509 Japanese recipes. Page 16 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Yakisoba Pan (Noodle Bread), Gunma Yakimochi, Miso Wheat Cakes.
A split hot dog bun, buttered and toasted on the inside, gets packed with saucy stir-fried noodles: carbs inside carbs, a Japanese street snack. The cabbage, onion, and carrot come off the heat before they wilt, leaving some crunch between the soft bread and the glossy noodles. A shake of dried parsley adds color and a light herbal note against the sweet-salty sauce.
The name says mochi, but these Gunma griddle cakes are wheat: flour and baking soda mixed with scallion and shiso, then kneaded with miso dissolved in water. They reflect the prefecture's strong wheat culture, built on wheat growing and double cropping, and similar cakes are called oyaki or jiriyaki in some areas. Farm households made them for koju-han, a hearty break between stretches of fieldwork, and also ate them with tea or carried them into the mountains.
Sliced, each round shows white and pale pink glutinous rice packed into the channels of the lotus root, a red-and-white pattern meant for celebrations in Kadoma, Osaka. Lotus root counts as auspicious because its open holes suggest a clear view of the future, and the clay soil of Kawachi and Kadoma has grown it since the Edo period. After about 2 hours of steaming, the root turns sweet with a light crispness while the rice becomes chewy. Served in 8mm slices with kinako and sweet azuki paste, it eats like a dessert.
Agar seasoned sweet and salty with soy sauce and sugar sets around threads of yellow egg and reaches the table as both a sweet and a side dish. In the Shonai area of Yamagata, where agar dishes were part of everyday cooking, adding egg, once a precious ingredient, made it food for New Year and festivals. Each bite pairs soft egg with agar that breaks off cleanly.
Each thin slice of beef is held with chopsticks and swished through gently simmering dashi for a few seconds. The name comes from the sound of that swishing. As the napa cabbage, tofu, shiitake and bok choy cook, their flavor builds up in the broth, which gets richer toward the end of the meal, and the last of it takes rice or udon.
Chilled buckwheat noodles get dipped in tsuyu sweetened and perfumed with yuzu marmalade, a softer, fruitier sauce than plain soba dipping broth. The sauce needs thorough mixing before it goes cold, because undissolved lumps of marmalade make some dips sugary and others flat. Any water clinging to the noodles thins that sauce with every dip. Grated radish, scallion, and wasabi stay on the side and go in a little at a time.
Browning gyoza on one flat side only and then steaming them under a lid leaves the pleats soft and tender while the bottom turns golden and crisp. Japanese families brought the idea home from Manchuria after the war, recreating the jiaozi they had eaten there.
Roasting the soaked rice in oil and cooling it before cooking it in sweet azuki broth keeps the grains loose and fragrant, unlike sticky sekihan, which it otherwise resembles. On the Boso Peninsula in Chiba it was offered at the Obon welcoming and farewell fires, at harvest prayers, and at celebrations after rice planting.
Okinawan water taro is cooked soft, then mashed and cooked down with sugar until it holds a spatula trail, much like Japanese kinton. A spoonful of mirin at the end adds gloss, and finely minced lemon or mandarin zest goes on top. Raw taro juice makes skin itch and undercooked taro irritates the mouth, so the taro is peeled with gloves and the first blanching water is thrown out. It is served warm or lukewarm.
Muroaji shokkara, a fermented mackerel scad sauce, handles both the salt and the savory depth in this soup on its own. The broth comes from small taro simmered until tender, with blanched ashitaba added at the end. Use a commercial shokkara with a clear production and storage history rather than fermenting fish at home.
In Osaka, the grilled heads left over after eel is made into kabayaki are called hansuke. Rinsed with boiling water to take off excess glaze and fat, they go into a broth of dashi, soy sauce, sugar and sake with grilled tofu, and the deep eel flavor passes through the broth into the tofu. It comes from a merchant city that wasted nothing, not even cheap by-products. The heads are full of small bones and are all lifted out; only tofu, scallion and strained broth go into the bowl.
Shiitake, carrot and burdock, cut into thin matching strips, are spread over the rice and cooked in dashi seasoned with soy sauce and mirin. They stay on top until the rice is done. Heavy vegetables mixed down into the grains keep the liquid from circulating and leave underdone patches.
Strands of white somen drift through translucent green agar and trace a flowing line across every slice. Suwa in Nagano built an agar industry by freezing and drying it through the winter, and tenyose became hospitality food for the Onbashira Festival and family gatherings. The pattern depends on one moment: the noodles sink if the liquid is too hot and will not hold if it has cooled too far.
Bone-in pork ribs simmer quietly with knotted kombu and shiitake for about an hour and a half, until the meat slips off the bone and the broth is still clear. The soup comes from Okinawa's habit of using every part of the pig and remains an important New Year dish. Each bowl also gets a softened kombu knot alongside the ribs.
Kaga lotus root turns so sticky when grated that it is nicknamed mochi-renkon. In Kanazawa the grated root is spread over white fish, shrimp, ginkgo nuts and lily bulb, steamed, and served to guests under a clear, lightly thickened dashi, eaten with a spoon so the chewy layer and the broth come up together.
This is the Japanese home standby of raw egg and soy sauce over rice, with butter added. The butter melts in the middle of freshly cooked rice, and the raw egg cracked on top warms just enough in that heat to coat each grain in a silky layer. Since the egg is eaten raw, it should be very fresh.
Burdock, carrot, summer orange peel, and young ginger are each candied on their own, so every piece keeps its firmness and aroma under a coat of sugar crystals. Farm households in Chiba made them to stretch the harvest, and the name comes from tenmondo, a dried medicinal tuber that was once steeped in honey.
One ink sac, loosened in two ladles of broth, turns the miso soup nearly black. In Amami, Kagoshima, bigfin reef squid is called mizuika and its ink sac mada. These large, translucent squid are caught in Amami's waters all year.
Diamonds of buckwheat and rice flour dough, boiled and coated in junen miso: toasted perilla seeds ground with sugar and miso. Hatto belongs to Hinoemata, where it marked the end of rice planting or roof work. One story links the name to gohatto, an Edo-period ban on eating too much grain, with villagers making the food in secret; another says a lord liked it so much that commoners were allowed it only at celebrations.
Strong bancha brewed to an amber color becomes the cooking liquid, and unwashed rice boils in it just long enough to lose its hard center, leaving loose grains in a thin, flowing porridge. Where Nara's cha-gayu reheats cooked rice in hojicha, this Yamaguchi version starts from raw rice in bancha and is left largely unstirred so it never turns sticky.
It is made with tofu, egg white, sugar and potato starch and no flour, yet once sliced it has a moist, firm crumb that looks a lot like castella. It comes from southern Akita.
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.
Two rounds of refrigerator drying, one before an unseasoned grilling and one after, firm small sea gobies enough to keep their shape through a long final simmer in sweet tamari broth. Grilling also cuts surface moisture and fishy aroma. The result, a preserved side from the Mikawa Bay coast of Aichi, is nearly dry, concentrated in soybean savor and sweetness, and eaten a little at a time with rice or drinks.
Warm soy tare goes over the tempura the moment it lands on the rice, and the grains take the sauce while the tops of the shrimp, sweet potato and eggplant stay freshly crisp. Shallow cuts along each shrimp's belly let it lie straight across the bowl.