509 Japanese recipes. Page 19 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Pork Cutlet Sandwich, Kencho Simmered Tofu and Daikon, Niigata Kirizai.
Fine panko fries into a firm crust on a thick pork cutlet, and with soft white bread on either side, every bite has both crunch and give. The bread is spread with tonkatsu sauce, the shredded cabbage is tossed in mayonnaise, and the sandwich is wrapped tightly in plastic for a few minutes before it is cut.
The tofu is broken up by hand into rough chunks, and they stay chunky among the daikon and carrot as everything cooks down in soy sauce and sake. In Yamaguchi it has long been made in a big pot and reheated over several meals, and it still shows up in school lunches.
Nozawana pickle, fresh daikon, and miso-pickled daikon are chopped to the same small size, squeezed dry, and tossed with toasted sesame, and natto is folded in only at the last moment. Kiri means cutting and zai refers to vegetables; in the Uonuma area of Niigata, records even tie the dish to provisions carried by warriors in the Sengoku period.
Skinned carp fillet, sliced about twice as thick as fugu sashimi, is swished briefly through water near 42°C and then tightened in ice water, which trims surface fat and odor and gives the flesh a crisp, springy bite without cooking it. In Koriyama, Fukushima, carp farming grew after the Asaka Canal freed up former reservoirs, and carp became special-occasion food for weddings, New Year, and guests. Mustard vinegar miso is the usual dip.
Komatsuna, a Japanese mustard green, steams on the same plate as soft tofu, and both get a spoonful of warm dashi soy sauce with sesame oil and sesame seeds. Take it out once the leaves have wilted and the stems just bend, and the green stays bright.
Slices of raw-grade bai whelk are laid in a single layer between sheets of ma-kombu wiped with vinegar water, pressed with a palm to push out the air, wrapped tight, and left in the fridge overnight. Neither the vinegar nor the kombu kills parasites or bacteria, so the whelk stays at 4°C or below from shelling to serving.
Each slice shows a dark spiral of kombu wrapped around soaked dried herring, glossy with a sweet soy glaze that reaches between the layers. The rolls come from the Hidaka area of Hokkaido, and because kombu sounds like yorokobu, to rejoice, they appear in New Year osechi boxes and at celebrations.
Straw ridges run along the outside of each slice, and inside, the crumbled tofu has knitted back together with tiny gaps that hold a sugary soy simmering liquid. That rough interior is the point: unlike a smooth block of simmered tofu, the cut surface drinks up the seasoning during the overnight rest. In central Ibaraki, villagers once pooled straw and made it in large pots for weddings and funerals, when meat was hard to come by.
Full of tiny holes, freeze-dried tofu soaks up a sweetened soy dashi until almost no liquid is left, then gets a soft blanket of egg. With the broth cooked nearly dry, the moisture comes from the blanched greens and the softly set egg. The dish belongs to Fukushima City, where cold winds off the Abukuma highlands once dried thin tofu through the winter, and the result went into simmered dishes, soups, and New Year rice-cake soup. Households started after the November harvest, wrapping the tofu in straw or reed blinds and hanging it in the cold air for roughly two weeks. The greens are local shinobuna, with komatsuna (Japanese mustard spinach) as the stand-in.
Mashed potato mixed with sauteed ground beef and onion gets shaped into ovals, coated in panko, and fried until golden. The crust shatters while the inside stays fluffy and potato-forward, plainer and heartier than cream-filled croquettes. Worcestershire or tonkatsu sauce goes on top, and in Japan butcher shops and delis sell them freshly fried to eat on the go. Fillings vary widely, from curry to crab cream to kabocha squash.
Fine powder left over from making koya-dofu, Japan's freeze-dried tofu, is stirred into a pot of diced chicken and root vegetables, where it drinks up the dashi and clumps into soft, crumbly curds. This home dish from Takacho in Hyogo is eaten with a spoon: everything from carrot and burdock to konnyaku, chikuwa fish cake, and fried tofu is cut small so each bite gets a bit of everything.
Along the Ariake Sea, tonguesole is called kuchizoko, and it is simmered briefly and hard in a generous mix of sake, soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Unlike long-braised fish, these thin fillets cook in minutes and come out of the pot as soon as they are done, which keeps the flesh tender and flaky. Burdock cooked in the leftover liquid goes alongside.
Thin beef on a bamboo skewer, dipped in light batter and fine panko and fried hot, makes up the Osaka street snack of the Shinsekai district. One story traces it to the late Taisho and early Showa years, when laborers needed a cheap, fast meal and tough cuts were sliced thin and given a thick coat. At the counter, the shared sauce pot comes with one rule: dip once, never twice.
A New Year dish in Fukushima: flat, firm aobata green soybeans and herring roe that pops between the teeth rest together in cold katsuobushi dashi and mentsuyu. The roe is the salted kind labeled ready to eat, soaked in cold water for a day or two to draw out the salt, though never all of it. A faint saltiness should stay.
Under a thick coat of coarse panko is a mix of ground pork and beef much like a hamburger steak, and cutting in lets out the juices the crust held. In Tokyo, neighborhood butchers have long fried them every day for the display case, and eating one hot from the paper bag on the street is an old habit.
Silver gizzard shad fillets come out of the jar coated in yellow millet grains, cured in sweet vinegar with a dried red chili tucked between the layers. This is an Edo New Year dish: kohada is a fish that changes its name as it grows, a symbol of rising fortune, and millet stands for a full harvest. It spends a few days in the refrigerator, until the sweet vinegar reaches the center, before going into the osechi box.
The name means black clothing, and the pork loin arrives exactly that way, coated in a dark, glossy layer of black sesame. Once a dish of the Ryukyu royal court in Okinawa, it is steamed rather than grilled, which lets sesame toasted and ground until oily wrap the lean loin without scorching.
A floury potato center, a thin crisp coat, and sweet-salty miso sauce come in that order with each bite of this Chichibu snack from Saitama, once eaten by farmers as kojuhan, a small bite between stretches of field work. The sauce is poured over rather than tossed so some crisp edges stay dry.
Slice into na-dofu and the cut face is flecked with chopped greens and carrot, set right into the curd. In the mountain village of Shiiba in Miyazaki, cooks stretched precious soybeans this way, adding rape blossoms or mitsuba in spring and the pungent leaves of Heike turnip from autumn on. Mustard greens stand in for the turnip leaves here. The tofu is never soaked in water after pressing; it is cut and eaten right away with soy sauce or yuzu miso.
Young edible loofah, nabera in Okinawan, gives off a clear, faintly sweet juice as it cooks, and that juice mixes with red miso into something moister than a stir-fry yet thicker than a soup. Nbushi refers to simmering with miso, and this summer home dish adds pork belly and hand-torn chunks of firm island tofu. No plain water goes in, only the loofah's own juice and a little of the pork cooking broth.
No heat touches namero, so the cold, fresh horse mackerel keeps its texture while miso adds salt and ginger, green onion, and shiso add sharp aromatics. It is a fishermen's dish from the Boso Peninsula in Chiba, and the name is said to come from the urge to lick the plate clean. Two knives chop the mix until the pieces of fish all but disappear and the paste turns fluffy and slightly sticky, lifting with the blade.
Etsu fried crisp in potato starch goes straight into a vinegar-soy marinade while still hot, so the fish absorbs it quickly and the thin-cut vegetables stay crunchy. The fish is caught only during a short season from May to July in the Chikugo area of Fukuoka, and its many fine bones call for closely spaced cuts along the body. Served chilled, it is a summer side dish.
Narazuke, Nara's vegetables pickled in sake lees, is chopped and folded into a sweet-soy simmer of fiddlehead fern (zenmai), kanpyo gourd strips, shiitake, konjac strips, carrot, and fried tofu. On its own the pickle is strong, but spread through so many soft vegetables its boozy aroma and firm crunch become a gentle accent. This everyday side dish from Nara is eaten fully cooled.
Hetamurasaki is a small Kaga eggplant with thin skin and soft flesh that keeps its shape even after a long simmer. In Kanazawa it is scored with a cross and cooked whole in a clear broth of dashi and light soy sauce in summer, then eaten slightly cooled or chilled.