509 Japanese recipes. Page 1 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Agedashi Tofu (Japanese Crispy Fried Tofu in Dashi Broth).
Hot dashi poured over a potato-starch crust starts softening it right away: the edges turn tender while the middle stays crisp only briefly. That brief contrast is the whole point, and the tofu goes from the oil to the bowl and straight to the table.
Soft milk bread wrapped around a generous ball of sweet red bean paste, anpan dates to 1874, when the Kimuraya bakery in Tokyo's Ginza paired Western bread with Japanese bean confectionery. The enriched dough with milk, butter, and egg bakes into a cottony crumb that pulls apart in strands. This version tops each bun with black sesame seeds.
Salt first, vinegar second: the salt draws water out of the mackerel and firms it, and a short soak in rice vinegar with kombu turns the surface white while the center stays pink and rich. That pink center is how shime saba should look, which also means the fish is essentially raw. Vinegar and salt do not kill anisakis, so the recipe only works with fillets sold for raw eating with a parasite-control freezing history. Kept at 4°C or below from thawing to serving, it is eaten the day it is made, with perilla leaves and shredded ginger on the side.
The name sounds like a vegetable pickle, but this Akita dish is mostly a chilled rice base cooked with sugar and sharpened with vinegar. Soaked rice is ground with a few grains left whole, which gives it a slightly nubbly texture. Cucumber and turnip go in only once the base is completely cold, to keep their crunch, and seasonal fruit sits on top.
The name still says pork (buta), but in Amakusa, Kumamoto, octopus from the bay took the place of pork that was once hard to come by. Boiled octopus and eggplant get a sweet miso glaze with mirin and sugar.
Each cup of the takoyaki pan gets octopus plus chopped kimchi and scallion. Sauce, mayonnaise, and bonito flakes still go on top as usual, but the kimchi comes through underneath, sour and hot.
Pull a piece and it breaks off cleanly instead of stretching the way all-rice mochi does. That is the wheat at work: a soft flour dough steams in the same basket as the glutinous rice, and the two are pounded together while hot. In the Nakakawachi and Minamikawachi areas of Osaka it was made around Hangesho, once rice planting was done, to give thanks and pray for a good harvest, and it is rolled in sugared kinako.
Thick, sweet, and slowly turning sour, miki comes from the Amami area of Kagoshima, where cooked rice flour, sugar, and water are fermented with juice pressed from raw sweet potato. Only the juice is used; the grated solids are left out. Freshly made, it tastes plainly sweet. Over the following days a sour tang builds behind that sweetness, and how much tang you like decides when the jar moves to the fridge, more than the calendar does.
Flying fish, called ago in Tottori, gives these bamboo-core fish cakes a darker color than ordinary chikuwa made mostly from pollock, and a skin that grills firm enough to make a sound under a knife. Tear them by hand as a drinking snack with soy sauce, or slice them into soups and simmered dishes.
Sweetened azuki beans and red-and-white rice dumplings sit in a lightly salted clear broth, putting sweet and savory in the same bowl. Itokoni from Yamaguchi Prefecture changes from area to area in its broth and ingredients, and this recipe follows the clear-soup style of Hagi. Setting dumplings tinted red beside white ones comes from the colors used at celebrations.
Despite the name, Gyoda furai is never deep-fried. This snack from Gyoda in Saitama is a loose flour batter spread into a 20 cm round on a lightly oiled pan, topped with long onion and thin pork, and pressed down again and again with a pot lid as it cooks. When brown spots appear on the batter it is brushed with Worcestershire-style sauce and eaten hot.
Thin slices of cucumber, eggplant, lotus root and carrot share the bowl with chewy wood ear mushroom, shiso and ginger, and each bite lands somewhere different on the crunch scale. Each vegetable is prepped on its own terms: the hard lotus root and carrot get a short blanch, while the softer cucumber and eggplant are rubbed with salt instead. The sweet vinegar with sliced red chili is boiled once and then cooled all the way down. Poured on while still warm, it costs the cucumber and lotus root their snap. Squeezing the salted cucumber and eggplant hard after rinsing keeps the dressing from going watery. Half an hour in the fridge is enough before serving it cold with its liquid.
With no broth to dilute it, the soy, sesame oil, and oyster sauce mixture at the bottom of the bowl clings straight to the noodles, so every mouthful lands at full strength. A small splash of vinegar keeps the oil from feeling heavy, and a bowl that starts to taste greasy just needs one more toss from the bottom up.
Napolitan grew out of postwar Japan, when ketchup and Vienna sausages were easier to find than pricier ingredients, and it still tastes like retro home cooking. The ketchup is fried in the pan before the noodles join it, cooking off its water so the raw tang turns into concentrated tomato sweetness, with Worcestershire adding a fermented, savory layer. Sausage browns first, until its edges color and the pan smells of it. The onion and green pepper get only a quick blast of high heat so they stay crisp, and a knob of butter at the end softens the ketchup's tang into a sweet, salty gloss.
Red taro stems (akadatsu) are blanched and steeped in vinegar and mirin, and as they chill the red color spreads evenly through the whole batch. Every strip of outer skin and tough fiber is peeled from top to bottom and the stems are rubbed with salt, or they stay stringy and taste acrid even after dressing. The stems bend but keep a light crunch at the center. That crunch depends on boiling the vinegar mixture to drive off the mirin's alcohol and then letting it cool completely; poured on hot, it keeps cooking the stems. With about twice as much vinegar as mirin, the dish tastes clearly sour before it tastes sweet.
Lifted from the center of the soy milk, Nikko yuba comes up doubled, thick, and rippled, and agemaki yuba is that tofu skin rolled into sticks, fried, and dried. The rolls simmer slowly in a sweet, mild dashi, and cooling them in the liquid is what carries the flavor to the center.
Portuguese missionaries brought this sponge to Nagasaki in the 16th century, and Japan turned it into a cake of its own. There is no baking powder: the rise comes entirely from eggs whipped for a long time, which gives a fine, even crumb that springs back slowly when pressed.
A modest scoop of rice gets its toppings arranged to taste: shredded chicken, thin egg strips, simmered shiitake, green beans, miso-pickled papaya, scallion, citrus peel, and nori. Hot chicken-bone broth is then poured over generously, and the bowl is eaten lightly, almost like soup. On Amami, the earliest form resembled seasoned chicken rice, and the custom of pouring broth over it spread in the Showa era and became standard. The bones simmer with ginger for an hour, and the tenderloin is poached in that same broth, which ties the meat and the soup together.
Rather than marinating the pork, this version sears thin slices of pork shoulder first and adds the soy, mirin, and fresh ginger sauce only for the last 30 seconds, when it reduces to a glossy glaze. Laid flat without overlapping, the slices brown at the edges instead of stewing in their own juices. Onion softened in the same pan adds sweetness, and the result is the ginger pork familiar from Japanese set meals and bento boxes.
Glutinous rice soaked a full day in food-grade lye water, wrapped in bamboo sheath and boiled for about three hours, ends up with no grain left to see, just a glossy, amber, jelly-like block. The cake itself is unsweetened, so it is sliced and served with kinako. Use only lye water sold for cooking, and keep it off bare skin.
Scooped of its white pulp and seeds, the thick, faintly bitter rind of akebi becomes a shell for maitake and shimeji cooked down with miso and myoga ginger. The filling has to be cooked until almost dry and fully cooled, or the rind will not close neatly around it when tied with string.
Botan means peony, and the name comes from the way thin slices of wild boar are fanned out on the platter like petals. The meat cooks with burdock and taro in a broth of mixed red and white miso, and the sansho pepper stays out of the pot, sprinkled over each bowl instead.
Okinawans are said to have made hirayachi on typhoon days, when going out was hard, from flour, egg and garlic chives already in the house. The batter can be loosened with either dashi or plain water. Its name refers to cooking something flat, and the batter is poured in quarters into an 18 cm pan and spread thin.
A white coat of amazake clings to thick daikon spears, which bend slightly yet still snap when bitten. Unlike fully dried takuan, this Tokyo pickle keeps the radish moist, with amazake supplying a gentle sweetness. It traces back to lightly pickled daikon sold at Edo-period Ebisu observances, and bettara stalls still appear at the autumn market of Takarada Ebisu Shrine in Nihonbashi.