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The Miso Soup Project, Part 1 (54 Miso Soups)

I read somewhere that at one time, Japanese consumed a hundred bowls of miso soup a month, on average. A whole lot of soup! But for good reason, because miso is truly a remarkable food:

February 25, 2009

Two Must-Try Miso Dressings

Man, was Chef Abe-san on a roll at Sunday's miso workshop at En Japanese Brasserie! Here are two of his versatile, super tasty miso dressings -- miso dressing and sesame miso dressing.

October 25, 2010

66 Ways: How to Cook Miso Soup

In Japan, miso soup reflects the full bounty, breath, spontaneity and endless creativity of the cuisine -- the varieties are mind boggling and delicious. Case in point, the list that follows, sixty six miso soups that a Japanese cookbook editor and fabulous cook named Nobuko-san just sent me.

December 29, 2009

Cooking Miso Soup with Hiroko Shimbo

A few weeks ago I kicked off the Miso Soup Project, an occasional series about this versatile, healthy, elemental and, of course, supremely delicious Japanese dish. To learn more, I visited the remarkable Hiroko Shimbo, Japanese food authority and author of The Japanese Kitchen, The Sushi Experience, among other terrific books. Hiroko graciously invited me to her kitchen to teach me about miso soup, and show me how to cook three tasty versions. Here's our interview:

April 14, 2009

Two Versatile Miso Dipping Sauces

At Sunday's miso workshop at En Japanese Brasserie, Chef Hiroki Abe introduced a couple of fabulous, fast and easy miso dipping sauces that I wanted to share with you.

October 25, 2010

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

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

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

Miso Nikomi Udon

This past Sunday, I joined Chef Hiroki Abe of En Japanese Brasserie to cook with miso, part of a series of workshops at the restaurant. Great workshop!

October 24, 2010

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

Cold Somen with Sesame-Miso Dipping Sauce

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

August 7, 2011

Sapporo Miso Ramen

While in Sapporo, Tadashi and I took a detour from our regional hot pot hunt to check out a famed local dish: the city's signature miso ramen.

November 20, 2008

Iriko Dashi & Daikon Miso Soup

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.

August 25, 2008

Atsushi's Class and Miso Soup

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.

May 9, 2011

Konbu Dashi Miso Soup with Snow Peas

A simple soup that evokes the ideas of mottainai and the power of konbu: Atsushi collected turnip peels and scrap pieces of carrot from preparing other dishes and added them to a pot of water with a piece of konbu in it. He turned on the heat and cooked it until the konbu gave off a pleasing aroma, then strained the liquid. In the meantime, Atsushi sliced a handful of snow peas on the diagonal.

August 20, 2008

Konbu-Kasuobushi Dashi & Silken Tofu Miso Soup

Let's talk about how to make a dashi before we get to this simple, delicious soup. Everything I've read about preparing konbu-katsuobushi dashi (kelp and dried, shaved bonito) says to first add the konbu to a pot of water and bring it to just a boil, then to remove the konbu before the water starts to really boil. Atsushi took a totally different approach.

August 6, 2008

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

Grilling Videos: Steak, Scallops, Chicken and Veggies

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!

June 21, 2011

Japanese Cooking Workshop with Sono-san

Oh, where to begin. Last week chef Chikara Sono of Kyo Ya restaurant led a remarkable workshop at the Saveur magazine test kitchen. In the kitchen: a Tasmanian sea trout, a wild black cod, a live striped bass and thirty curious participants. On the agenda: all fish, all the time. Here's some of what we learned:

December 14, 2009

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

All About Salmon

I was curious to see the reaction of fellow commuters as I stepped onto a Brooklyn-bound subway holding a clear plastic bag filled with 20 pounds of salmon parts.

April 21, 2010

Cooking with Atsushi

For the past two weeks, I've had a visitor from Japan stay over at my apartment here in New York, a terrific guy named Atsushi Nakahigashi. All of 22-years-old, he's already an accomplished professional bass fisherman -- and an accomplished chef. Since the age of 14 or so, Atsushi's been working at his father's legendary restaurant in Kyoto, Sojiki Nakahigashi. His dad, Mr. Hisao Nakahigashi, is one of my absolute culinary heroes, a wonderful man who I've had the privilege to get to know and write about. Atsushi's his dad's talented protégé, and since he was here in New York... I put him to work in my kitchen! Actually, Atsushi, wise, thoughtful and mature way, way beyond his years, graciously offered to teach me a few things about Japanese cooking. It's been a seminal couple of weeks.

August 4, 2008

hiroshima-style oyster nabe

December 23, 2007

Turnips (Lightly) Pickled Three Ways

Turnips, daikon, beets and radishes aren't only about the tasty bulbous root -- the leaves are just as important.

August 1, 2010

Chef Yamada's "1.5" All-Purpose Dashi

When Chef Isao Yamada recently returned to my place for another cooking session, one of the first questions I asked him was prompted by a reader's comment asking for a method for an all-purpose dashi.

April 1, 2010

"New York" Hot Pot

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.

February 19, 2010

Simmered Kabocha Pumpkin and Chicken

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.

February 25, 2010

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

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