509 Japanese recipes. Page 11 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Kanimaki Jiru Freshwater Crab Miso Soup.
Nothing else goes into the pot as filling. Yamataro crabs, with only the top shell removed, are pounded with miso in a mortar, mixed with water and strained three times, and as that liquid heats, the crab protein sets into curds like soft tofu. Ginger juice and sliced scallion are the only things on top.
Golden grilled slices of momen tofu soak for about a week in umezu, the salty, sour liquid that rises when plums are cured. The result pairs bright acidity and strong salt with a dense, almost creamy interior. This Kochi side dish is eaten in thin slices with drinks. For home use, the recipe calls for bottled food-grade umezu and tofu heated through before it goes into the refrigerator to cure.
Thin shabu-shabu beef and onion, glazed in soy sauce, mirin, and sugar, sit on top of thick udon in clear dashi, giving the bowl a sweet, savory topping over a light broth. The beef is cooked in a separate pan rather than in the soup, which keeps its glossy finish and stops the broth from turning murky. It needs only about 2 minutes once the seasoning is added, at the point where half the red has gone, or it toughens. A little dashi is held back at the start to soften the broth if it tastes too salty. Rinsing the boiled noodles with hot water clears off their surface starch so the soup stays clean. Sliced scallions finish the bowl with a fresh edge.
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.
In Tochigi, leftover rice gets a second life: soaked in water, kneaded with flour and miso along with corn, kounago (tiny sand lance fish), aonori seaweed and toasted sesame, then pan-cooked into thick oval cakes. The outside turns lightly browned and firm while the center stays chewy, somewhere between a rice cake and a savory pancake. Drain the soaked rice too thoroughly and it will not bind with the flour, leaving cakes that crumble while shaping.
Koppa, dried sweet potato, is rinsed, covered, and left for 6 hours so moisture spreads evenly through each piece, which is what lets it pound together with steamed glutinous rice into one smooth mass. Equal weights of brown and white sugar sweeten the dough, which is pressed into a thick slab and cut once set.
Toyama turnips from Yonezawa in Yamagata are harder and sweeter than ordinary turnips. Instead of being sliced, they are pried into rough chunks with the heel of the knife, and the sake-lees broth works its way into the torn surfaces. Even so, the flavor only reaches the center once the soup has cooled overnight and been reheated the next day.
A small spoonful is enough to flavor a bowl of rice: young sansho leaves bring a bright, citrusy aroma and a faint tingle on the tongue, and dried whitebait adds salty savoriness. The preserve comes from the mountain villages of Kyoto, where sansho trees grew wild and the spring shoots, called kinome, were cooked down with sake and light soy sauce until almost no liquid remained. Spoon a little over rice, onigiri, ochazuke, udon, or chilled tofu.
Despite the name, the noodles are thick wheat, not buckwheat, served in a clear bonito broth under pork belly braised sweet and salty in soy, mirin, and sugar. Because the pork carries so much seasoning, the broth gets only a light touch of soy so it stays clean. The cooked noodles get a brief rinse in warm water rather than cold, which removes surface starch without cooling them down, and bonito flakes on top add a smoky aroma.
Heso daikon starts as thick rounds of blanched radish threaded on skewers and left to freeze at night and thaw by day for about a month. The hole left by the skewer looks like a navel (heso), which gives it its name, and the dried radish keeps until the following summer. In southern Miyagi Prefecture it is simmered with taro, carrot, shiitake, freeze-dried tofu, knotted kombu and kamaboko fish cake until almost no liquid remains.
Salt-pickled takana mustard leaves wrap each large rice ball completely, and every bite brings the salty leaf and soy-seasoned rice together. In southern Wakayama these were a portable meal for forestry workers in the mountains and fishers at sea, easy to hold because of the leaf wrapper. Several explanations for the name survive: the mouth opening wide for a big bite, eyes widening at the taste, or the rice sealed with no gaps. Even the thick stems are used, chopped, seasoned, and mixed into the rice.
Despite the name, there is no whale in kujira-mochi. One story traces it to kujimochi, a rice cake that keeps well, while another says old versions were as large as a whale. One account links it to provisions made for the Shinjo domain about three centuries ago. In the Mogami and Murayama areas of Yamagata it was set before the doll display for the Peach Festival on April 3. Brown sugar syrup, two kinds of rice flour, an overnight rest, and walnuts at the bottom of a deep mold give a dark, dense cake that slices firm yet chewy.
Two glutinous rice dumplings filled with sweet bean paste float in each bowl of clear soy-seasoned broth, sweet and savory in the same spoonful. They are shaped like small eggs, which is where the name keiran, meaning egg, comes from, and in the Shimokita area of Aomori they were made for the autumn harvest and festive days.
Fully ripe yellow ume are packed with coarse salt at 20 percent of their weight, aged for about a month in the plum vinegar that rises, then dried in direct sun, which leaves them intensely sour and salty with chewy flesh. Throughout aging every plum has to stay wet with brine. Drying happens only on rain-free days, and the fruit comes back into the refrigerator each night.
In Gunma homes, wide unsalted noodles go straight into a pot of root vegetables and dashi without being boiled first. The broth comes out slightly cloudy and thick rather than clear, and that is how it should be. Taro, burdock, daikon, shiitake, and fried tofu make it a hearty one-pot meal seasoned with both soy sauce and miso. Noodle thickness and vegetables change from one household to another.
Purslane is blanched and dried in summer, then soaked in winter and stir-fried with shirataki, carrot and fried tofu before simmering in soy-based seasoning. In the snowy Murayama and Okitama areas of Yamagata, wild greens and vegetables were dried this way to eat through the winter. The soaked stems are soft but still have a little give when you bite. The purslane here is commercially made hyoboshi sold for eating, not something picked from a field.
This oyakodon, chicken thigh and onion simmered in dashi, soy and mirin and set with egg, gets a handful of mitsuba at the very end. The lid goes on for twenty seconds before the heat goes off; any longer and the herb's parsley-like scent is gone.
The New Year kuri kinton made with sweet potato and candied chestnuts shares only the name. The Nakatsugawa wagashi uses nothing but chestnut flesh kneaded with sugar, keeping the chestnut's crumbly texture and aroma. Boiled chestnuts stick to their shells once they cool, so only a few come out of the hot water at a time for scooping. Each portion is twisted in a damp cloth, leaving pleats on top that look like the tip of a chestnut.
The first things in the pot are 8 tablespoons of oil and firm tofu crumbled by hand. Once the tofu has broken into loose crumbs, daikon, burdock, zenmai, warabi and butterbur are fried with it, and only after that are the dashi and light soy sauce poured in. There is no meat.
A hollowed white melon is packed with green chilies wrapped in shiso leaves, and each slice shows pale melon around a green center. The look of a gun barrel loaded with ammunition gives teppo-zuke, gun pickle, its name. It began as a winter preserve around Narita and Katori in Chiba, became a crisp, spicy side for rice and sake, and is a well-known souvenir near Naritasan Shinshoji Temple. The salted melon first spends two days in water, changed as it goes, to draw out the salt. Reboiling only the marinade and returning it cold each day for several days is how the seasoning reaches the center of the dense melon.
Soaking water from dried shiitake, with no meat or bonito, forms the broth for this Japanese vegetable soup, and potato starch thickens it just enough to coat a spoon. In southern Miyagi it is a Buddhist meatless dish served around the spring and autumn equinoxes, at Obon, and at memorial gatherings. That light body holds taro, burdock, carrot, tofu, and fried tofu in suspension, letting each spoonful bring up both broth and filling. The umen noodles are boiled in a separate pot, since cooking them in the soup would release enough starch to cloud and weigh it down. Shiraishi umen, shirataki, and small wheat gluten puffs (mame-fu) make it something between a soup and a noodle dish, and a scattering of mitsuba adds a fresh herbal note at the end.
In yoshoku, the Western-style cooking Japan developed after the Meiji era, fried shrimp come out long and straight with the tail on. The straightness comes from three or four shallow cuts on the belly side and a press with the palm before breading. The panko is laid on lightly rather than pressed, and tartar sauce or tonkatsu sauce goes alongside.
Rice cooked in cooled hojicha instead of water takes on a quiet roasted aroma, and dry-roasted soybeans add a nutty bite. Its early form is said to be the rice served with tea porridge to monks taking part in Omizutori at Todaiji. Travelers later carried it to Edo, where shops near Sensoji made it widely known. The beans and salt are scattered over the soaked rice and left unstirred while it cooks.
About twenty dried persimmons are joined into one tight cylinder, so a thin slice shows amber flesh and white sugar bloom layered like a rose. In Uki and Yamato in Kumamoto it carries the wish of raking in good fortune and is given as a year-end gift and eaten at New Year. Momi-gaki, kneaded by hand several times while drying, give the tightest and clearest pattern.