509 Japanese recipes. Page 7 of 22. Compare ingredients and cooking times. Nasu Dengaku (Miso-Glazed Eggplant), Iwashi Dango Jiru (Sardine Dumpling Soup).
Halved eggplant gets a thin layer of sweet miso glaze on its cut face and only a brief turn under the grill. The flesh underneath is soft enough to scoop with a spoon, and the glaze on top bubbles and picks up small brown spots. Eggplant drinks oil quickly, so be generous with it in the first cooking.
The sardines are ground in a mortar until no grain is left, then mixed with grated mountain yam, egg and miso into a sticky paste for the dumplings. The miso seasons the dumplings themselves, so the broth needs only a little soy sauce.
Halved eggplants layered with sweetened sticky rice, yellow chrysanthemum petals and sliced red chili show stripes of yellow and red when cut. In southern Akita it has long been set out at New Year and on celebration tables, and it is called sushi because the pickle is built on rice, not fish. Sugar, salt and sake are mixed into the rice, which becomes the pickling bed: the eggplant comes out more sweet than salty, with soft rice clinging to it. Alum, chrysanthemum and bamboo leaves all have to be food-grade, with no decorative flowers or unidentified leaves. The container stays at 4°C the whole time, and any mold or rotten smell means it is not eaten.
Curry roux dissolved into dashi instead of water gives this bowl a savory, brothy depth that curry rice does not have. The roux turns the stock into a thick gravy that clings to fat udon strands and comes up with every lift of the noodles.
Daikon, carrot, lotus root, shiitake, fried tofu, burdock and koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu) are cooked in three separate batches before meeting one sweet rice-vinegar dressing. Each group keeps its own texture: crunchy lotus root and burdock, tender daikon, and koya-dofu that holds stock like a sponge. Spreading the cooked pieces in a sieve until they stop dripping keeps the vinegar dressing from turning thin. The simmered koya-dofu cools in the sieve on its own, untouched: pressing it while hot would break it and squeeze out the stock it absorbed. White sesame and fine threads of yuzu peel are scattered on top, adding toastiness and a citrus lift.
Horse meat sold specifically for raw eating is sliced thin across the grain while still cold and fanned over shiso leaves and paper-thin onion soaked in cold water. Grated garlic and ginger go into sweet soy sauce for dipping. Only commercially processed meat labeled for raw consumption works here; freezing ordinary horse meat at home does not turn it into a substitute. Leftover raw slices are neither kept at room temperature nor stored again.
Freshly cooked rice is pounded just until it holds together with some grains still whole, pressed thin onto a flat skewer, and ridged across the top with a fingertip. Those shallow ridges are what keep the sweet red miso sauce, ground with walnuts and sesame, from sliding off. In the mountains of central Japan, woodcutters and hunters made it the day before Yama no Ko, a gathering to pray for safety in mountain work; today it is a snack sold at sightseeing spots.
Long-aged takana, a salted mustard-green pickle, soaks for hours to lose its salt, then gets chopped fine and fried in sesame oil with a little sugar and soy sauce. Even after soaking, one piece tasted before cooking shows whether it needs more time in water. Only half the soy sauce goes in at first, and a salty pickle may not need the rest.
A thick round of sweet potato and a ball of red bean paste are wrapped together in dough and steamed, so a cut bun shows three separate layers: soft wrapper, bean paste, and fluffy potato. These dumplings come from the Kikuchi area of Kumamoto, where they were made as a snack during the autumn sweet potato harvest.
Long fillets of cutlassfish are wound in a spiral around bamboo sticks and turned over charcoal, brushed again and again with a soy, sugar, sake and ginger glaze until it builds into a dark lacquer. The strips are trimmed to an even width and wound with their edges slightly overlapping so they do not loosen as the stick turns. Uwajima in Ehime credits the dish to an old fishmonger who came up with it in 1987; because it is so fiddly, people mostly eat it at izakaya and local fish-cake shops rather than at home. A last brush of mirin gives the final shine. To eat, the fish is slid off the hot bamboo and looked over for any stray bones.
Each piece is stretched so its edges go thin and tender while the center stays slightly thicker and springy, giving two textures in one bite. Hittsumi comes from southern Aomori, and the name points to the pulling and pinching of dough rather than rolling and cutting noodles. The rested bread-flour dough is torn straight into dashi with chicken, burdock, carrot and green onion.
Daikon split at an angle into thick, rough chunks soaks up sweet amazake, a thick, lightly fermented rice drink, while the center stays crunchy. Everything stays at 4°C or below from the first salting through storage. Mold, an off smell or unusual sliminess means the batch is discarded without tasting.
With butter mellowing kimchi's sourness and adding a rich, nutty aroma, a splash of soy sauce is all the udon needs. The sharp tang softens once the kimchi, spread out in the pan, cooks down its juices until the edges darken. A soft-boiled egg on top breaks into a creamy sauce, with crumbled seaweed and chives for fragrance, and the whole dish comes together in about 12 minutes.
Nuta pairs blanched wakegi, a slim Japanese scallion, with obaike, the cooked skin of a whale's tail, under a thick karashi su-miso of white miso, sugar, vinegar and hot mustard. After blanching, the wakegi is pressed with the back of a knife from base to tip to push out its slippery inner liquid, which would otherwise thin the dressing.
No water or dashi goes into this pot: chicken, gizzards, pork and vegetables cook in sake and whatever moisture the vegetables release. The dish comes from Saijo in Higashihiroshima, Hiroshima Prefecture, where sake brewery workers ate it during breaks in brewing. With so little liquid, each ingredient keeps its own flavor, and diners season their portion with salt and pepper. Cooking it in two rounds, half the ingredients at a time, keeps the napa cabbage and garlic chives from going limp.
These rice balls were handed out to mikoshi carriers at the autumn Yawatanmachi festival in Tateyama, Chiba Prefecture, which is why they are big and shaped to hold in one hand. Inside is pork belly and fried tofu simmered sweet and salty with bonito flakes. The simmering liquid is cooked down until little remains, since it gets mixed into the rice too. One batch makes twenty.
Leopard plant stalks only become something you can stir-fry after the outer skin is pulled off in long strips, the pieces soak in cold water for 20 to 30 minutes to lose their astringency, and then they are boiled. The frying is short by comparison, finished sweet and salty with fried tofu, soy sauce and sugar.
Set with agar, this sweet potato yokan cuts with clean, upright corners, then the dense potato softens on the tongue. The boiled potato has to be pushed through a fine sieve while still hot, which leaves the coarse fibers behind.
Caught off Hokkaido in spring and early summer, tokishirazu salmon have not yet matured for spawning, so their flesh carries more fat throughout than autumn salmon. A long soak in soy sauce and sake, then brushing with the boiled marinade on the grill, gives a salty, glossy surface. In Hokkaido it was a home feast dish for the June shrine festival, served with sekihan (red bean rice), and it works as both a rice side and a drinking snack. Fresh salmon fillets with moderate fat stand in when tokishirazu is unavailable.
Fishing villages in Shizuoka make this summer soup from raw bonito pounded with miso and umeboshi, then loosened with ice water. Since nothing is cooked, the bonito must be labeled for raw eating. It is pounded coarsely, leaving small pieces rather than a paste, and eaten as soon as it is mixed.
Frost-softened nozawana greens are layered whole in a barrel with salt, kombu and dried chili, then pressed under a heavy weight until their own brine rises and lactic fermentation proceeds in the cold. The plant developed in the cool highlands of Nozawa Onsen in Nagano, growing long leaves and stalks rather than a big root, and became an essential way to keep greens through winter. It can be sampled after a few weeks and turns more sour and savory at around a month. With 40 kg of greens, foot-treading and stones of 30 kg or more, this is a two-person barrel project rather than a kitchen pickle.
Sour kimchi, first fried in sesame oil, flavors the chicken stock, and miso with soy sauce lays a savory, salty layer on top. Frying the kimchi softens its sharp tang so it sits comfortably beside the miso.
Briefly blanched seri and spinach soak for 8 to 12 hours in chilled dashi seasoned with mirin and light soy sauce, long enough for the broth to seep all the way into the greens. Instead of being tossed in a dressing, the vegetables are served moistened with that clear liquid, letting their own fragrance come through. The two greens are blanched separately so the tender spinach does not overcook while the seri stems keep a distinct bite. Twisting them dry would crush the stems and leave the dashi soaking in unevenly, so they are lined up and pressed between the palms instead. Seri, a Japanese water dropwort, gets swapped for Korean minari when Kuroda seri is hard to find.
Two calls decide this braise: how far the daikon is cooked before it meets the fish, and when you stop. Parboil the daikon until the edges turn translucent so the centers are already softening; that way the yellowtail isn't left simmering until it dries out while the daikon catches up. Scald the fish with hot water until the surface turns pale, pat it dry, and spoon the braising liquid over the skin as it cooks so it doesn't dry. Turn off the heat when the thickest piece reaches at least 63°C in the center, a chopstick slides into the daikon, and the liquid has cooked down by about half.