31 recipes. Page 1 of 2
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In the Noto area of Ishikawa, this root vegetable side dish is made for New Year and other special occasions. Flattened soybeans, burdock, and fried tofu simmer in sweetened soy, while daikon and carrot strips are blanched separately and folded in afterward, and each keeps its own texture. Vinegar layered over the soy seasoning puts it somewhere between a simmered dish and a dressed salad.
Minced crucian carp and root vegetables simmer in a sweet-salty dashi with two kinds of soy sauce, and the hot soup is ladled generously over rice, then topped with sliced green onion and torn nori. The dish grew up around the reclaimed land of Kojima Bay in southern Okayama, where rice paddies, canals, rivers, and Kojima Lake held plenty of winter carp. Its other names, tontoko-jiru and tontoko-meshi, echo the rhythmic chopping of fish on a board.
Dried taro stems (imogara) are soaked for 30 minutes, fried in oil with lotus root, carrot, fried tofu and konjac, then simmered uncovered in a sweet soy liquid. By the end almost nothing is left in the pot; the stems are soft to chew while the lotus root still has its crunch.
Buckwheat dough rolled between the palms into thin strands shaped like little loach fish cooks gently in a dashi full of vegetables. Bound with egg and hot water, the dough should be as soft as an earlobe without sticking badly to the hands. Burdock, carrot, kabocha, napa cabbage, shiitake and chikuwa fish cake share the pot, which holds far more than a plain flour-dumpling soup.
In Kagawa, fresh udon goes straight into the loach and miso soup, so it eats as both soup and a bowl of noodles, with burdock, eggplant, taro and fried tofu in the pot too. The loach is never self-caught: only farmed fish that a licensed supplier has professionally purged.
Okara (soy pulp) is dry-toasted until crumbly, then mixed with vinegar-cured sardine, salted cucumber and carrot, and sweet simmered fried tofu, all held together by a thick peanut and miso dressing. The dish comes from the Boso coast of Chiba, and each portion is squeezed by hand into a small rice-bale shape. Store-bought okara added straight from the pack carries too much water and turns the mix soggy, which is why it is toasted first. The salted vegetables and the vinegar-rinsed sardine also need to be well drained, or the shaped bales slump. Toasty okara, salty fish, sweet vinegared miso and yuzu peel land in a single bite.
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.
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.
Sumo wrestlers ate this hot pot together in their stables, which explains how much goes into a single pot: chicken thigh, chicken meatballs, napa cabbage, mizuna, shiitake, soft tofu, fried tofu and kuzukiri noodles. The broth is chicken stock with grated garlic and ginger, and people help themselves to whatever is done while the rest keeps simmering.
Wide flour noodles from Yamanashi simmer straight in miso broth with kabocha, potato, daikon, and napa cabbage, leaving the soup thick and slow to cool. In mountain areas poorly suited to rice, houtou long served as a staple, and its lasting warmth means it is eaten most often in winter. Unlike udon, the dough has no salt and the floured strips are never boiled on their own, which leaves their starch to thicken the pot.
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.
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.
Barley grains and chestnuts dried for a day give chew to this steamed sticky rice, which also carries chicken, burdock, fuki, shiitake, and fried tofu glossed with soy seasoning. The dish came to the Hiruzen area of Maniwa in Okayama from Daisen okowa in Tottori, and barley entered the mix around 1972 through a local staple-food improvement campaign. Families served it at New Year, seasonal celebrations, and festivals. The liquid left from simmering the filling is kept and sprinkled over the grains partway through steaming.
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.
Sweet-savory simmered tofu pockets sit on a clear dashi broth and slowly release their syrup, and the soup grows a little sweeter as you eat. The broth starts out lightly seasoned to leave room for that sweetness and should not taste salty before the tofu goes on. Simmer the tofu until a little liquid remains and it stays moist, and making it a day ahead lets the flavor sink in further. Scallions and shichimi pepper add fragrance and a touch of heat.
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.
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 sheet of sweet, soy-simmered fried tofu sits on top of the bowl, and every bite squeezes its braising liquid out into the broth. That broth is a clear dashi made from kombu and bonito flakes, pale in color but full in flavor, in the Kansai style associated with Osaka. Reducing the tofu until its simmering liquid is nearly gone puts the sweetness inside the tofu rather than leaving it in the pot. It tastes best once it has soaked in the hot soup for a moment and gone soft. In Osaka this is everyday food, eaten as an early breakfast as readily as at lunch.
Vinegar is added only at the very end, so a sweet soy simmer of burdock, carrot, lotus root, shiitake, shirataki, and fried tofu picks up a bright sour note while the lotus root keeps some crunch. It comes from around Mito in Ibaraki, and one theory traces the name to nite aeru, to simmer and then dress. Families made big batches for New Year and ceremonies and ate it the next day, and it still tastes best after a night in the refrigerator.
Every ingredient in this Tsugaru Little New Year soup is diced to about 5 mm, and each spoonful carries daikon, carrot, burdock, mountain vegetables, fried and freeze-dried tofu, soybeans, and kombu together. Red miso seasons it. Half the soybeans stay whole and half are coarsely mashed into zunda, which gives the broth a light body.
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.
Red soybean miso, aged from a soybean koji, gives this Aichi stew a dark broth with deep savoriness, a little acidity, and a faint astringency. Also called misoni, it grew out of the soybean miso tradition best known through Hatcho miso. Every household loads the pot with daikon, carrot, burdock, taro, konnyaku, and fried tofu, but some keep plenty of broth and eat it like a hot pot while others cook it down to a thicker simmer.
In Akita this soup belongs to Little New Year, and with daikon, potato, mountain yam, wild greens, tofu and candied chestnuts in it, it is made in one big pot. Near the end, yaki-zunda, small cakes of green soybean flour and glutinous rice flour browned in a pan, go in for a final five-minute simmer.
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.