813 recipes. Page 21 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
Compared with Malaysian nasi lemak, this Jakarta coconut rice has a lighter coconut note, with lemongrass and pandan adding a soft herbal layer. The rice itself is salted, and fried shallot flakes on top give it crunch. It is meant as a base for side dishes such as fried tempeh, chicken or thin egg omelet strips.
Burdock, carrot, summer orange peel, and young ginger are each candied on their own, so every piece keeps its firmness and aroma under a coat of sugar crystals. Farm households in Chiba made them to stretch the harvest, and the name comes from tenmondo, a dried medicinal tuber that was once steeped in honey.
Filipino families often make this on rainy days and ladle the broth over rice. The sourness comes from tamarind paste, and if it tastes too mild, another tablespoon goes in. Tomato and onion, added in big pieces, melt into the broth over 30 minutes of simmering.
Laksa paste fried in oil until it bleeds red does most of the work, and coconut milk and chicken stock turn it into a spicy, creamy broth. Fried tofu puffs act like sponges, soaking up that broth so they burst when bitten, while the shrimp spend just 3 minutes in the pot and stay plump. This style of curry noodle soup is everyday food in Singapore and Malaysia. Coconut milk turns thick and heavy as it cools, so the bowls go to the table as soon as the broth is poured.
A winter side dish from the Tsugaru region of Aomori, where cod was eaten from head to innards and the roe was salted for keeping or saved for New Year and celebration food. Carrot, koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu) and shirataki are cooked in sake first, then fresh roe scraped from its membrane is stir-fried in until it turns opaque and scatters into dry little grains that cling to every piece.
From Shiga Prefecture, oae dango combines flat boiled rice dumplings with konnyaku, shiitake, carrot and komatsuna, all coated in a shiraae dressing of tofu and ground sesame. Everything is cooled completely before mixing, and the dish is served at room temperature rather than hot.
It is made with tofu, egg white, sugar and potato starch and no flour, yet once sliced it has a moist, firm crumb that looks a lot like castella. It comes from southern Akita.
Bone-in pork ribs simmer quietly with knotted kombu and shiitake for about an hour and a half, until the meat slips off the bone and the broth is still clear. The soup comes from Okinawa's habit of using every part of the pig and remains an important New Year dish. Each bowl also gets a softened kombu knot alongside the ribs.
Beef shank simmered for 2 hours with star anise, cinnamon and ginger yields a clear broth with a gentle spice aroma. The dish comes from Lanzhou in Gansu province, where the noodles are hand-pulled; store-bought Chinese wheat noodles stand in for them. Keeping the pot at a quiet simmer the whole time decides whether the broth stays clear. Daikon, sliced beef, cilantro and chili oil finish each bowl.
Hot-water dough is rolled thin, brushed with sesame oil, salted and scattered with scallion, then rolled into a log, coiled like a snail shell and pressed flat. The oil-and-roll step happens only once, yet when the pancake comes out of a medium-hot pan and is torn open, it separates into thin layers, with edges that crackle.
Whole hulled barley keeps a gentle pop inside a thick pot of softened rice, kidney beans, and three kinds of potato. In Yamanashi mountain villages where paddy rice was hard to grow, rice was saved for celebrations and barley carried everyday meals. Nothing is seasoned in the pot; each diner stirs in negi miso, a mix of scallion, miso, bonito flakes, and a little sugar.
Toasted soybeans are packed tightly into wheat dough sweetened with brown sugar and sanontou, then steamed in log form. The name refers to beans shut inside the dough, and it also goes by tochiko-mame or toshiko-mame. Around Yamaga and Kikuchi in northern Kumamoto it was made at year's end alongside osechi, and it appeared at weddings, funerals, and as a gift or farm-season snack. Chilled until firm and sliced, it shows beans crowded through the brown dough.
Instead of the offal and many garnishes found in fuller versions of this Jakarta soup, this home recipe makes its beef broth from brisket, coconut milk and a ground paste of onion, garlic and ginger cooked in oil. The milky color comes from the coconut milk added at the end, with no need to wait for a cloudy stock. Brisket is the slow part, and a cooked-looking surface says little; a fork should slide easily into the center. Rice is served on the side.
Unlike chow mein, which gets fried until crisp, lo mein tosses boiled noodles gently with sauce so they stay soft and glossy. Soy sauce, oyster sauce and a little sugar make a salty, faintly sweet coating, mixed in advance so the seasoning spreads evenly during the brief toss. Half cooking the shrimp before the vegetables go in keeps it from toughening while everything is tossed, and the broccoli and carrot come off the heat while still bright and crisp. The noodles are plated the moment the sauce turns glossy, since left in the pan they dry out. Chicken or beef works in place of shrimp with the same steps.
Thin wonton skins fried until they shatter at the edges hold a hot, molten filling of cream cheese and crab, the way American Chinese restaurants serve them as an appetizer. This version uses drained canned crabmeat rather than imitation crab sticks, and block cream cheese instead of a soft spread, since a looser filling tends to leak into the oil.
Hot green tea is poured over rice topped with grilled salmon and laver flakes just before eating. As the salmon and soy sauce seep into the tea, the broth gets richer, and the wasabi on the side changes the heat each time a little more is stirred in. Some pour dashi instead of tea, or swap the salmon for umeboshi (pickled plum) or pollock roe.
Bite through a firm, crumbly white sugar shell and the tart juice of a fresh Koshu grape bursts out. One Yamanashi story traces the sweet to a grape that fell into boiling sugar at a Kofu confectioner in the Edo period. The shell is fondant, syrup boiled and then worked until it turns white, and the grapes need thick skins like Koshu. Thin-skinned or bruised grapes split open in the warm fondant.
One ink sac, loosened in two ladles of broth, turns the miso soup nearly black. In Amami, Kagoshima, bigfin reef squid is called mizuika and its ink sac mada. These large, translucent squid are caught in Amami's waters all year.
Wide, thick noodles take on the numbing tingle of Sichuan peppercorns, the heat of chili oil, the tang of black vinegar and the fermented saltiness of doubanjiang (chili bean paste) all at once. The numbing note comes from warming the peppercorns briefly in chili oil over low heat, pulled off before they darken or smell scorched. Heat is best adjusted with the amount of doubanjiang rather than more chili oil, which keeps the flavor clean. Because the noodles are so broad, a sauce with oil floating on top seasons them unevenly, so the sauce gets stirred to the bottom and the noodles are tossed hard. Boiled 1 minute short of the package time, they stay chewy to the last bite. Bok choy blanched in the noodle water adds a crisp, green bite between the oily strands.
In Punjab the pot was once set beside a tandoor after its coals had died down and left to simmer overnight, then served the next day. Here, black lentils and kidney beans cooked first in a pressure cooker get another two hours over low heat. In that time the grains break apart and release starch, and the dal turns thick and smooth before any cream goes in.
Gardenia fruit turns the rice a clear yellow, and a brothy stew of crumbled tofu, minced lizardfish and root vegetables is spooned over it. The dish comes from Usuki in Oita. One story credits the frugal local domain, which used yellow rice in place of costly red bean rice; another ties the color to paella seen through Nanban trade. Merchant households cooked a large pot of kayaku on New Year's Eve and reheated it through the first three days of the year.
Softer than the rice-flour uiro of other regions, this one trembles slightly on the plate. In Yamaguchi it is made by stirring smooth red bean paste into warabi starch and steaming it, and this recipe makes just one small mold using store-bought paste. Chilled straight from the steamer, the starch firms up; it cools at room temperature instead and is eaten the same day.
A Sichuan fish soup that gets its sourness from rinsed pickled mustard greens and its heat from dried chilies and chili oil. Thin slices of white fish, lightly coated in starch, turn silky and soft in the red broth.
No broth at all: hot, thick noodles are tossed with chili-oil pork, chives, scallion, fish powder, and a raw yolk until everything coats the strands. The noodles skip the cold rinse so they reach the bowl hot and the yolk loosens into a sauce. The pork must be cooked down until no thin liquid remains in the pan; otherwise water pools at the bottom and the mix turns uneven. Spreading the toppings in a ring instead of one pile keeps the flavor from bunching up when everything is mixed. Fish powder and nori bring the savory depth a soup would normally supply.