Recipes & Articles

Here's my antidote to August swelter: refreshing cold somen with an unbelievable sesame-miso dipping sauce.

I love soba, but I never actually made it myself. That changed at 7am one morning last week, incredibly, in a shed behind the house of a soba master in Seki City, Gifu Prefecture. We had stopped at his shop the day before.

Gimme this down-home joint any day over some fancified restaurant. When I arrived in Nagoya last week, my fried Yuko reserved a couple of seats at Ichii, an izakaya (eating pub) set along a narrow alley in the center of the city. I knew it was my kind of place the minute we walked in the door.

I'm in Japan now for a quick trip, and when I rolled into Gifu Prefecture yesterday, I asked the usual question -- what should I eat? Simple: Grilled unagi, the river eel this region is famous for, which is in peak season right now.

Here are more videos Tadashi and I shot for last week's Japan Society presentation of our book, The Japanese Grill. Check out how to turn out amazing steaks, scallops, chicken, veggies, using marinades and rubs with garlic-soy sauce, miso, yuzu kosho, sansho and more... So don't delay: Fire up the Weber and get grilling right away!

Last night my coauthor Tadashi and I gave a talk and demo on Japanese grilling at the Japan Society in New York. But how do you demo grilling in auditorium where you can't grill? With videos, of course!

Here's the final recipe from Atsushi Nakahigashi's class last week at the Brooklyn Kitchen: Lightly cured pickles. I've talked about Japanese pickles on this blog before - so you know I've never been totally comfortable with the word "pickles..."

Now that summer's coming soon to a neighborhood near you (at least in the Northern Hemisphere), you have to keep this simple but magical technique -- ohitashi -- in mind. Ohitashi is a method of steeping vegetables in a delicate dashi, which infuses ingredients with umami and lovely flavor but retains the food's natural taste and sensibility.

I usually think of grilled fish as a mainstay of a traditional Japanese breakfast (especially salted half-dried shishamo, smelt, which I love), for his recent class at the Brooklyn Kitchen, Atsushi Nakahigashi decided to cook the amazing simmered pork pictured above.

Last night I helped my buddy Atsushi Nakahigashi, a chef at the award-winning Kajitsu, teach a packed class at the Brooklyn Kitchen about traditional Japanese breakfast. (A truly fantastic, fascinating, informative class -- great job, Atsushi!!) Of course, no Japanese breakfast is complete without a bowl of beautiful, steaming white rice, so one of the first things Atsushi did was demonstrate his way of washing, rehydrating, and resting rice for cooking.

Sake lovers, take note: My pals Reika and Jesse at EN Japanese Brasserie in lower Manhattan are holding their annual monster sake and shochu tasting this Saturday from 3p to 5:30p.

It's always a pleasure to hang out in the kitchen with Atsushi and watch him in action--and you can see what I mean for yourself on May 16th, when Atsushi will teach a Japanese breakfast class at the Brooklyn Kitchen. It's going to be an amazing evening. I hope you can make it.