509 Japanese recipes. Page 10 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Dried Squid Koji Pickle, Mentaiko Yuzu Cream Udon.
Thin strips of dried squid spend ten days in the fridge in rice koji and a soy-based seasoning, slowly softening and taking on the koji's sweetness. The old method aged it in weighted crocks; here nothing sits at room temperature, and it matures in the refrigerator from start to finish. A little goes on rice or alongside a drink.
Yuzu marmalade brings a citrus sourness to a cream and milk sauce, cutting the weight that cream udon usually carries. Two thirds of the mentaiko melts into the sauce off the heat, and the last third goes on top, so the bowl has both silky and fresh roe. The sauce is ready when it coats the back of a spoon in a thin layer, and frozen udon only needs a quick blanch and a good drain so it does not water the sauce down.
Daikon cut into very fine threads is crisped in cold water, then piled with bonito flakes and shredded nori and dressed with soy sauce, rice vinegar and a little sesame oil.
Warm milk and grain vinegar, nothing else, make this curd from the Awa and Kamogawa area of Chiba Prefecture. Despite the tofu name, no soybeans are involved; the texture is closer to a soft fresh cheese. Locally it was once made from colostrum, the first milk after a cow calves, while this recipe uses ordinary pasteurized whole milk. Chilled, it tastes mild with a faint tang.
A single block of store-bought roux thickens the sauce and gives Japanese curry its mild, slightly sweet taste. There is no blending of spices as with Indian curry, which is how it became an everyday family dish in Japan that tastes the same every time. Potatoes, carrots, and onions are cut large so they hold their shape in the thick sauce.
Ten shiratama dumplings, each about 1.5cm across, go into a bowl of cold, clear syrup. The syrup is coarse sugar with a little white sugar and tiny amounts of light soy sauce and salt, simmered and then chilled in the fridge. The dumplings go straight from the pot into ice water, which keeps the whole bowl cold from the first spoonful.
Salmon fillet with skin and bony parts, milt, and loosened roe all go into one pot of kelp stock seasoned with miso in this Hokkaido-style nabe. It is said to come from fishermen near the mouth of the Ishikari River, who dropped fresh salmon pieces and bones straight into miso soup to celebrate a big catch. Root vegetables, konnyaku, tofu, and rolls of blanched spinach wrapped in napa cabbage are arranged in sections around a mound of miso in the center. A final dusting of sansho pepper over the whole pot adds a tingling lift to the miso broth.
Steamed glutinous rice mixed with cucumber, red cabbage and red shiso ferments into something thick and tangy, stained red from grain to grain. Northwestern Tsugaru in Aomori has long put it up as a winter preserve. The shiso is salted and kneaded separately and its dark juice squeezed out, which removes its harsh astringency before it meets the rice. The grains should stay mostly whole while the shiso and vegetables spread evenly through them. The recipe fills an 18 L crock, so a pressing weight and a cool spot are needed before starting. Sourness and thickness keep shifting as it ferments, and it is eaten with rice once it reaches the stage you like.
Cooked and served in a small earthenware pot, nabeyaki udon stays piping hot from the first bite to the last. Chicken thigh simmered right in the dashi, soy, and mirin broth adds fat and body that breast meat would not. The egg poaches in the center under the lid until the white sets and the yolk stays soft, and the shrimp tempura is added after the heat is off so it reaches the table still crisp.
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.
Breaded pork loin fried to a deep golden brown is sliced thick and set beside a Japanese curry made sweet with well-browned onion and carrot. Where the curry touches the cutlet the crust softens while the rest stays crunchy, and each bite shifts between the two. Panko pressed firmly all the way to the edges keeps the coating from peeling away in the oil. The curry base cooks in a little of the reserved frying oil rather than fresh fat.
Grated Yamato yam whipped with water traps enough air to lift this white Kagoshima cake without eggs or oil. Karukan took root where wild yam grew in the well-drained shirasu plateau and sugar arrived from Amami and Ryukyu. Sugar was costly in the Edo period, so it was served in daimyo households before spreading more widely in the Meiji era. Its name means light yokan, a nod to how the steamed crumb ends up lighter than the batter. Each of the ten small cakes hides a ball of red bean paste in the center.
This Ishikawa miso soup comes from the Buddhist temple tradition and uses no meat or fish stock: kombu dashi is mixed with the water the adzuki beans cooked in. The first boiling water is thrown out for its astringency, and only the second goes into the soup.
Big, thick Miike takana leaves are wilted for a day or two, layered with salt and chili powder, and pressed under a heavy stone to mature in their own brine until the rainy season has passed. After about a week the first brine is poured off and the leaves pressed again under the fresh liquid that rises. This long-fermented mustard-green pickle comes from Setaka in Fukuoka; Miike takana arose from a Sichuan green crossed with a local variety and is prized for crisp stems and a pungent smell. Older pickles grow more acidic and savory. Rinsed briefly in cold water if too salty and chopped fine, it is eaten with rice, in ramen or in stir-fries, and turmeric and whole chilies tucked between the leaves are the traditional additions for long storage.
Grated daikon gives the chilled mentsuyu a mild peppery bite and a cooling edge, with scallion, nori, and wasabi adding sharper notes. Thick udon is chilled all the way through in ice water after rinsing, which firms the starch and brings back its springy chew.
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.
A freshly fried pork cutlet is warmed briefly in sweet tsuyu broth with onion and bound with softly set egg, so the underside soaks up broth while the top keeps some crunch. Nicking the sinew along the edge of the loin before breading stops the meat from curling, letting it lie flat over the rice.
Half-moon rice dumplings filled with red bean paste are steamed between two sarutori-ibara leaves. Using these leaves in place of oak is the Shimane way. When they are done, the skin turns translucent and springs back under a fingertip.
Miso is spread thickly around the inside rim of the pot like a bank of earth, and it gets scraped into the broth a little at a time as the pot simmers. Oysters release salty juices of their own, which is why the miso never goes in all at once.
Pressed tofu coated in sugar, wrapped in gauze and buried completely in miso loses moisture over about 40 days in the refrigerator, ending dense and almost cheese-like. Local accounts in Kumamoto tie the dish to Heike fugitives roughly 800 years ago, and older versions could sit in miso for about half a year. The salty-sweet flavor is strong enough that it is sliced thin and served in small amounts with rice or drinks.
Pork, shrimp, squid, and clams are stir-fried hard with cabbage and bean sprouts, then simmered with thick champon noodles in a chicken-based broth seasoned with oyster sauce and sake. There is no chili; the flavor comes from the seared seafood and the sweetness of the vegetables. Kamaboko fish cake and shiitake round out a bowl that is mostly toppings. Serve as soon as the noodles have soaked up the broth and the cabbage still has some bite.
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.
Leftover rice is kneaded with flour and chopped shiso until it holds together, then shaped into thick patties and pan-fried until golden. This Nagano griddle cake finishes with a quick turn in a sugar and soy glaze, just long enough to leave a thin, glossy sweet-salty coat. Because it starts from cold, firm rice, it is a practical way to use up leftovers.
Soybeans roasted right through crunch inside a sweet flour batter in these bean cakes from the Kohoku area of Shiga. The beans are hard and round, so for small children they are roughly crushed before going into the batter.