813 recipes. Page 13 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
Neat blocks of pink fish soboro, green scallion, and orange mandarin peel cover the white shirataki noodles, putting four colors on one plate. It is a celebration dish from Uwajima in Ehime, and the noodles underneath are simmered in dashi, mirin, and light soy sauce until no liquid remains.
Briefly blanched seri and spinach soak for 8 to 12 hours in chilled dashi seasoned with mirin and light soy sauce, long enough for the broth to seep all the way into the greens. Instead of being tossed in a dressing, the vegetables are served moistened with that clear liquid, letting their own fragrance come through. The two greens are blanched separately so the tender spinach does not overcook while the seri stems keep a distinct bite. Twisting them dry would crush the stems and leave the dashi soaking in unevenly, so they are lined up and pressed between the palms instead. Seri, a Japanese water dropwort, gets swapped for Korean minari when Kuroda seri is hard to find.
Horse meat sold specifically for raw eating is sliced thin across the grain while still cold and fanned over shiso leaves and paper-thin onion soaked in cold water. Grated garlic and ginger go into sweet soy sauce for dipping. Only commercially processed meat labeled for raw consumption works here; freezing ordinary horse meat at home does not turn it into a substitute. Leftover raw slices are neither kept at room temperature nor stored again.
Aichi claims a share of its history: the temple town of Toyokawa Inari is named among its possible birthplaces, and Nagoya-style pockets are packed generously and often left open along the bottom. The tofu pockets, simmered in dashi, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin, need to cool before filling, since warm ones let the sushi rice soak up leftover liquid and turn heavy.
There is no coconut milk here. Eggs and evaporated milk make the sauce, and instead of a soupy curry you get soft, moist curds clinging to the crab. The curry note comes from mild curry powder rather than paste, along with nam prik pao and Chinese celery.
Soybeans roasted right through crunch inside a sweet flour batter in these bean cakes from the Kohoku area of Shiga. The beans are hard and round, so for small children they are roughly crushed before going into the batter.
This Ishikawa miso soup comes from the Buddhist temple tradition and uses no meat or fish stock: kombu dashi is mixed with the water the adzuki beans cooked in. The first boiling water is thrown out for its astringency, and only the second goes into the soup.
Fully ripe yellow ume are packed with coarse salt at 20 percent of their weight, aged for about a month in the plum vinegar that rises, then dried in direct sun, which leaves them intensely sour and salty with chewy flesh. Throughout aging every plum has to stay wet with brine. Drying happens only on rain-free days, and the fruit comes back into the refrigerator each night.
Without a cornstarch slurry, gan jjajang's black bean sauce reaches the noodles as a glossy, oil-carried stir-fry rather than a thick gravy. Frying chunjang, the Korean-Chinese black bean paste, before anything else takes away its raw bitterness, and high heat does the thickening that starch would otherwise do. Onion pulled off while just turning translucent keeps some bite, which matters in a sauce with nothing starchy to hide behind.
Wilted chard, leaves and stems both, gets folded into thick Greek yogurt with garlic, then olive oil warmed with chili flakes is drizzled across the top in a red streak. It is served cold, as part of a Turkish meze spread. Only half the minced garlic is cooked with the onion, while the rest stays raw in the yogurt, where its sharp edge survives. Most watery borani comes from mixing the chard while it still holds heat, which pulls liquid out into the sauce. A low-moisture strained yogurt keeps the coating thick for the same reason. Done right, the plate holds no loose water, and the cool yogurt and warm chili oil stay distinct.
Over two to three hours the coconut milk goes from loose curry to thick sauce and finally to a dry stage, where the oil separates and the beef fries in its own spice crust. Finished pieces are dark brown, almost black at the edges, carrying chili heat, the warmth of galangal, and the sweetness of caramelized coconut. Beef chuck suits that long cook, a cut that needs the hours to turn tender.
Unlike inari-zushi, which fills tofu pouches with rice that is already cooked, itadaki packs them with raw rice, burdock, carrot, and shiitake and lets the rice cook inside in shiitake soaking liquid seasoned with soy sauce, sugar, and sake. Small holes spread across each pouch let that liquid reach the center, and leaving headroom matters because raw rice expands enough to burst a packed pouch.
Pork loin and green pepper are cut into matching thin strips so they cook together in a few minutes over high heat. Slicing the loin across the grain means even the long strips bite cleanly instead of turning chewy and stringy.
Koppa, dried sweet potato, is rinsed, covered, and left for 6 hours so moisture spreads evenly through each piece, which is what lets it pound together with steamed glutinous rice into one smooth mass. Equal weights of brown and white sugar sweeten the dough, which is pressed into a thick slab and cut once set.
Miso is spread thickly around the inside rim of the pot like a bank of earth, and it gets scraped into the broth a little at a time as the pot simmers. Oysters release salty juices of their own, which is why the miso never goes in all at once.
A hollowed white melon is packed with green chilies wrapped in shiso leaves, and each slice shows pale melon around a green center. The look of a gun barrel loaded with ammunition gives teppo-zuke, gun pickle, its name. It began as a winter preserve around Narita and Katori in Chiba, became a crisp, spicy side for rice and sake, and is a well-known souvenir near Naritasan Shinshoji Temple. The salted melon first spends two days in water, changed as it goes, to draw out the salt. Reboiling only the marinade and returning it cold each day for several days is how the seasoning reaches the center of the dense melon.
Butter-browned button mushrooms and soy sauce bubbled briefly at the edge of the pan coat thick udon in a salty, nutty glaze. The blanched udon needs a thorough drain, because any water clinging to it thins that sauce. The mushrooms cook until dry and browned at the edges for the same reason, adding meaty depth without leaving liquid in the pan. Hitting the hot metal lets the soy reduce almost instantly, and it has to be stirred into the mushrooms before it scorches. Most of the butter is used for frying; a small piece melted in after the heat is off brings back its aroma and gives the noodles a final gloss.
Sumac, a tangy red spice, stacks another layer of sourness on the lemon and vinegar and turns mild white beans bright. Thin red onion and coarsely chopped parsley add crunch and a grassy note among the soft beans. The onion spends about 5 minutes in cold water to tame its bite and is drained well so it does not thin the dressing. The beans are already cooked, so rough stirring mashes them quickly. Sumac is scattered evenly over everything at the end so no spoonful is all sourness, and the salad rests for about 10 minutes at room temperature. As in Turkey, it is served alongside bread or grilled meat.
With canned chickpeas there is no soaking or boiling, and the only real wait is for the steamed beets to cool completely. Blended with chickpeas and tahini, they turn the hummus deep pink and add sweetness to the nutty, lemony base of classic hummus, with its garlic and cumin.
Ground pork plus onion, zucchini and cabbage all cut to the same 1 cm dice means every spoonful picks up a bit of everything once the sauce is mixed into the rice. The chunjang (black bean paste) is fried in oil for a minute first to take away its harsh edge, lifted out, and returned only after the vegetables have cooked.
Fried chicken thighs get only a thin coat of a sour, spicy sauce made from gochujang, ketchup and vinegar, so the crust is still crisp when it reaches the table. Letting the fried chicken cool and then rewarming it in the oil makes it crunchier still.
Despite the name, there is no whale in kujira-mochi. One story traces it to kujimochi, a rice cake that keeps well, while another says old versions were as large as a whale. One account links it to provisions made for the Shinjo domain about three centuries ago. In the Mogami and Murayama areas of Yamagata it was set before the doll display for the Peach Festival on April 3. Brown sugar syrup, two kinds of rice flour, an overnight rest, and walnuts at the bottom of a deep mold give a dark, dense cake that slices firm yet chewy.
Nothing else goes into the pot as filling. Yamataro crabs, with only the top shell removed, are pounded with miso in a mortar, mixed with water and strained three times, and as that liquid heats, the crab protein sets into curds like soft tofu. Ginger juice and sliced scallion are the only things on top.
Blanched taro stalks (zuiki) turn bright and keep a light crunch at the center when they are slipped straight into sweet vinegar. In Niigata this is a summer side dish, made from the leaf stalks of yatsugashira taro harvested from June to September. Both the outer skin and the stringy fibers come off first, and the stalks are weighted under water while soaking so none float. The temperatures run the opposite way from a hot-brine pickle: the brine is cooled ahead of time, while the zuiki is added hot from the pot, which sets the color and texture. Overcooking breaks the fibers down, so they come out as soon as they bend without snapping, and a little grated ginger is spooned on top when served cold.