813 recipes. Page 20 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
There is three times as much steamed sweet potato as mochi, so the pounded dough turns out golden, soft and stretchy. Most of the sweetness sits in the sugared kinako coating rather than in the dough. Store-bought cut mochi steams on top of the potato in the same basket, which saves cooking glutinous rice separately.
The mackerel's head and backbone go into the stock along with the fillets, and the clear broth still tastes strongly of fish. Pouring boiling water over the pieces and dunking them straight into cold water to pull off blood and scales is what keeps that broth clear. Each bowl gets a few drops of ginger juice, yuzu peel and two kinds of slivered onion.
Tofu, shiitake and thick udon all cook in one pot of kimchi broth that goes to the table as is, nabe style. Frying the sour kimchi in sesame oil first takes off its raw sharpness and leaves the anchovy-kelp broth spicy yet rounded. Tofu pressed dry with a paper towel keeps the broth from clouding, and it simmers while broth is spooned over it, since stirring hard breaks it apart. Only half the soup soy sauce is added early because kimchi varies in saltiness, and the rest is added bit by bit once the noodles are in. Once the udon has soaked up the soup it is ready, and any broth left in the pot can take a scoop of rice to finish.
The lotus root, burdock and carrot go into the fat left from browning the chicken before any broth is added, so even after braising the vegetables taste of chicken. It is cooked down until only a little liquid is left in the bottom of the pot, and it reheats fine the next day.
Kecap manis, Indonesia's thick sweet soy sauce, coats each grain of cold rice in a glossy brown layer. Shrimp paste and sambal are fried first until the oil turns red, and the rice tastes salty and hot as well as sweet. On top goes a fried egg with crisp edges and a soft yolk.
Agar seasoned sweet and salty with soy sauce and sugar sets around threads of yellow egg and reaches the table as both a sweet and a side dish. In the Shonai area of Yamagata, where agar dishes were part of everyday cooking, adding egg, once a precious ingredient, made it food for New Year and festivals. Each bite pairs soft egg with agar that breaks off cleanly.
Nanbu wheat crackers broken by hand into a soy-seasoned broth of chicken, burdock and vegetables soften at the edges as they drink up the liquid, while their centers stay chewy. In the Hachinohe area of Aomori, crackers have long gone into soup this way. Snack crackers tend to dissolve, and the ones sold for soup are used instead.
Thin-sliced pork belly fried until golden renders the fat that everything else cooks in. Onion, scallion and kimchi go into that fat, and the kimchi keeps frying until its juice has nearly gone, concentrating flavor and keeping the noodles from turning soggy. Older, more fermented kimchi gives a deeper sour note to the finished udon.
Bhature balloon up the moment they hit the oil. In Punjab and Delhi, people tear them apart to scoop up chole, a thick chickpea curry, and that is breakfast. Dough for bhature is usually left until it ferments a little; here yogurt and baking powder go in and it rests for just 20 minutes.
In Penang, nasi kandar usually means rice flooded with several curry gravies mixed together, a style called kuah campur. This version keeps it to a single coconut chicken curry with halved boiled eggs. The curry is deliberately left thin so it seeps between the grains, and the rice is cooked a little drier than usual so it can soak up that gravy without going soft.
Strawberries and grapes on skewers get one quick turn in sugar syrup cooked to 150°C, which leaves a thin shell that shatters like glass over cold, juicy fruit. Syrup that falls short of that temperature stays tacky even after cooling. Humid air softens the set shell quickly, so these are eaten right where they are made.
Each thin slice of beef is held with chopsticks and swished through gently simmering dashi for a few seconds. The name comes from the sound of that swishing. As the napa cabbage, tofu, shiitake and bok choy cook, their flavor builds up in the broth, which gets richer toward the end of the meal, and the last of it takes rice or udon.
Sweet-savory simmered tofu pockets sit on a clear dashi broth and slowly release their syrup, and the soup grows a little sweeter as you eat. The broth starts out lightly seasoned to leave room for that sweetness and should not taste salty before the tofu goes on. Simmer the tofu until a little liquid remains and it stays moist, and making it a day ahead lets the flavor sink in further. Scallions and shichimi pepper add fragrance and a touch of heat.
There are no noodles in this high-heat stir-fry of chicken breast, bok choy, carrot, mushrooms, and bean sprouts; it sits beside rice, with a light brown sauce that coats rather than pools. The carrot is cut thinner than the softer vegetables so everything finishes at once while the bok choy stems keep their crunch.
Nasi kerabu, a Malaysian rice dish, can be made with rice tinted by flowers; this one uses plain white rice cooked with coconut milk and lemongrass. Flaked grilled mackerel, cucumber, blanched bean sprouts and sambal are set around it separately and mixed in only at the table.
Okinawan water taro is cooked soft, then mashed and cooked down with sugar until it holds a spatula trail, much like Japanese kinton. A spoonful of mirin at the end adds gloss, and finely minced lemon or mandarin zest goes on top. Raw taro juice makes skin itch and undercooked taro irritates the mouth, so the taro is peeled with gloves and the first blanching water is thrown out. It is served warm or lukewarm.
Muroaji shokkara, a fermented mackerel scad sauce, handles both the salt and the savory depth in this soup on its own. The broth comes from small taro simmered until tender, with blanched ashitaba added at the end. Use a commercial shokkara with a clear production and storage history rather than fermenting fish at home.
A sheet of sweet, soy-simmered fried tofu sits on top of the bowl, and every bite squeezes its braising liquid out into the broth. That broth is a clear dashi made from kombu and bonito flakes, pale in color but full in flavor, in the Kansai style associated with Osaka. Reducing the tofu until its simmering liquid is nearly gone puts the sweetness inside the tofu rather than leaving it in the pot. It tastes best once it has soaked in the hot soup for a moment and gone soft. In Osaka this is everyday food, eaten as an early breakfast as readily as at lunch.
Small steamed rice cakes with a shallow dip in the middle, each one topped with a spoonful of chai poh: preserved radish fried with garlic and soy until salty and browned at the edges. The cake itself is just rice flour, water, and salt, so it tastes of almost nothing and stays soft. All the seasoning sits on top, with sambal chili on the side for heat. Teochew hawkers in Singapore and Malaysia sell it for breakfast, often from stalls that make nothing else.
Rice cooked in coconut milk with pandan leaves makes a rich, fragrant base for the fiery sambal served beside it. Around it go crisp dried anchovies, roasted peanuts, boiled egg and cucumber, and each bite can be salty, crunchy, cooling or hot.
Strands of white somen drift through translucent green agar and trace a flowing line across every slice. Suwa in Nagano built an agar industry by freezing and drying it through the winter, and tenyose became hospitality food for the Onbashira Festival and family gatherings. The pattern depends on one moment: the noodles sink if the liquid is too hot and will not hold if it has cooled too far.
Despite a name that means water-boiled fish, the bowl arrives under a layer of red chili oil. Thin slices of white fish, coated in starch, poach gently in a doubanjiang broth so they stay tender inside all that heat. Hot chili oil poured over Sichuan peppercorns at the end sizzles and releases the numbing aroma, and bean sprouts underneath catch the broth. It is intense enough that rice on the side is not optional.
Laksa paste fried until dark, then loosened with shrimp stock and coconut milk, gives this Singapore and Malaysia noodle soup its spicy, creamy broth. Full-fat coconut milk matters, since its fat sets the body of the soup; light versions come out thin. Hard boiling can split the coconut milk, so it simmers gently with the bottom stirred. Rice vermicelli, shrimp, fried tofu, bean sprouts, boiled egg and lime fill each bowl.
Star anise and ginger are in the pot too, but what reaches you first from these ribs is clove, with a faintly medicinal edge. Cloves are strong, and the count stays at five. Before any soy goes in, the ribs are tossed in rock sugar melted to amber, which leaves a glossy dark-brown coat, and then they braise low with dark soy and Shaoxing wine until the meat slips off the bone.