813 recipes. Page 12 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
Most of the time goes into the onions, cooked in butter for eight minutes or more until the edges turn brown. Rush them and they only lose water without turning sweet, and the sauce ends up flat. The beef is cooked just until it changes color, then tomato paste, Worcestershire and flour turn the pan into a sauce that is spooned alongside the rice.
Fresh okara soaks up a dashi simmered with carrot, burdock and shiitake until it is moist yet crumbles apart under a spatula. Once the okara goes in, it needs constant turning from the bottom of the pot or it sticks. The dish is done before it dries out: no loose liquid, but still damp enough to clump and fall apart again.
Ten shiratama dumplings, each about 1.5cm across, go into a bowl of cold, clear syrup. The syrup is coarse sugar with a little white sugar and tiny amounts of light soy sauce and salt, simmered and then chilled in the fridge. The dumplings go straight from the pot into ice water, which keeps the whole bowl cold from the first spoonful.
Scored chicken legs are rubbed with yogurt, cumin, coriander, paprika and lemon juice, then left in the fridge for at least four hours, overnight if possible. The dish traditionally comes out of a tandoor, a cylindrical clay oven; a home oven heated thoroughly to 230°C still raises dark charred patches over the red coating. Naan and sliced onion often come alongside.
In southern Aomori this soup was served at Bon, New Year, weddings, and other celebrations, and its name comes from golden sea urchin in clear broth looking like wild strawberries seen through morning mist. The roe is heated only until its surface sets; a hard boil breaks it apart and dulls its aroma.
Pressed tofu coated in sugar, wrapped in gauze and buried completely in miso loses moisture over about 40 days in the refrigerator, ending dense and almost cheese-like. Local accounts in Kumamoto tie the dish to Heike fugitives roughly 800 years ago, and older versions could sit in miso for about half a year. The salty-sweet flavor is strong enough that it is sliced thin and served in small amounts with rice or drinks.
In Kagawa, fresh udon goes straight into the loach and miso soup, so it eats as both soup and a bowl of noodles, with burdock, eggplant, taro and fried tofu in the pot too. The loach is never self-caught: only farmed fish that a licensed supplier has professionally purged.
Daikon, carrot, lotus root, shiitake, fried tofu, burdock and koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu) are cooked in three separate batches before meeting one sweet rice-vinegar dressing. Each group keeps its own texture: crunchy lotus root and burdock, tender daikon, and koya-dofu that holds stock like a sponge. Spreading the cooked pieces in a sieve until they stop dripping keeps the vinegar dressing from turning thin. The simmered koya-dofu cools in the sieve on its own, untouched: pressing it while hot would break it and squeeze out the stock it absorbed. White sesame and fine threads of yuzu peel are scattered on top, adding toastiness and a citrus lift.
The name echoes the loud sizzle the batter makes when it hits a hot, oiled pan. In southern Vietnam this turmeric-yellow crepe, crisp and lacy at the edges, is torn into pieces, wrapped in lettuce with mint and perilla, and dipped in nuoc cham.
Toasted iriko (dried sardines), sesame and peanuts are pounded with miso, browned under the grill, then whisked into cold bonito stock until it is stronger than everyday miso soup. Torn tofu, cucumber, shiso, myoga and ginger float in it, and it is ladled over freshly cooked, hot barley rice. In Miyazaki it is said to have grown out of a farmhouse habit of putting raw miso and water on barley rice on hot days.
Ground pork hits a wok heated to the edge of smoking, and the Thai basil is added only seconds before the heat is cut, just long enough to wilt. Five chilies and five garlic cloves, pounded rather than finely minced, make this hot and garlicky, and it is eaten over rice with a fried egg on top.
Grated Yamato yam whipped with water traps enough air to lift this white Kagoshima cake without eggs or oil. Karukan took root where wild yam grew in the well-drained shirasu plateau and sugar arrived from Amami and Ryukyu. Sugar was costly in the Edo period, so it was served in daimyo households before spreading more widely in the Meiji era. Its name means light yokan, a nod to how the steamed crumb ends up lighter than the batter. Each of the ten small cakes hides a ball of red bean paste in the center.
Caught off Hokkaido in spring and early summer, tokishirazu salmon have not yet matured for spawning, so their flesh carries more fat throughout than autumn salmon. A long soak in soy sauce and sake, then brushing with the boiled marinade on the grill, gives a salty, glossy surface. In Hokkaido it was a home feast dish for the June shrine festival, served with sekihan (red bean rice), and it works as both a rice side and a drinking snack. Fresh salmon fillets with moderate fat stand in when tokishirazu is unavailable.
Sweet white miso, used generously, gives this Okinawan celebration soup a soft body and mild sweetness without any starch. Ina means wild boar and mudouchi means an imitation: the name dates from when pork replaced increasingly scarce boar. Castella kamaboko, a fish cake rich in surimi that is steamed and then fried, links the soup to Ryukyu court hospitality, and it still appears at New Year, graduations, school entrance and coming-of-age celebrations.
Golden grilled slices of momen tofu soak for about a week in umezu, the salty, sour liquid that rises when plums are cured. The result pairs bright acidity and strong salt with a dense, almost creamy interior. This Kochi side dish is eaten in thin slices with drinks. For home use, the recipe calls for bottled food-grade umezu and tofu heated through before it goes into the refrigerator to cure.
Pad kee mao, as drunken noodles are called in Thailand, layers chili and garlic heat with a last-minute handful of basil over wide rice noodles. This version uses chicken thigh and Thai basil, which smells different from the holy basil of traditional versions. The 250 g of noodles is a dried weight (fresh noodles at the same weight give a different yield), and wide dried noodles vary enough that the package directions are the better guide for softening them. Draining the softened noodles well keeps the soy, oyster and fish sauces coating the strands instead of pooling around them. Once the noodles join the pan, a short toss is enough; longer heating breaks them apart.
Nuta pairs blanched wakegi, a slim Japanese scallion, with obaike, the cooked skin of a whale's tail, under a thick karashi su-miso of white miso, sugar, vinegar and hot mustard. After blanching, the wakegi is pressed with the back of a knife from base to tip to push out its slippery inner liquid, which would otherwise thin the dressing.
Yeast-raised wheat dough wraps a filling of ground pork, cabbage and scallion seasoned with soy sauce and sesame oil, and the soft, light skin holds in the juices. The pleats at the top do more than shape the bun: they keep those juices from leaking out during steaming.
Glutinous rice, sticky millet, and azuki beans are boiled together, then worked with a wooden paddle while still hot until some grains break and the mass holds together without any sugar. On Taketomi Island in Okinawa, these cakes were prepared ahead for the Tanedori festival. Each round is wrapped in a bashō leaf, a relative of the banana leaf, and steamed, which perfumes the cake. Expect a grainy bite, with whole beans and millet still visible.
Once the pan is hot, the heat stays high until the end. Pork goes in first, then shrimp and squid, then the vegetables, roughly a minute apart, with no gap for chopping or drying anything, which is why everything is prepped and lined up beside the stove. There is no starch at the finish: oyster sauce and water boil for 2 minutes and leave only a thin coat.
Half-moon rice dumplings filled with red bean paste are steamed between two sarutori-ibara leaves. Using these leaves in place of oak is the Shimane way. When they are done, the skin turns translucent and springs back under a fingertip.
Grilled chicken thigh picks up a sweet, salty glaze and a few charred edges as the tare, a reduction of soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake, is brushed on in thin layers. The scallion pieces between the chicken lose their sharpness on the grill and turn sweet, which softens the saltiness of the glaze. For a plainer version, shio style skips the tare and seasons with salt alone, letting the chicken juices carry the flavor.
Salmon fillet with skin and bony parts, milt, and loosened roe all go into one pot of kelp stock seasoned with miso in this Hokkaido-style nabe. It is said to come from fishermen near the mouth of the Ishikari River, who dropped fresh salmon pieces and bones straight into miso soup to celebrate a big catch. Root vegetables, konnyaku, tofu, and rolls of blanched spinach wrapped in napa cabbage are arranged in sections around a mound of miso in the center. A final dusting of sansho pepper over the whole pot adds a tingling lift to the miso broth.
A small spoonful is enough to flavor a bowl of rice: young sansho leaves bring a bright, citrusy aroma and a faint tingle on the tongue, and dried whitebait adds salty savoriness. The preserve comes from the mountain villages of Kyoto, where sansho trees grew wild and the spring shoots, called kinome, were cooked down with sake and light soy sauce until almost no liquid remained. Spoon a little over rice, onigiri, ochazuke, udon, or chilled tofu.