813 recipes. Page 22 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
A thin flour crepe goes into the pan first, then an egg is poured over it and scattered with scallion, and as the egg sets the two become one sheet. It is a griddle item at Taiwanese breakfast stalls, where the thickness of the batter and the cooking time differ from one stall to the next, and so does the chew. Folded or rolled and cut into pieces, it comes with soy sauce, sometimes with chili oil too.
Barley grains and chestnuts dried for a day give chew to this steamed sticky rice, which also carries chicken, burdock, fuki, shiitake, and fried tofu glossed with soy seasoning. The dish came to the Hiruzen area of Maniwa in Okayama from Daisen okowa in Tottori, and barley entered the mix around 1972 through a local staple-food improvement campaign. Families served it at New Year, seasonal celebrations, and festivals. The liquid left from simmering the filling is kept and sprinkled over the grains partway through steaming.
Stirred without a break, the cloudy, thickening warabi starch mixture suddenly turns clear and starts pulling away from the sides of the pot. That is when it goes into the mold to chill; it is then cut into bite-size pieces, rolled in kinako, and finished with dark brown sugar syrup just before eating. It is softest on the day it is made.
Gunma suiton dough is never rolled or cut. A loose flour batter is simply spooned into dashi already simmering with daikon, carrot, taro, shiitake and fried tofu, and that ease made it an everyday dish that stood in for rice when rice ran short.
Somewhere between a soup and a sauced noodle dish, mee bandung from Johor in Malaysia covers soft yellow wheat noodles with a thick red gravy of shrimp stock, tomato paste, and chili paste. A starch slurry at the end gives the gravy enough body to cling to every strand, the texture that defines the dish.
Whole loach, a small freshwater fish, simmer with burdock, tofu and scallion in a soy-based broth until even the bones are soft enough to eat. Burdock shaved thin, like sharpening a pencil, flavors the broth. In eastern Saitama, along the Tone and Ayase rivers, loach were caught in rice paddies from summer into autumn; thick ones were simmered whole like this, and thin ones went into soup.
From late April through June, when Spanish mackerel entered the Seto Inland Sea and broad beans ripened, farming families in Sanuki made this pressed sushi for Haruio, a spring gathering where relatives shared fish, food, and sake. The mackerel on top must be sold for raw consumption, because the vinegar cure does not kill parasites or pathogens.
Four steamed buns go onto each bamboo skewer and are grilled under a sweet red miso glaze until they shine dark with small charred edges. Gunma traces the snack to miso-zuke manju made by Harashima Ruizo in Maebashi at the end of the Edo period; the glaze turned sweeter once kuromitsu syrup arrived. The rice-koji starter ferments for a day or two and the glaze rests in the fridge for 2 days, so the work begins well before grilling day.
Coarsely grated daikon and overnight-dried sardines simmer together, and a splash of rice vinegar at the end turns the pot into a hot, tangy soup. In the Miyazaki dialect shui means soup, and unlike chilled vinegared salads this one is eaten steaming, traditionally alongside mochi.
Mashed sweet potato loosened with chicken stock becomes a thick gravy ladled over yellow wheat noodles in this Malaysian dish. Curry powder and peanut butter layer spice and nuttiness over the potato's natural sweetness, and the result sits closer to a spoon-coating sauce than a broth. Mashing the potato while it is still hot keeps lumps out of the gravy. Halved boiled eggs and lime finish the bowl.
The dish takes its name from the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo. Thick squares of pork belly are tied with string and braised for a long time in soy sauce, rice wine and sugar until the fat turns translucent, then cut into thick slices and served under a spoonful of the reduced, glossy brown sauce.
Thin slices of vinegared mackerel and a sheet of vinegar-softened white kombu wrap a firm block of sushi rice that has been pressed in a wooden mold. The Osaka style needs no soy sauce, and sweet pickled ginger is served alongside. Sushi Tsune in Minami-Semba created it in 1891 using konoshiro, and the half-fish shape looked like a small boat, battera in Portuguese. Mackerel and a square mold came later.
In Toyama, glutinous rice dough tinted green with mugwort is pressed into flat rounds, griddled, and brushed while hot with a thin layer of sweet sesame miso. The miso is made by grinding toasted sesame until its oil just begins to show, then mixing in miso and sugar, which leaves a little texture from the seeds.
Eggs are whipped for 4 to 5 minutes into a creamy foam, poured into boiling broth, and left covered off the heat until the foam puffs into a soft dome and sets. Records put the dish on breakfast trays at the Fukuroi post station in the Edo period, and the Fukuroi tourism association revived it from those old documents.
Tamarind leads the flavor, sour and fruity, with fish sauce and sugar rounding it into a sweet-salty tang. Despite a name that points to Siam, the dish belongs to Singapore and Malaysia rather than Thailand. Thin rice vermicelli is soaked, then stir-fried hard and fast so the sauce soaks in without the noodles breaking down. The shrimp are only seared at first and finish cooking alongside the noodles and bean sprouts, which go out with some crunch still in them.
Dote means riverbank. Miso is spread around the inside rim of the pot like an embankment and worked into the liquid in the middle a little at a time, and that is where this Osaka dish gets its name. Beef tendon and konjac cook slowly in sweet country-style miso; by the time the tendon turns soft and gelatinous, the sauce coats a spatula thickly.
Chicken thigh and onion simmer in nothing more than water, soy sauce and mirin, with no dashi. The eggs are beaten only lightly, so streaks of white remain, and poured in two goes: the first half sets around the edges, the second stays soft and barely trembling, and the topping ends up marbled yellow and white. A little broth is left in the pan to soak into the rice underneath.
Hand-stretched wheat dough becomes long, flat ribbons that are boiled and rolled generously in kinako and sugar. Furuno in Yufu, Oita, is regarded as its birthplace, and it is still offered during Obon and Tanabata. Each ribbon is thinnest in the middle and slightly thicker at the ends, and one piece chews differently from end to end. The dough rests twice, once as a ball and again as short sticks, and that is what lets it stretch past 20cm without tearing.
Everything left after filleting a cod, from the head, backbone and skin to the liver, roe or milt, goes into one big pot here. Jappa means scraps in the Tsugaru dialect of Aomori, yet these parts make a full-bodied winter miso soup. Liver mashed into the broth near the end gives it a soft richness, and fresh milt is treated as a prize. In Tsugaru cod was the fish for welcoming the New Year; families bought a whole large one at year's end and dragged it home over snowy roads, which gave rise to the phrase tara shogatsu, cod New Year.
Turmeric and fish sauce tint the pork yellow and season it before it ever meets the pan, and that colored fat ends up in the broth. Mi quang, from Quang Nam province in central Vietnam, uses only enough of that concentrated broth to moisten the noodles, so the bowl eats more like dressed noodles than soup. Shrimp cooked separately and briefly stays tender, and bean sprouts with peanuts added at the last moment keep their crunch against the soft rice noodles.
These are the steamed pork ribs that come in little dishes at dim sum. Coarsely chopped douchi, salted fermented black beans, keeps its salty, funky smell through the steaming and ends up in the juicy meat.
Twelve chard leaves are rolled finger-thick around ground beef, soaked rice, onion and dried mint. The rolls are packed tightly into the pot, weighed down with a heavy plate, and cooked slowly in a thin tomato broth. In Turkey they come to the table with a tangy garlic yogurt.
Every slice reveals a pattern built from green aonori, black sesame, black soybeans, and a red-tinted dough worked into rice-flour mochi. In Nagano it was offered at home altars and temples for Nehan-e on February 15 and then shared with children. Strands of each colored dough are laid side by side, wrapped into a long roll, and creased with chopsticks into ridges and petals, and the order of the strands decides the final design. Cotton thread cuts the soft roll without squashing that pattern. Fresh slices are tender; pieces that firm up in the fridge are good toasted.
In inland Yamagata, families and friends gather on riverbanks in autumn to share huge pots of this taro and beef stew at imoni-kai parties. The beef waits until a skewer slides easily into the taro. Added at the start, it toughens and throws off more foam.