Recipes & Articles

As I've traveled through the Japanese countryside I've occasionally come across magnificent old farmhouses with roofs made not of clay tile, but of thatch. I say occasionally, because, as I learned recently, these old buildings are quickly disappearing from the landscape here.

Yosuke and Mami Kanamaru win my vote for the most adorable husband and wife chef team on planet earth. Adorable, and exceedingly talented.

On my way to the restaurant in Fukuoka where I'm currently a shugyo, or trainee, I bumped into my chef, who motioned me to join him. His destination: the Yanagibashi market.

For the past three weeks I've been working as a shugyo, a trainee, at Takegami, a traditional ryotei in Tokyo's Akasaka district.

I love these guys. Ueno-san on the left, Nagase-san on the right, two exceptionally talented chefs at Takegami who run the restaurant's dining counter, and who...

When I mentioned to Chef Abe of Takegami that I just finished writing a hot pot cookbook with my friend Tadashi Ono, he said he'd show me Takegami's signature version the following day. What a hot pot.

"Japanese cooking is simple," Chef Ooe told me as we stood in his kitchen at Kozue, the stunning Japanese restaurant of Tokyo's Park Hyatt. "Only cutting, dashi, grilling... simple." The hard work of achieving this simplicity? Well, that's why I was in his kitchen...

I love working with Japanese kitchen blades. I've visited blacksmiths before and have written about them, and own several blades. Right now I'm in Tokyo for a few months apprenticing at several restaurants (more on that soon), and cutting every day for hours. Chefs here have been graciously instructing me on my technique.

A few weeks ago I kicked off the Miso Soup Project, an occasional series about this versatile, healthy, elemental and, of course, supremely delicious Japanese dish. To learn more, I visited the remarkable Hiroko Shimbo, Japanese food authority and author of The Japanese Kitchen, The Sushi Experience, among other terrific books. Hiroko graciously invited me to her kitchen to teach me about miso soup, and show me how to cook three tasty versions. Here's our interview:

At 8am the toji, the sake brew master, makes his morning rounds. He inspects the moto, a mingling of rice, water, koji rice, yeast and lactic acid that fulminates for about two weeks. He steps into the warm, fecund koji room to check out cottony mold blooming on steamed rice spread on large wooden trays. He works a twelve foot pole to stir the moromi -- the sake mash -- moto, rice, water and koji percolating in thirteen hundred gallon steel tanks, a mixture like gurgling oatmeal that ferments for about twenty five days before being pressed to release clear liquid -- sake.

There's nothing like fresh, handmade Japanese "silken" tofu (called kinugoshi in Japanese). Coaxed from just soybeans, water, and nigari, a coagulant derived from seawater, it's a quintessential expression of Japanese cuisine -- the idea of finessing something so sublime from a few simple elements. I first tasted the real deal at the workshop of a traditional tofu maker in Kyoto I visited one morning before sunrise. With a lovely custard-like texture, delicate natural sweetness and seductive fresh soybean flavor, their tofu had as much to do with the stuff sold in supermarkets as a beautiful farmstead ricotta does with a tub of Polly-O.

When I worked on a story on dashi last fall, I searched mightily for all the English-language information I could find on kombu and katsuobushi (dried kelp and dried, shaved bonito), the elements that make up a classic Japanese stock. I wish "Dashi and Umami" was available when I was writing my article.