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Japanese Soul Food! Need Recipe Testers for Our New Cookbook

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?

February 27, 2012

Grill Time! Need Recipe Testers for New Cookbook

Calling all friends of the Japanese Food Report! Just in time for summer grilling (or winter grilling south of the equator), my coauthor Tadashi Ono and I are in the thick of writing an exciting new cookbook for Ten Speed Press called, appropriately enough, "The Japanese Grill." We're now organizing a team of volunteer recipe testers to evaluate our dishes, and need your help.

March 17, 2010

Cook This Hot Pot! Need Recipe Testers for New Cookbook

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.

October 20, 2008

Japanese Pickle Recipes

Like most Americans, I suppose, I grew up with a concept of "pickles" as, basically, heavily vinegared cucumbers. But in Japan I discovered something completely different -- a vast and fascinating world of pickles, lightly cured for the most part to amplify the natural flavors of a wide array of vegetables, and typically infused with aromatics and other ingredients (like rice bran and sake lees) to add even more layers of flavor. (See last year's post on pickles.) They're an integral part of the traditional Japanese meal and a favorite of mine, especially at breakfast. And there are countless regional varieties and family recipes. I've been very interested to learn more about Japanese pickles.

May 20, 2008

More Pickle Recipes

Here is another one of Mrs. Torimitu's pickles, called Kyuri no Asazuke ("quick cucumber pickles"). As she wrote: "When you are in a rush and have no time, try this recipe."

May 20, 2008

Recipe: En's Soy Milk Dressing for Greens

Besides honing my technical skills working every week now with Chef Abe and his crew in the kitchen of En Japanese Brasserie, I've been learning a ton about contemporary Japanese cooking.

October 23, 2009

Recipe Trove

July 11, 2009

Our Grilling Book Has Published! (Plus Recipe!)

Just in time for grilling season, Tadashi and my newest cookbook is now available -- The Japanese Grill! Run, don't walk, to your local bookstore (brick or virtual) and pick up a copy; I guarantee you'll love it.

April 27, 2011

EN's Japanese Cocktails (Plus Recipe)

I knew I was in for a treat when my pals at Manhattan's EN Japanese Brasserie invited me to sample cocktails up whipped up by their new mixologist, Gen Yamamoto.

March 26, 2010

kyushu style fried chicken

Takako Kuratani is a prodigious chef who designs menus for Japanese restaurants around the world, styles food for Japanese movies and TV commercials, develops recipes, teaches Japanese cuisine -- and never stops cooking and experimenting. I was fortunate to meet her last year at her test kitchen in Tokyo where she and her team treated me to a fantastic dinner. (Ah, the joys of writing... :)) Besides being incredibly talented, Takako is utterly gracious and kind, and thorough emails has been teaching me about Japanese ingredients and cooking. She just visited New York and one of the things she brought with her was a slender red notebook -- her own personal cookbook, where she records her recipes and cooking inspiration. While she was here, Takako planted herself in a kitchen, cracked opened that little red book and prepared a wonderful homey dinner for a bunch of friends. Her theme: the down-home cooking of Kyushu, Japan's own Deep South.

May 5, 2008

Onion Salad with Miso Dressing

A couple of weeks ago a Japanese government representative here in New York handed me an interesting pamphlet called "A Guide to Japanese Ingredients," listing food producers and their ingredients, as well as a few recipes. One dish in particular caught my eye, for onion salad. The restaurant Yakitori Totto (which I love and should have mentioned in my restaurant post!) features it and it's fantastic. It's a kind of aemono, "dressed things," which, according to "Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art," is Japanese-style salad of several raw or cooked and cooled ingredients tossed with a dressing. Typical aemono dressings are vinegar-based and thickened with pureed tofu, ground sesame or miso. Just like the one in the recipe below. This dish makes a tasty small plate to accompany sake at the beginning of a meal.

May 11, 2008

Steamed Chicken with Cucumber and Wakame

My new favorite cookbook is a Japanese-English paperback called (at least in English) "Traditional Japanese Recipe Book with English Translation." Not the most evocative title, for sure, but the book's packed with great recipes, techniques and useful information.

November 25, 2009

Elizabeth Andoh's "Kansha"

My friend and hero Elizabeth Andoh has just published her latest cookbook, Kansha. Make sure to pick up a copy! As I paged through the book, Elizabeth's recipe for age-dashi dofu, or crispy creamy tofu, as she describes it, caught my eye (p 178). I had to cook it, and it was delicious! Here's my adaption of her recipe, for 4 servings:

January 4, 2011

Cold ramen noodles from "A Cook's Journey to Japan"

Paging through a review copy of A Cook's Journey to Japan, a charming cookbook filled with homestyle faves, I landed on the hiyashi chukka recipe, cold ramen noodles with sesame vinaigrette. Man, that looked good.

July 25, 2010

Chestnut Rice

A friend in Japan just sent me this recipe for chestnut rice (kuri gohan) and I cooked it tonight. Wow! So simple, but with such a play of delicate flavors. You have to try it.

December 1, 2009

Pork Miso Soup from EN's Staff Meal Dinner Party

Last night a bunch of hungry souls joined me at EN Japanese Brasserie to experience an amazing meal based on classic makanai, or staff meal, cooking. A highlight was Chef Abe's delicious butajiru, or traditional pork miso soup, the recipe of which he graciously shared with me, below.

January 17, 2010

Steaming Large Clams with Dashi & Sake

I found these big, hunky clams at the farmers market this weekend, each at least 2 inches across. But how to prepare them? My wife Momo found a bunch of recipes online, but we decided to go as simple as possible -- steam them with sake.

November 15, 2011

Master Class: Sumo Hot Pot

Hey all, I want to share a recipe from Tadashi and my hot pot master class last week at Tadashi's restaurant Matsuri. We cooked three terrific hot pots, including this version of the classic chanko nabe -- sumo wrestler hot pot. Dee-licious.

February 22, 2011

The Power of Goma-ae, or Sesame Dressing

Here's another dish from another one of my Japanese cookbooks, this one titled "Gentle Vegetables, Gentle Tableware." This book features gorgeous shots of foods arranged in simple yet rustic and breathtaking tableware. There are no recipes, per se, just a list of ingredients for each dish, and the author's thoughts on the cooking.

October 20, 2011

Magurozuke: Marinated Tuna

Happy holidays, everyone! I want to share a few dishes from a fabulous home-cooked Japanese dinner I enjoyed this past week. I don't have recipes, but Nobuko, who's an amazing cook and prepared everything, explained what she did. So I'll try to explain the dishes here, in turn. First up, magurozuke, marinated tuna.

December 25, 2010

Three Great Techniques from the CIA Conference

Master Japanese chefs shared amazing techniques, recipes, ingredients, know-how, theory and more during the two and half days of the CIA's Japan:Flavors of Culture. Here is a trio of methods I came across that I loved, and jotted down in my notebook:

November 9, 2010

Chicken Soba Hot Pot

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.

February 1, 2010

Lightly Cured Pickles (Tsukemono)

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..."

May 31, 2011

Ton Jiru: Classic Winter Miso Soup

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).

November 22, 2011

Miso Clams Over Rice, From "Dashi and Umami"

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.

March 13, 2009

Grilled Eggplant Simmered in Dashi

I found some beautiful (or, "byu-DEE-ful," as they like to say here in my homeland of Brooklyn) Japanese eggplants at the local market, so I started digging through my notes and cookbooks for ideas on how to prepare them.

August 23, 2009

Read This Book: Asian Dumplings

Okay, I'm going to out myself here -- I'm totally "gyoza otaku," or obsessed with Japanese-style fried dumplings. I'm not alone. In Japan, gyoza is the classic companion to ramen (with a frosty mug of beer finishing the picture), with bespoke versions the subject of magazine articles and television shows and endless debate online.

October 20, 2009

More on Dashi...

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.

October 15, 2008

Tosajoyu, Katsuo Bushi-Infused Soy Sauce

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.

August 29, 2008

Japanese-Style Fried Chicken

Sorry Paula Dean, but nothing beats Japanese-style fried chicken. (To Mary in Austin and all my friends down south who make amazing fried chicken: Don't kill me! :) ). The secret is the marinade.

September 18, 2011