813 recipes. Page 6 of 34
Curry, stir-fry noodles, and Asian recipes
Cooked rice simmered in strongly brewed hojicha gives a pale, loose porridge with a nutty roasted aroma and a gentle bitterness, the grains soft but still distinct. A quick rinse of the cooked rice in cold water removes surface stickiness so the broth stays clear and light.
Gai pad med mamuang is Thai cashew chicken with onion and bell pepper. This version uses oyster sauce, soy sauce, and sugar, with no fish sauce or dried chilies. Cut the chicken thigh into 2-3cm pieces and the vegetables into chunky 3cm pieces before heating the pan. Mix the sauce separately so it can be added quickly after the chicken and vegetables have cooked. Use roasted cashews: this recipe adds them for only the final 30 seconds and does not include a separate roasting step. Lower the heat before adding the sauce, and stop reducing while it still coats the chicken with a glossy glaze. Add the cashews last and serve immediately to keep their crunch.
Honey in the batter keeps these small Japanese pancakes soft and pliable for hours after they cool, and their mild sweetness leaves the red bean paste in charge. Only one side touches the pan, so each round has an evenly browned face and a smooth, pale back.
Small horse mackerel go straight from the grill into sanbaizu, a sweet-sour mix of vinegar, sugar, soy sauce, and dashi, and the seasoning soaks in while the fish is still hot. The dish comes from Kagawa on the Seto Inland Sea, where people who helped haul beach seine nets were once given small mackerel to take home. Its clean acidity suited hot days, and it turned up at summer festivals alongside drinks. Because the fish are grilled whole, the thickest part of the body has to be fully cooked. For children and older eaters, pick the flesh off the bones, which the vinegar does not always soften, and keep the fish refrigerated despite the acid.
Every solid in this pot, from chicken and lotus root to taro, konnyaku and fish cake, is cut to the same 1cm dice, so each spoonful carries a little of everything. Dabu comes from the Karatsu area of Saga, and its name is said to echo zabu-zabu, the sound of plenty of broth sloshing around the ingredients. Neighbors once gathered to cook it in large pots for weddings, funerals and invited guests. The cut changed with the occasion: squares for celebrations, triangular konnyaku for Buddhist memorial meals.
Crunchy dried daikon, chewy toasted squid and nutty roasted soybeans all soak in the same sweet soy and vinegar dressing. The pickle comes from Miyazaki, a major dried-daikon region where winter wind and strong southern sun turn fresh strips into a pantry staple. Its name is said to echo impatient calls asking whether it is ready yet. Toasting the squid and dry-roasting the beans before mixing gives the jar a roasted aroma that a raw-vegetable pickle lacks, while kombu and ginger add their own savor and bite. It is served chilled after resting overnight under refrigeration.
The broth gets its heat from dried chilies and smells of lemongrass, with a salty depth from fermented shrimp, and the noodles are bún, thick rice noodles that are round in cross-section. Bean sprouts and lime go on the side, and a few slices of cooked pork blood sausage bring the bowl closer to how it is served in Hue.
Thin slices of lotus stem stay crunchy, while shrimp split lengthwise open up a wider surface for the fish sauce dressing to soak into. The vinegar soak at the start removes the astringent aftertaste of the stem; skip it and no amount of dressing hides it. Leave the stems in much past 10 minutes, though, and their own aroma fades as well. Salty, sour and sweet hit together, with cilantro on top, in the style of a Vietnamese goi salad. Resting the tossed salad for 5 minutes or more lets the dressing reach into the shredded carrot and the shrimp.
Raw peanuts in their thin skins and thick arame seaweed simmer in plain water for about an hour, and the sugar, soy sauce, and mirin are added only after a peanut splits easily under a finger, since soy sauce reduces faster than a firm center softens. This keeping side dish from the Atsumi Peninsula in Aichi finishes with almost no loose sauce, just a glossy coat on the peanuts and seaweed.
The dough is fine semolina, which crumbles apart in the mouth, and each cookie hides a date paste spiced with cinnamon. After the filling is wrapped, a mold or fork presses the pattern on top, and they leave the oven while the tops are still pale and only the edges have gone light gold. Baked any darker, they lose that crumbly tenderness and turn hard.
In Vietnam this is what people eat for breakfast or when they are feeling unwell, much the way Koreans turn to dakjuk. The broth carries a quiet heat from sliced ginger, and the seasoning is fish sauce rather than soy.
Dried tofu cut into thin strips does not break up in the pan; it lifts on the chopsticks in strands, like noodles. Carrot, green pepper and onion cut to the same width make it colorful.
Douhua is traditionally set with a coagulant such as gypsum, but this home version uses gelatin to set the soy milk into a pudding. It wobbles on the spoon, and goes under a cooled syrup of brown sugar simmered with ginger.
In the Iya area of Tokushima, river trout, tofu, konjac and vegetables were traditionally cooked over a layer of sweet miso on a heated flat stone called a hirara. Here a lidded electric griddle stands in for the stone, and chicken thigh, potatoes and shiitake join the trout, enough for four on one plate.
Dough made from flour and glutinous rice flour is stretched by hand into short, flat pieces and dropped straight into the simmering pot. These dago are kept short rather than pulled into long, even noodles so a spoonful can hold them together with burdock, taro and carrot. The broth comes from dried shiitake soaking liquid and dried sardines, seasoned with pale usukuchi soy sauce.
Fine strips of dried squid and kombu cure in soy sauce, sake and mirin until the kombu releases its sticky body, with salted herring roe mixed through. The dish is said to have begun in the Matsumae domain of southern Hokkaido. As roe grew expensive, squid and kombu took over a larger share, but it remains a winter and New Year staple.
Hold the lime and fish sauce dressing until the bowl is about to be eaten; once it hits the rice noodles, they start to go soft. The beef is sliced thin against the grain and needs a pan that is already very hot, with room for the slices to lie in a single layer. Crowded slices give off water, so cook in batches and pull each one as soon as the edges brown and no raw red surface is left. Rinse the boiled noodles hard under cold water to wash off the surface starch, and lay the lettuce and cold noodles in the bowl before the warm beef goes on so the greens do not wilt.
Grapefruit segments and a yuja marmalade dressing layer two kinds of citrus, one juicy and tart, the other floral. Thin ribbons of shiso, with their minty, herbal edge, tidy up any fishiness from the shrimp, while cucumber and radish supply crunch. Served cold, every element tastes sharper.
Cut one lengthwise and you get rings: the yolk at the center, a pale red edge on the white, and a layer of white-fish surimi around it all. This fried fish cake from Hirado in Nagasaki Prefecture is a whole peeled egg wrapped in fish paste, so it is served halved or quartered with the cut side up.
The sheet is a chiffon batter with meringue folded in, light and springy, and the bitterness of matcha lingers after the sweetness of the cream has gone. How green it turns out depends on how briefly you fold once the flour and matcha go in.
Cut into the finished pot and the rice is white except where the saffron water landed, leaving scattered patches of gold. The yogurt and garam masala chicken sits at the bottom, so dig the spoon all the way down to serve rice and chicken together.
Despite the japchae in its name, there are no glass noodles. Pork tenderloin, green bell pepper and onion are all cut into long strips of the same thickness, the starch-coated pork is seared first over high heat, and oyster sauce finishes it. With everything the same size, meat and pepper come up together in one pinch of the chopsticks.
Only a small amount of brown sugar is rolled into each thin wheat crepe, so the toasted wrapper comes through before the sweetness. Scattered widely, the sugar melts and leaks out the sides, which is why it goes down in one thin line. Eat them while they are still warm.
A dried magnolia leaf serves as the plate: Hida-style miso is spread on it with sliced leek and shiitake and warmed over low heat until it bubbles. The leeks lose their sharpness and the mushrooms soften in the salty miso, which is eaten a little at a time over rice or alongside drinks. The leaf itself is only a cooking surface and stays on the plate.