Recipes & Articles

Calling all friends of the Japanese Food Report around the world! Just in time for winter, Chef Tadashi Ono and I have started a new project: To write a Japanese hot pot cookbook for the Ten Speed Press, one of America's most prestigious cookbook publishers. We're whipping up hotpots fast and furious, but we need your help. We're now organizing a team of volunteer hot pot recipe testers to help us evaluate the dishes we put together.

Today the NY Times ran my story about dashi, a look at how Western chefs across the country are now cooking with this essential stock of Japanese cuisine. As regular readers of the Report know, I'm intrigued by dashi. I thought to add a few more ideas about this remarkable broth to expand on the article.

The final dish Chef Honma showed me how to cook when I visited him at EN Japanese Brasserie recently was this one, a customer favorite, EN's incredible sautéed duck breast.

Here's why you need to befriend your local fishmonger, and fast: Tuna collar. Chef Ono of Matsuri and I donned hair nets and white smocks to visit a fish wholesaler located beside Newark Airport yesterday.

In this preparation, Chef Honma of En Japanese Brasserie demonstrates the Japanese cooking notion of contrasting a main ingredient with a supporting ingredient to highlight the main food's flavor.

Here's another dish Chef Honma taught me at En Japanese Brasserie. Like the mushroom ohitashi, this obanzai-inspired dish relies on dashi.

I recently visited En Japanese Brasserie to learn more about Chef Yasuhiro Honma's cooking.

Chef Honma of En Japanese Brasserie features this dish on his seasonal obanzai menu, which evokes the traditional home cooking of Kyoto.

Monkfish are huge, ugly and incredibly tasty. I first came face to face with one in Akita Prefecture last year (more on that below). Today I got to watch Chef Masaharu Morimoto of Iron Chef fame dramatically offer this fish as the sacrificial lamb of his demonstration at the annual StarChefs Congress.

Working on a manuscript this past spring for a Japanese noodle cookbook (for Ten Speed Press, publishes in 2009) gave me a chance to do a bit of research on ramen, soba, udon and somen. Soba, buckwheat noodles, I found particularly interesting, because they're both a down-home soul food and something more rarefied. That "something more rarefied" side to soba can now be found at a terrific new restaurant in Manhattan called Matsugen, where I recently visited the chefs there to learn more about their noodles.

Earlier this month, Gourmet.com ran my story on robata style grilling, which I put together thanks to Chef Jiro Ida of the terrific midtown Manhattan restaurant Aburiya Kinnosuke. Over the course of a few weeks, Jiro-san graciously invited me to his kitchen before service to watch him in action and teach me about robata.

On his last morning at my apartment, Atsushi explained this dish to me. First, let's talk about iriko dashi, a traditional dashi prepared from small dried fish. While konbu and katsuobushi dashi is intricate and involved, iriko dashi is the opposite: Totally simple to make.