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Miso Soup Ingredients

We covered some fantastic miso soup in my latest miso soup post, but what about the ingredients that might be unfamiliar? To help you navigate Japanese markets and find these gems, I wanted to share a trio of photos of key ingredients I mentioned.

December 30, 2009

Hot Pot Videos: Theory, Ingredients and How-To

Here are a series of videos from the hot pot master class Tadashi Ono and I led last month. I think you'll find them informative.

March 14, 2011

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

The Power of the Otoshibuta (or, the Drop Lid)

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?

February 27, 2010

Konbu Dashi Soup with Clams

One of the many things I love about Nakahigashi Restaurant is how Mr. Nakahigashi can bring out the sublime natural flavors of ingredients even though he does very little to them. Atsushi expressed this idea in a simple clam soup with just three ingredients: Clams, water and umami-rich konbu. Actually, when he explained what he was about to cook, I suggested he add a little yuzu citrus peel to give the soup another layer of flavor. Atsushi politely demurred -- that's not the Nakahigashi way, he explained. Clams and konbu are all you need. No accents or garnishes necessary.

August 4, 2008

Mild Japanese Peppers with Kombu Seaweed

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.

October 7, 2008

salmon hotpot

This hotpot hails from the far northern island of Hokkaido, a snowy, remote region famous for its salmon, crab, cattle and potatoes (an influence of nearby Russia), among other ingredients. It's called ishikari nabe in Japanese, in honor of Hokkaido's Ishikari River.

February 7, 2008

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

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

Mizutaki Chicken Hot Pot

Mizutaki hot pot is about as simple as it gets: Pile a bunch of ingredients into a hot pot. Pour in water. Turn on the heat and cook.

February 6, 2012

Chicken Simmered with Carrots and Daikon

I've talked about simmering before, so you know it's one of my favorite cooking techniques in Japanese cuisine. It's a simple and fast way to infuse amazing flavor into ingredients. The secret is the traditional seasonings:

January 16, 2011

Kurama Mixed Rice

The amazing chestnut rice I cooked in the last post must have put me in a serious rice kind of mood, because here's another incredible rice dish, this one mixed with soy sauce-infused chirimen jako (dried, tiny fish, a fantastic ingredient we'll get to in a minute) and sansho (intensely aromatic, seductive accent, ditto about getting into in a minute).

December 10, 2009

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

Spring Vegetables Steeped in Dashi (Ohitashi)

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.

May 21, 2011

Chef Abe's Fresh Yuzu Kosho

Yuzu kosho is one of my absolute favorite Japanese ingredients. A salt-cured condiment made with yuzu citrus peel and chilies, it's at once intensely fragrant, hot and alive, a zesty accent that plants a big, fat palate-popping kiss to any dish.

December 9, 2011

Japanese Beef Curry From Scratch

I've been working to perfect making Japanese curry from scratch, as I'll soon be leading a workshop entitled "Comfort Food All-Stars: Curry, Tonkatsu, Gyoza" at the fantastic Brooklyn Kitchen. I love Japanese curry, but I don't love those ubiquitous packages of Japanese curry mixes, which are highly processed with junk ingredients...

March 31, 2011

sakekasu-cured grilled fish

I became interested in sakekasu (or sake kasu) at Matsuri, the restaurant where I volunteer as a cook. Chef Ono prepares his delicious version of glazed black cod by first marinating the fish for several days in a mixture that includes sakekasu. I wondered about the effect of this ingredient. But before I get into this, let me pause for a quick definition:

December 27, 2007

Three Leaf and Radish Pickles

As he cooked, Atsushi often repeated a central tenant of traditional Japanese cooking: motai nai -- don't waste. He demonstrated this philosophy by preparing tsukemono, pickled vegetables, from the leaves of turnips, daikon and radish, leaves that are often cut off their edible roots and thrown in the garbage. The leaves taste quite sharp fresh, but the pickling mellows them out. As Atsushi prepared the pickles, I noticed him automatically picking up every stray bit of ingredient. A force of habit -- a force of motai nai.

August 4, 2008

Konbu Dashi Soup with Egg and Scallion

This dish, like the konbu dashi soup with clams, once agan demonstrates the power of konbu, which infuses water with an irresistible savoriness or umami to serve as a flavor foundation for other ingredients. In this case, Atsushi prepared a simple soup with egg and scallion that was fast to prepare and extremely tasty.

August 20, 2008

Mentaiko!

Shin Hatakeyama, a chef who is the manager of Sunrise Mart, the Japanese food market in Manhattan (the one at 494 Broome Street), has made a commitment to importing top-quality, authentic ingredients from Japan. Yesterday he invited Daigo Irifune of Yamaya USA to showcase his company's mentaiko. What's mentaiko?

June 22, 2008

Videos: Miso Curing Fish & Yuan Yaki Marinating

Miso is such a versatile ingredient (hey, we did a whole class on it). In this installment of our recent fish workshop at EN Japanese Brasserie, Chef Abe, owner Reika Yo and I walk through how to miso-cure fish, plus how to marinate fish for grilling yuan yaki style, a traditional, and incredibly easy, Japanese technique.

November 19, 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

Flounder Kara-age

Kara-age is a technique for deep frying without a batter, to highlight the natural taste of an ingredient. Foods are simply dredged in flour or starch, to seal the surface, and plopped into a vat of bubbling oil (okay, not literally a vat -- a saucepan is fine!).

April 24, 2011

Onsen Tamago, or poaching eggs in their shells

Recently, a TV reporter visited my restaurant Ganso and asked a typical reporter question: How many distinct ingredients do we use to make a bowl of ramen?

December 28, 2012

freestyle hotpot

After I wrote about nabe, or home-style hotpot cooking, last month, I asked a friend in Japan to research the many regional varieties of this social and comforting soul food. She just sent me a list of twenty styles of nabe, dishes prepared with salmon, tuna, octopus, pork, chicken, root vegetables, even wild boar and snapping turtle. These hotpots all reflect local foods, customs and geography, and their histories and lore are absolutely fascinating: One traces back to the cooking of Japanese pirates, another originated with bear hunters. There's a nabe invented by sake makers living inside breweries during production season and one that's supposed to be eaten in the dark (yikes!). There's even a nabe invented in 2005 to commemorate the merger of three cities. Like I said, fascinating.

January 28, 2008

hotpot 101, or window into japanese cuisine

"There are no rules for making nabe," said Chef Ono, as we got to talking about Japanese hotpot cooking to me the other night at Matsuri restaurant. I've been fascinated by this homey soul food, as readers of the Report know (see posts here and here), and wanted to learn more -- and understand what hotpots say about Japanese cuisine as a whole.

February 4, 2008

hiroshima-style oyster nabe

December 23, 2007

Simmering: More Thoughts on Seasoning

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.

February 27, 2010

Sake and Salt Poached Flounder

At the farmers market, Atsushi and I spotted local Long Island Sound flounder, in peak season right now. I asked him how to prepare this delicately fish and he suggested poaching it in sake and salt, a simple method to subtly and elegantly express its flavors. We picked up a bunch, iced them down, and brought them over to Chef Tadashi Ono's house to prepare for his family (hey, I wan't the only enjoying Atsushi's cooking!).

August 6, 2008

seaweed of the forest

May 13, 2007