and evaluating at least four dishes by mid April.

If you're interested, and can make a serious commitment, please email me at harris [at] japanesefoodreport [dot] com. Tell me a little about yourself, what you'd like to cook (meat, poultry, veggies, fish) and where you're located (anywhere is fine). Let me entice you with a bit of grilling eye candy:

Vinegared Sardines (Tosazu)

2010-03-10T04:28:50Z

Here's another method for sardines, thanks to Chef Isao Yamada: Marinate them in vinegar. In my last post I mentioned I wanted to learn more Japanese sardine preparations, to give me some options for this flavorful but underappreciated fish (at least in America). Yamada san reeled a bunch of possibilities, including nimono (last post), tempura, grilled, raw and vinegared (sunomono).

We decided to marinate sardine fillets in tosazu, which means "Tosa vinegar." Tosa is the ancient name for an area in Shikoku (one of Japan's main islands), a place where fishermen have long pulled in bonito (katsuo) -- so the name suggests an infusion of katsuobushi, that is, dried shaved bonito. Small word, lots of meaning. The bonito adds a heady dose of smoke, flavor, and rich umami to the sardines. Combine this with the acidity of the vinegar, and you have a delicious, complex preparation that's quite simple to prepare. First, here's the method for preparing the tosazu:

]]> 1 cup dashi
3 tablespoons mirin
1/2 cup Japanese rice vinegar
1 (3 inch) piece of kombu
3 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon usukuchi soy sauce (saltier, lighter color soy sauce)
1 small handful of katuobushi (dried, shaved bonito)

Place the dashi, mirin, rice vinegar and soy sauce in a saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil for two minutes and add the both kinds of soy sauce. Boil for 30 seconds more. Turn off the heat, add the handful of katsuobushi, and let it steep for 5 minutes. Strain the liquid through a cheesecloth, allow to cool, and you have your tosazu. Set aside.

Before I go on, let me interject with a couple of notes (but of course): You want the sweetness of the mirin to balance the acidity of the vinegar and savoriness of the soy sauce. Taste the tosazu to see if you're getting that. Also, tossing in the handful of dried, shaved bonito is called oigatsuo -- "chasing" katsuo, a technique to amp up umami. Finally, as with nimono, we're creating supercharged water to infuse flavor in an ingredient, classic Japanese cooking at work. Okay, back to our regularly scheduled technique:

6 fresh sardine fillets
Salt for salting
2 tablespoons tosazu
2 tablespoons water
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon hari shoga, ginger sliced into thin needles
5 shiso leaves, sliced as thinly as possible
1 tablespoon myoga, thinly sliced (optional)
Sesame seeds

Lightly salt the sardine fillets and place, skin side down, on a plate. Allow the fish to cure for 20 minutes in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, combine the tosazu, water and sugar in a bowl. When the sardines are ready, rinse off the salt. Place them in the bowl with the tosazu and marinate for 5 minutes. (Up the proportions of liquid, if necessary, to cover the fillets completely.) When the fillets are ready, use your fingernail to get under the skin and pull it off. Thinly slice the sardines on an angle. Assemble the dish by piling the sardines in a bowl, pouring in a little tosazu, and topping with ginger, shiso, myoga and a sprinkle of sesame seeds. Enjoy.

(By the way, tosazu can sit in the fridge for a while. I'll be back with more uses for this ingredient in future posts.)

Simmered Sardines and Umeboshi

2010-03-03T04:39:44Z

Here's another amazing dish I cooked during my recent session with Chef Isao Yamada. I asked him to teach me a method for sardines, a delicious (and sustainable) fish that I feel more of us should be eating. The last time I was in Japan I stopped by a tiny izakaya on the Tokyo Bay that featured sardines cooked thirty ways, and I wanted to learn some of their fishy tricks. Yamada-san graciously obliged, and explained a few ways to prepare sardines, including the simmering method here.

Okay, before we get into the method, brush up on the otoshibuta, and your understanding of nimono (simmering), here and here. Got everything? Good, let's push on! In this dish, Yamada-san cooked iwashi with sake and umeboshi, salt-pickled Japanese apricots. Both of these ingredients naturally diminish the fishiness in sardines, plus the acidity of the umeboshi softens the small bones in the fish, which you can eat. Cool, eh? Make sure the sardines are nicely trimmed, with heads, tails and belly flaps removed. Finally, you'll notice Yamada-san doesn't call for dashi in this method. Why? The sardines themselves will create a heavenly fish broth while they cook. Cool, eh? Here are the ingredients:

]]> 1 (3 inch) piece kombu
6 sardines, cleaned and heads, tails and belly flaps trimmed
2 or 3 fat, plump whole umeboshi
3 ladlefuls sake
1 ladleful mirin (so ratio of 3:1 sake to mirin)
2 tablespoons soy sauce (or more depending on taste)
2 tablespoon ginger, thinly cut into needles (hari shoga)

Place the kombu on the bottom of a saucepan. Arrange the sardines on top of it, in a neat row (the kombu both adds umami and prevents the sardines from burning). Add the umeboshi. Pour in sake to just cover the fish and umeboshi. Add the correct ratio of mirin. Place over high heat and bring to a boil. Boil for 2 minutes, then place an otoshibuta over the ingredients. Reduce the heat to low and simmer for about 15 minutes, or until the liquid has almost all evaporated.

Remove the otoshibuta and add the soy sauce, and taste the cooking stock. Does it seem well balanced between savory and sweet? If it feels too salty, add a little sugar to balance it, depending on your taste. If it doesn't feel salty enough, add a little soy sauce, again, depending on your taste. Replace the otoshibuta on top of the ingredients, and increase the heat to high. Boil for about 2 minutes. Remove the otoshibuta, and break up the umeboshi with chopsticks. Boil until the cooking stock has become thick and glossy for maybe another 30 seconds -- but be careful not to burn it. Turn off the heat. Spoon the cooking stock over the fish. Serve by piling the sardines on a plate and topping with the cooking stock and bits of umeboshi. Finish with the hari shoga. Go to town.

The Power of the Otoshibuta (or, the Drop Lid)

2010-02-27T17:14:05Z

An amazing thing happened when I watched Chef Isao Yamada simmer ingredients in the Japanese way, a technique called nimono. When the simmering liquid started to boil, he laid a lid, a wooden lid smaller than the saucepan, directly on top of the cooking ingredients. The liquid immediately started boiling up, but then Yamada-san adjusted the heat, and it calmed down, happily bubbling away under that lid. What was going on here?

That lid is called an otoshibuta, or drop lid, and it's a genius piece of Japanese kitchen equipment. As I said, it's smaller than the diameter of the saucepan, so it fits inside, rather than covering it. As Yamada-san explained, the otoshibuta performs three primary functions: First, it circulates and increases heat, so the ingredients cook quickly and evenly. The cooking liquid also circulates towards the lid, so it coats the top of the ingredients inside the saucepan without having to stir or spoon. Second, the increased temperature caramelizes the sugars in the cooking liquid, adding flavor, and evaporates and concentrates the cooking liquid. And third, the otoshibuta holds ingredients in place so they stay stable, don't move around and don't break apart.

If you're using a wooden otoshibuta make sure to soak it in water first. If it's dry it will soak up the cooking liquid, which you don't want, of course. There are plastic or silicon otoshibuta, too, plus you can easily fashion one out of aluminum foil or parchment (I'll explain in by doing this in a future post). In fact, for some delicate ingredients like kabocha or turnips, you want to use parchment instead of a wooden lid, which would be too heavy and crush the fragile ingredients once they start simmering. Finally, when using an otoshibuta, make sure to keep a close eye on your pot -- things cook fast and you'll burn your food if you don't pay attention. (And guess who's done that?)

Simmering: More Thoughts on Seasoning

2010-02-27T17:08:42Z

In my post on simmering kabocha and chicken, I got into some of the underlying ideas behind nimono, or Japanese simmering technique, that Chef Isao Yamada explained to me. I wanted to touch on a few more of Yamada-san's thoughts about nimono.

With nimono, ingredients cook in umami-rich liquids like dashi, soy sauce, sake, and mirin, and balanced further with sugar. Balance. That's a key idea. Think about Western cuisine as a cuisine of impact. Butter, fats, herbs, spices are combined to create a flavor crescendo. Japanese cuisine, on the other hand, is concerned with balance. Sweet balancing salty, sweet balancing tart, seasonings balancing the natural flavors of ingredients. I read this difference described as a cuisine of addition (Western) versus a cuisine of subtraction (Japanese) -- Japanese cuisine being focused on drilling down to the essence of an ingredient's natural flavor (for more on this, read legendary Chef Yoshihiro Murata's outstanding essay in the book Dashi and Umami, in English). I also heard this difference, by the way, described as an oil cuisine (Western) versus a water cuisine (Japanese).

This water, water supercharged with umami-rich seasonings, is what infuses ingredients with flavor when simmering nimono-style. But as Yamada-san explained to me, seasonings aren't added willy nilly. There's a precise and purposeful way to work with them, to make sure they balance each other. (Precision is another hallmark of Japanese cuisine). The key is sa shi su se so, which represents, as I understood it: sugar (and mirin), salt, vinegar, soy sauce and miso. This is the order that seasonings are added. (By the way, you typically cook with either soy sauce or miso, one or the other, not both).

Why this order? Yamada-san explained that sugar molecules are larger than salt molecules, so if you added salt first, it would penetrate an ingredient and leave no room for the sugar molecules. So you always add sugar before adding salt, to achieve the balance of flavors. If you try it the reverse way, say adding soy sauce before mirin, a dish won't taste as good. All this, of course, was discovered eons before modern science came along to explain the actions of molecules.

Nimono fascinates me, and I'm going to speak more with Yamada-san about this technique in the future. If you walk into a French kitchen, the stove is the centerpiece, and the sauté pan its workhorse, cooks sautéing all kinds of ingredients in fats to develop flavor. With nimono, on the other hand, you create irresistible, balanced flavor by simply simmering foods in potent liquids. Interesting, isn't it?

Jinenbo Nakagawa's Pottery

2010-02-27T00:17:32Z

Today I heard from a few readers curious about the gorgeous piece of pottery in the picture of my last post on simmering kabocha and chicken. This stunning vessel is the work of the esteemed Karatsu potter Jinenbo Nakagawa, who I wrote about in a story for the late, great Gourmet in 2005 (click here to read the piece). Jinenbo means "nature boy," an apt handle for a man who digs clay himself from nearby mountains and conjures his glazes from the ash of rice stalks he collects from the fields near his workshop and home deep in the Saga Prefecture countryside. Karatsu pottery is so earthy, lyrical, and breathtaking; it's one of my favorite styles of Japanese pottery. And Jinenbo is one of my heroes. He's an amazing potter and I love his work; it's been a great privilege to call Jinenbo a friend. The piece in the picture is a katakuchi, a traditional spouted bowl, and the glaze is applied by a technique called hakeme, where Jinenbo roughly brushes rice stalk ash glaze using a brush he made himself out of, well, rice stalks. It's one of my most cherished pieces.

Let me say, too, that the wonderful thing about Japanese potters, even masters like Jinenbo, is that you can go visit them in their workshops. That's how we first met years ago, when I ambled down to rural, lovely Saga. In fact, pottery is what inspired me to travel Japan in the first place, and I've visited potters across the country. Check out Robert Yellin's blog and websites, a great way to begin discovering Japanese pottery. (I once called Robert out of the blue, not as a journalist, and he's the one who graciously introduced me to Jinenbo). Here's a shot of Jinenbo, from when I visited him last year.

Simmered Kabocha Pumpkin and Chicken

2010-02-26T03:55:24Z

In my last post I made dashi with Chef Isao Yamada, who I cooked with recently. So now that we had some beautiful dashi, the fundamental stock of Japanese cuisine, what to do with it? Yamada-san didn't waste any time cooking a slew of fantastic dash-based dishes, including this one, Braised Kabocha Pumpkin and Chicken. I had asked Yamada-san to teach me something about nimono, the technique of simmering. Simmering is a central cooking style in Japanese cuisine, and an incredibly versatile method to prepare fish, meat, vegetables and poultry.

What I love about nimono -- and all of Japanese cuisine -- is how it relies on such a remarkably constrained palette of seasonings to create so many different tastes. We're talking soy sauce (2 kinds mainly), mirin, sake, sugar, miso and dashi. Within these half-dozen ingredients, four are brewed and fermented with variants of the same koji mold (soy sauce, mirin, sake, miso), or prepared from fermented ingredients (dashi) -- so the components that make up these foods (rice, soy beans, kombu, bonito, sometimes barely) have been broken down and their flavor compounds released and blossomed, in other words, their umami, their incredibly intense umami or sense of savoriness. So cooking with these seasoning means infusing foods with and irresistible flavor fundamental to human beings (breast milk is extremely rich in umami compounds, fyi). That's why Japanese cuisine is so appealing, even though it traditionally has not relied on butter or olive oil or other fats to create flavor, like in other cuisines.

With nimono, foods are simmered in umami-rich liquids so they (a) taste incredibly good, and (b) cook quickly because the flavor is already so developed in the seasonings -- you don't have to cook for hours to tease out the flavor (think French braising).

Here's how Yamada-san cooked kabocha and chicken:

]]> 1/2 kabocha pumpkin, sliced and edged
4 ladlefuls dashi (20 fl ounces)
1/2 ladleful mirin (2.5 fl ounces)
1/3 ladleful usukuchi soy sauce (about 1.5 fl ounces)
2 tablespoons sugar
Small piece of kombu (2 inches approx)
2 deboned chicken legs, skin on
1 teaspoon arima sansho

First, some notes:

Kabocha: This squash must be ripened for at least a month after harvesting to convert its starches to sugar. The result is a luscious, sweet squash. Here's what Yamada-san did to bring out this lovely natural flavor: First, he carefully cut the kabocha in half and seeded it. Then he cut it in half again. He pointed out that the quarters have a thicker top part, and a thinner bottom part. When he cut the kabocha one more time (into eights) he cut the thicker side a little smaller -- so all the chunks had the same weight. Now he cut each chunk into even slices that weighed the same. The aim is to have same size slices so they all cook evenly. Once he finished the slices, he processed to trim the edges of each slice (called mentori I believe). Why? A couple of reasons: To create more surface area of the kabocha to absorb flavor, to make the slices aesthetically beautiful and to remove hard edges, so when the kabocha slices cook and hit each other, the delicate ingredient won't break apart. Finally, Yamada-san tapped the heel of his blade into the kabocha's skin to cut nicks into it, so when the kabocha cooks and the flesh expands, the harder skin will be able to expand with it and the slice won't crumble. Wow.

Okay, I went through all this description to give you some small idea of what it means to become a top-notch Japanese chef. What amazed me about cooking with Yamada-san was how aware he was of his ingredients, to such a deep level of specificity and sensitivity. Incredible. Watching him was just breathtaking. Now, of course, at home you don't have to get this deep, but keep in mind what Yamada-san did, and become more aware of your own ingredients. I know I have.

Ladlefuls: Why the heck am I talking about "ladlefuls" in the ingredients list? Well, if you know how much liquid your ladle holds, it's faster and easier to measure out ingredients using it than pouring liquids into a measuring cup! I'm all about expediency, so I know that my ladle (a shallow Japanese otama) holds 150ml or about 5fl oz of liquid. How much does your ladle hold?

Now, the method:

Add the kabocha to a medium sized saucepan, skin side down. Add the dashi, mirin, sugar and kombu. Place over medium heat and bring the liquid to a boil. When the liquid boils reduce the heat so the kabocha just gently simmers. Cook until the kabocha is just cooked through -- a skewer or toothpick will go through it easily. When the kabocha is ready, turn off the heat and add the usukuchi soy sauce. Let the kabocha steep in its cooking liquid for at least an hour (more is fine, even a few hours - don't refrigerate). Once the kabocha has steeped, carefully remove it and set aside, and reserve the cooking liquid in the saucepan.

For the chicken, preheat a skillet over high heat. When the skillet is hot, add the chicken, skin side down, and brown for a minute or two to give the skin color. Now transfer the chicken to the saucepan with the kabocha cooking liquid. If you need more liquid, add some dashi. You want to just cover the chicken. Bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce the heat so the liquid simmers and place a drop lid over the chicken (I'll get into drop lids in detail in another post, if you're not familiar with them. For right now, cut a piece of aluminum foil to fit inside the pot, poke a couple of holes in it, and place directly on top of the liquid and chicken, which will help the cooking). Cook for 15 minutes.

When the chicken is done, transfer to a cutting board and slice across the grain and set aside. Place the kabocha back in the cooking liquid and bring it just to a boil over medium heat. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat. Plate the dish by piling chicken slices besides kabocha slices. Top with sansho arima (sansho peppercorns cooked tsukudani-style)

Final notes:

I know, what a hell of a long post! I guess that's an observation, not a note. But Yamada-san is just so hardcore, I learned a ton spending time with him. So please bear with this brain dump. Now, one thing that struck me as odd when we cooked this dish was that Yamada-san added mirin, which is sweet, and sugar, ditto, to cook sweet kabocha. Isn't that sweet overkill? Au contraire, answered Yamada-san (but not in French). He explained that adding sugar and mirin to the dashi in fact keeps the sugar that naturally occurs in kabocha inside the ingredient when soy sauce is added. If there was no sugar in the cooking liquid, he explained, the salty soy sauce would pull the sweetness out of the kabocha. So you'd have a flavorful stock, but a flavorless kabocha. So the sugar in the stock keeps the natural sweetness of the kabocha intact.

All in all, sooo much to learn from this simple dish... thank you, Yamada-san!

Here are a few pictures to help your cooking along:

Chef Yamada's Dashi

2010-02-22T02:29:59Z

The first thing we did during my cooking session with Yamada-san was the most fundamental: Prepare a dashi. Dashi is the foundation of Japanese cuisine, the basic stock that infuses Japanese dishes with its distinctive, savory, umami-flavor. There are a number of dashi, but the classic one is prepared from kombu and katsuobushi -- an edible kelp and dried, tissue-thin shaved bonito, both naturally preserved ingredients, both among the most umami rich foods on the planet. I'm going to explain how Yamada-san prepared his dashi, then get into detail about things he explained and I observed during the process. Dig into it as much as you'd like.

Dashi preparation is a process of extraction and infusion. You extract the flavors of kombu by steeping or heating in water, then infuse the liquid with katsuobushi (K.B. in my shorthand). Classically, you prepare two versions of the dashi when you cook it, the first and the second (ichiban dashi and niban dashi). Ichiban dashi is a delicate, fleeting stock meant for clear soups (suimono), while niban dashi is an all-purpose stock to cook with. Although our goal was to prepare dashi for cooking, Yamada-san walked me through the two-step process, so I could understand it. It's actually pretty straightforward, although as I'm writing it, I realize it might seem complicated at first blush. Be not afraid. Here's how he did it:

]]> 4 cups of water
1 piece of kombu, about 5 inches long
2 handfuls of K.B. (this estimation works), plus 1 more handful

Set up a large strainer that fits in a mixing bowl that can hold at least a quart of water. Line the strainer with cheesecloth and set aside.

Add the water and kombu to a saucepan and let it sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. Place the saucepan over medium heat and simmer until just before it starts to boil (you'll notice bubbled forming on the bottom of the pot). Remove the kombu and set aside. This steeping and heating process will extract maximum flavor from the kombu.

Once the kombu has been removed, bring it to a boil. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat. Remove any scum that has accumulated on the surface (impurities from the kombu). Now, add 2 tablespoons of cold water to the liquid in the saucepan to cool it. If the water is too hot when you add the K.B., you'll release its impurities and damage the flavor. You want the temperature to be about 70 degrees C (or 160 degrees F). You can use a kitchen thermometer, if you'd like, or just guestimate it -- when it cools about a minute, it'll be ready.

Now add 2 handfuls of K.B. Allow the K.B. to infuse the liquid. Do not stir, but you can gently push the K.B. down into the liquid if necessary with chopsticks. As soon as all the K.B. becomes saturated, gently strain it through the cheesecloth. Do not squeeze or push down on the ingredients while you strain, which will cloud the stock. When all the liquid has been strained, look at the stock. Taste the stock. Smell the stock. Notice its deep golden color, lip smacking umami, and alluring smoky fragrance? You've now got yourself some ichiban dashi.

To make the niban dashi, return the used K.B from the strainer to the saucepan. Add the reserved kombu you used earlier. Pour in 4 cups of water and place over medium heat. Bring the liquid to a boil. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat and add a handful of fresh K.B. Let it steep for a few minutes. Meanwhile, set up the strainer and cheesecloth (use the same cheesecloth as earlier) in another mixing bowl. After about 3 or 4 minutes, strain the liquid. This time, squeeze the ingredients in the strainer and wring the cheesecloth to yield as much liquid as possible. This is your niban dashi. You'll notice the color, umami and fragrance isn't as intense as the ichiban dashi, but this stock has plenty of umami to cook with.

Okay, so let's get into some details now. First, with the niban dashi, you can bring it to a boil because it's not as subtle and refined as an ichiban dashi, so not as delicate. Also, the handful of K.B. we add to the niban dashi is called oigatsuo, or "chasing katsuo." This, of course, intensifies the K.B. flavor and umami of the niban dashi, and is a technique you'll see soon for other cooking liquids.

A few things about kombu: Yamada-san brought with him a longish piece of ma-kombu, a fine variety. It had a thicker tapered end, and a wider, thinner end. It certainly looked like a frond of kelp. What Yamada-san explained was that the tapered end was the root side of the frond, which produces too strong a flavor for dashi (it has other uses). So he broke off a piece from the wider frond. Also, the kombu had a whitish substance on its surface. That's a critical umami compound, Yamada-san explained, adding that you don't want to wash or rinse the kombu before you use it, which would wash away this umami. I know some older cookbooks advise washing kombu, but today Japanese kombu is basically packed clean, like packaged baby arugala or something, so you can use it right out of the bag.

While the method above instructs to steep kombu for 30 minutes then gently heat, Yamada-san shared two other approaches. First, you can simply let the kombu steep in water for 12 hours, remove the kombu, then heat that liquid to 70 degrees C and add the K.B. Another approach, which apparently has been proven by scientific research to yield the greatest concentration of kombu umami is to add the kombu to water and heat to 60 degrees C and carefully simmer hold that liquid temperature steady for an hour. This is the latest kombu extraction innovation, but it's more geared for fancy restaurant fare.

Like everything in Japanese cuisine, you can go as deep as you'd like with dashi, or not. Depends what you're cooking for. I'm sticking with Yamada-san's method above, which is perfect for my kind of cooking, and simple, to boot.

Cooking with Chef Isao Yamada

2010-02-22T02:05:30Z

Here was my grand idea: I wanted to invite a top-notch Japanese chef to come over to my apartment and cook with me. I've been fascinated by Japanese cooking for years, and have been studying the cuisine diligently, but I have lots of questions still begging for answers. Why not ask a great chef, while chopping veggies together at home? (As a billionaire I once met liked to repeat, almost like a tic, "nothing ventured, nothing gained.") So I put out the clarion call among my friends in the Japanese food community in New York (in journalism we call this process "smile and dial.") A mutual friend was kind enough to put me in touch with Chef Isao Yamada, who, to my incredibly good fortune, was game to work with me.

Chef Yamada cooks at Upstairs at Bouley Bakery, the brainchild of the exalted chef David Bouley: It's both a French-inspired restaurant and a Japanese one, under the same roof, each with its own open kitchen at either side of the room. (Chef Bouley has long been fascinated by Japanese cooking, and will open a Japanese restaurant called Brushstroke in Manhattan this summer.) Before arriving to America, Yamada-san trained at Kyoto Kitcho, one of Japan's most revered kaiseki restaurants, and other top places. He's also a native of Fukuoka, the capital of Japan's south, one of my favorite cities in the country, with its own particular brand of moxie, and unbelievably good food.

I met Yamada-san in person last month at a Japanese cuisine seminar. I liked him instantly. A warm, outgoing man with a big smile and an easy laugh, he told me he was excited to teach me more about Japanese cuisine so I could help Americans understand it better. My kind of guy. We made a plan to meet, and a week or so ago Yamada-san trekked over to visit me in my hamlet of Brooklyn (hamlet?) along with his friend, the journalist Yoshi Muto. Yamada-san entered my apartment, changed into a chef's coat, grabbed his knife and headed to my humble kitchen. We went to town for the next five hours. A remarkable, incredible, unbelievable five hours. In the next several posts, I'm going to try to explain as much as possible what I learned. Stay tuned.

"New York" Hot Pot

2010-02-19T16:30:01Z

Tomatoes, garlic... hot pot? When the local Japanese-language newspaper in New York, Japion, contacted us about doing a story about our hot pot book, Tadashi got inspired to create a New York-style hot pot. He based it on our Sumo Wrestler Hot Pot recipe in the book (page 105), but decided to add tomatoes and garlic. This flourish isn't as far-fetched as it seems. Tomatoes are incredibly rich in umami, the natural savory taste that's a hallmark of Japanese cooking. So they melded perfectly with the other flavors of this dish. Here's what went into the dish: Garlic, fresh tomatoes, canned whole tomatoes, tomato sauce, shiitake mushrooms, onions, chicken balls, pork belly, napa cabbage and shungiku. He used tori gara, Japanese-style chicken stock, to make the broth (p. 32) and flavored it with Sendai miso (a rustic, intense red miso), sake and soy sauce. For shime, the finish, he used spaghetti instead of udon! I don't have a formal recipe for this hot pot, but if you're comfortable cooking these dishes, use the Sumo Wrestler method as your guide. Any adventurous cooks out there make this dish - please let me know! (Here's the article we were in, in Japanese.)

Sake-Steamed Whole Chicken

2010-02-09T02:50:36Z

Here's a simple method my pal and coauthor Chef Tadashi Ono of Matsuri mentioned to me last week: Steaming a whole chicken with sake. It couldn't be easier. Salt a whole chicken. Find a big pot (a Le Creuset French oven works perfectly) and stick a steaming basket inside (unscrew and remove the post in the center). Pour a mixture of water and sake in a 1:1 ratio into the pot until it reaches the top of the steamer. Position the chicken on the steamer and turn on the heat. Cook until the chicken is done, oh, about 45 minutes or so. You can test for doneness by making a cut between the thigh and the breast and peeking inside. If the juices run clear and the meat by the bone is no longer red, you're, as they say, golden. While the chicken is steaming, grate some daikon to make daikon oroshi (grated daikon). Also, pour ponzu sauce into individual serving bowls. Okay, now, very important: When the chicken is ready, allow it to cool to room temperature or so inside the pot. This way it will retain its succulence. If you pull it out of the pot and cut it up immediately, you'll end up with dry chicken. Patience is key. When you're ready to eat, add some daikon oroshi to the ponzu to give it body, and dip pieces of the chicken into the sauce. What you'll discover is that the steaming sake tenderized the chicken while it cooked, so it turns out incredibly moist and flavorful. Finally, you can reduce the steaming liquid down to a sauce and pour over the chicken if you'd like (more French than Japanese, but, hey). This chicken, leftover and out of the fridge, is also fantastic. Guess what I ate for lunch today? Tadashi, you are one amazing cook, brother. Thank you.

The Right Temperature To Serve Sake: A Guide

2010-02-07T15:28:29Z

I remember the first time I tasted sake, and sushi for that matter, back when I was in college in the 80s. A friend who studied in Japan took me to a sushi bar on Irving Place in Manhattan, where he introduced me to raw fish on rice and sake served as hot as a steaming mug of coffee. I didn't know much about sake at the time; I thought it was some generic tipple -- and in fact, most sake available at the time was indeed low-caliber. Fast forward a decade or so, as premium, small-batch sakes began filtering in from Japan, amazing brews as deep and sublime as the finest wines. I was hooked. But now, I was told, to savor these delicate brews refrigerator-cold. So hot sake was bad sake, and cold sake was good sake? Well, not so fast.

I thought about my initial encounters with sake, and attendant questions, as I listened to a fascinating and immensely useful seminar last week at the Japanese Culinary Center, called "Sake Temperatures: How Hot Is Too Hot?" I was thrilled that Mr. Nori Kanai, the founder of Mutual Trading (which runs the center) gave the presentation. First, a little bit about Mr. Kanai, a spry 87-year-old: (a) he's a legend, (b) he's the man responsible for introducing sushi to the West and (c) he was just anointed a "Living National Treasure" by Emperor Akihito for his life's work promoting Japanese food culture around the world. Wow. (By the way, Mr. Kanai credits his vitality to eating soba for breakfast every morning. Duly noted.)

]]> Mr. Kanai explained that sake was originally consumed for religious purposes. By the Edo Period (the 1600s), it became a popular beverage that was enjoyed... drum roll... warm. Warm like the temperature of your body. Not too hot. And not too cold, which was considered bad manners. Warm sake is called kanzake in Japanese. When Mr. Kanai arrived to America in the mid-50s, the sake that was generally available, the cheapo stuff, was typically imbibed piping hot. That surprised him. Perhaps "warm" got translated into "hot," because, hey, if warm was good, wouldn't hotter be better? Somehow hot sake became the norm across America, like at the joint on Irving Place where I first tried it.

So what's the right temperature to drink sake? As Mr. Kanai explained, it really depends on the particular kind of sake (now that we have such a bounty of incredible sake available). He noted eight temperature ranges, but as a rule of thumb, he said you can't go wrong with drinking any sake at room temperature. Here are a couple of other general guidelines:

Fragrant sake like gingo or daigingo: Drink chilled, around 50 degrees Fahrenheit, but don't drink it cold, which will kill the delicate aroma and taste (like drinking white wine too cold).

Unpasteurized sake (namazake): Drink it a little cooler, in the 41-50 degree range, to bring out its crisp, fresh taste.

Rich sake like junmai or honjozo: These are perfect served room temperature or warm -- kan. What is warm? Body temperature (98 degrees) up to 110 degrees. (Perfect with hot pot, by the way.)

I watched the gang at the Japan Culinary Center heat sake, which was also instructive: They heated it in a water bath to get it to the right temperature. Now, of course, we didn't just talk about sake, but tasted as well. Here Rick Smith of Sakaya weighed in with a few favorite selections: Suigei Tokubetsu Junmai, which is fantastic warm, Dassai 50 Junmai Daiginjo, best served chilled, and Kikusui Hanjozo, enjoyed chilled or at room temperature.

The upshot is that you can enjoy great high-quality sake warm, room temperature or chilled. But not too hot, or not too cold. And now that it's miserably cold in New York City, I'm ordering a kanzake junmai the next time I dine Japanese. That'll do the trick.

(Thank you for your incredible lecture, Mr. Kanai.)

Chicken Soba Hot Pot

2010-02-01T12:46:11Z

My wife and I and a houseguest visiting from Japan cooked this dish on New Year's Eve from a recipe dug up in a Japanese newspaper. Soba is the traditional meal on the last day of the year, the noodles symbolizing long life and health for the upcoming annum. I particularly liked this dish (it's a hot pot, of course I liked it!), a tasty combination of chicken, mushroom, abura age and soba. The dried soba you drop into the pot raw, so it cooks in the broth and thickens it. Nice touch, and easy. And to top it off, you accent this dish with one of my favorite Japanese ingredients, citrusy, fiery yuzu kosho, dissolving it right into the broth. God, this was good. What a way to ring in the New Year.

A couple of days ago, as I was shivering my butt off in the current deep freeze enveloping New York City (anyone want to invite me to their home in the Bahamas for... forever?), my thoughts drifted back to this satisfying, comforting, warming, fantastic hot pot. Why just eat it once a year? Here's how I prepared it:

]]> The basic ingredients (add more or less of anything to fit your pot, and taste; the following is a rough guide)
2 (6-inch) pieces kombu
1 piece of abura age
Boiling water to pour over abura age
3/4 pound mushrooms (see note)
1 tablespoon sesame oil
2 chicken legs and thigh, skinned, deboned and cut into bite-sized pieces
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 pound napa cabbage, sliced on an angle into bite-sized pieces
4 cups warm liquid (see note below)
3 tablespoons sake (use the real stuff, not "cooking sake" junk)
2 tablespoons mirin
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1/2 pound dried soba noodles
2 scallions thinly sliced
Yuzu kosho to taste

First, the notes: For liquid, you can use water, or Japanese chicken stock (bones, water and kombu only) or Shiitake dashi (dried Japanese shiitake steeped in water for at least 5 hours - use the reconstituted mushrooms in the hot pot). I used a combo of chicken stock and shiitake dashi for the heck of it, and it tasted great. Also, you want the liquid warm especially if you're using a donabe (earthenware pot); cold liquid might crack it in the pot (see what we do below). For the mushrooms, use any combination of cultivated Japanese mushrooms like shiitake, enoki or shimeji. I used reconstituted dried shiitake as well as fresh shiitake. Oyster mushrooms are great too, or if you're a mycologist like my buddy Sebastian, use any mushroom you happen to forage, as long as it doesn't kill you!

Prep the ingredients: For the abura age, place it in a colander and pour boiling water over it to get rid of excess oil, then slice into thin strips. For shiitake, remove and discard the stems, and slice in half or thirds (depending on size - you want things bite-sized for chopsticks). For enoki, shimeji or oysters, cut off the ends and separate the clumps by hand.

To cook: Add the sesame oil to your pot (I'm partial to Japanese earthenware donabe or Le Creuset, especially their fantastic shallow braiser pot) and place over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the chicken, cooking and stirring, until the pieces turn golden. Sprinkle salt.

Randomly pile the mushrooms, abura age, and napa cabbage over the chicken. Sautee for 2 to 3 minutes, stirring and cooking until mushrooms and cabbage begin to soften. Add the liquid and slide the pieces of kombu under the ingredients. Add the sake, mirin and soy sauce.

Cover and bring to a boil. When the liquid boils, uncover the pot and simmer for 5 minutes. Remove any scum that appears on the surface. Taste and adjust the flavoring, adding more soy sauce or mirin if you like (make sure to balance the sweet/savory tastes).

Break the dried soba in half and stick into the pot. Make sure the noodles are submerged in the liquid. If you need more liquid, add it. Cook for about 5 minutes, or until the noodles are ready. Stir occasionally to make sure all the noodles are cooking evenly. Taste the noodles; as soon as they're cooked through, it's ready.

Transfer the hot pot to the dining table. Serve in rounds in small bowls. Add a dab of yuzu kosho to the broth and sprinkle some in thinly sliced scallions. Enjoy!

Washing Rice

2010-01-26T01:54:42Z

I was going to wash the rice for dinner myself, but my house guest, a talented young Japanese chef stepped in to do it. When I worked beside him for a month last year in Tokyo, I was awestruck by how sensitive he was to the foods he cooked. I was reminded about that again as I watched him wash rice.

He added the rice to a large mixing bowl and filled it with water. He gently sloshed the water around and carefully poured out the now milky colored. He added more water and did the same thing again. And again. And again. All the while he never actually touched the rice. Now he added water to the bowl and began lightly caressing the rice with the tips of his fingers, barely touching it. "The most important thing is not to break the grains of rice," he said. My friend drained the water and repeated this process another five times until the water was almost clear. Then he picked out a raw grain of rice, lifted it to his mouth and bit into it. I did the same. It tasted like, well, a raw grain of rice. What was he doing? "I'm checking if the grain feels polished and smooth," he answered. Oh. This was way beyond my toothy ken. He again filled the bowl with water but this time let the rice soak in it. For about 20 minutes, he told me.

We were working on something else in the kitchen and I noticed him lift some grains of rice out of the water, feel them with his fingertips and inspect them closely. What was he looking at? Checking if the rice was ready to be drained, he answered. I looked at some rice grains myself. They were pearly white with a few translucent flecks. "They need more time," he said. How did he know? About 5 minutes later he drained the rice. Now the each grain was entirely milky white, the translucence gone. He placed the rice in a colander and let it rest.

"Rice is difficult," the young chef explained. "Every cook has a different way to prepare it."

Rice is the most fundamental food in Japanese cuisine. So fundamental, the word for it, gohan, also means the meal itself. What struck me watching the chef was how even the act of washing it could be so subtle and deep and revealing. Such a humble task, yet one, at least in his hands, offering such a profound window into the cuisine. I know the rice gods were smiling.

Spontaneous Chicken Dish

2010-01-25T14:54:25Z

For me, the holy grail of Japanese cooking boils down this: The ability to look in the fridge, see what I've got and cook something fabulous with it. I've witnessed this two-step over and over in Japanese homes, watching slack-jawed with admiration as home cooks knocked out great dishes on the spot. This versatility, spontaneity and creativity is what Japanese cooking is all about, on any level. Since I don't have this awesome culinary knowledge wired into my DNA, of course, I've been trying to figure out a way to break it down and explain it in some kind of coherent -- and replicable - fashion (the journalist in me). It's a work in progress...

I thought about all this as I watched my friend and houseguest prepare us dinner last night. He's a young chef who cooked at the incredible Ryugin in Tokyo, where I had the privilege last year of working beside him for a month. We were both hungry, so we checked the fridge. There was precious little inside: a thinly pounded fillet of chicken breast, still frozen, an onion and a half a bunch of asparagus. (Yeah, time to go shopping!) "How about pizza," I mused. My friend just smiled. "I can make something with this," he said, and went to town. Ah yes, that irrepressible Japanese cooking spontaneity in action! I tried to capture what he did as best as possible in the following recipe. Stay tuned as I work out how to explain the underlying ideas behind it. Here's the dish:

]]> 1/4 cup mirin
1/4 cup soy sauce
1 teaspoon sugar
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon salt
4 stalks of asparagus cut into bite-sized pieces on an angle
2 teaspoons vegetable oil
1/2 pound chicken breast, cut into bite-sized pieces (in our case, after defrosting, of course)
1 small onion, sliced into 6 wedges
Black pepper to taste
Sansho to taste

Add the mirin to a small saucepan and bring to a boil over medium heat. When it boils, add the soy sauce and boil for 30 seconds more. Add the sugar and boil until it dissolves, stirring occasionally. Turn off the heat. Pour in the sake, and gently mix. Set aside.

In another small saucepan bring water to a boil. Add salt and mix until it dissolves. Add the asparagus and poach until they turn bright green are just cooked through. Taste one to check. Don't overcook. When they're ready, cool the asparagus under cold running water. Set aside.

Add the oil to a skillet and place over medium heat. When the oil is hot, add the chicken, cooking and stirring just until the chicken turns golden. Transfer the chicken to a plate. In the same hot skillet, add the onions. Grind some fresh pepper over it. Sautee for 1 to 2 minutes, until the onions soften. Return the chicken to the skillet. Cook for 1 or 2 minutes more, stirring constantly. Add half of the mirin-soy sauce-sugar-sake liquid. Cook, stirring, until the liquid almost completely evaporates. Add the asparagus and the remaining liquid. Cook, stirring, until about 1/2 the liquid remains. Turn off the heat. Sprinkle a little bit of sansho. Serve hot.

NOTES: My friend says you can cook this dish with any vegetable, and use dark meat chicken, too. I would say use 2 or 3 vegetables, but no more than that -- this is Japanese food, not a stir fry. Finally, the sansho, with its intensely citrusy fragrance, adds such a nice dimension to this dish. Amazing how a simple home-cooked meal can have so many layers of flavor going on.