Recipes & Articles

Recently, a TV reporter visited my restaurant Ganso and asked a typical reporter question: How many distinct ingredients do we use to make a bowl of ramen?

Tis clip from today's NY Times -- my new restaurant GANSO will be opening this summer in Downtown Brooklyn! (map) I'm teaming up with my pal Chef Rio Irie,...

Calling all friends of the Japanese Food Report: We need your help! My pal and coauthor Tadashi Ono and I are now in the thick of writing our biggest, baddest, most exciting new cookbook yet -- and we're organizing a team of volunteer recipe testers. Want to test recipes for us?

Simple, so delicious and versatile. I cooked it in ten minutes last night with dark meat chicken, garlic chives (nira) and slivers of carrot. Here's what you do:

Mizutaki hot pot is about as simple as it gets: Pile a bunch of ingredients into a hot pot. Pour in water. Turn on the heat and cook.

Sukiyaki, of course, is a classic shaved beef hot pot traditionally cooked in a special cast-iron pot. We love getting down with sukiyaki on a frigid winter night here at Brooklyn mission control. Especially when paired with a glass of great sake.

So I was talking to a Japanese chef friend named Rio Irie about clams, and he brought up something interesting. Cooking clams together with chicken in a liquid, Rio told me, creates a broth with a remarkable mouthwatering flavor synergy...

The first time I traveled to Japan it wasn't for the food, but for the pottery. Back when I was a TV news producer in Washington in the early nineties, I caught a number of phenomenal Japanese pottery shows at the Smithsonian's Sackler-Freer Galleries that simply blew me away.

Yuzu kosho is one of my absolute favorite Japanese ingredients. A salt-cured condiment made with yuzu citrus peel and chilies, it's at once intensely fragrant, hot and alive, a zesty accent that plants a big, fat palate-popping kiss to any dish.

Ah, Japanese mixed rice. There are so many variations, and they're all so tasty and easy to prepare. So why isn't this dish a standard in every American home? It should be.

I love grabbing a drink in Japan, because it's never just about the booze -- there's always some kind of food involved. At its most elemental, that grub is tsumami, savory finger-snacks to whet the palate, to make you wanna knock one (or more) back.

Tadasuke Tomita is the force behind an incredible Japanese-language website called Shiro Gohan ("white rice"). A self-described food enthusiast and now cookbook author, he writes that he created the site "to help people recognize the deliciousness of washoku" (traditional Japanese food).