Recipes & Articles

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.

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 he adjusted the heat, and it calmed down, happily bubbling away under that lid. What was going on here?

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.

I heard from a few readers curious about the beautiful piece of pottery in the picture of my post on simmering kabocha and chicken. This stunning vessel is the work of the esteemed Karatsu potter Jinenbo Nakagawa, who I met years ago and wrote about in a story for the late, great Gourmet in 2005.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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. God, it was good.

I was going to wash the rice for dinner myself, but my houseguest, a talented young Japanese chef stepped in to do it.