286 recipes. Page 1 of 12
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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.
Crack the golden crust with a spoon and a thick cream sauce full of chicken, carrot, potato and peas comes up in a puff of steam. It is an everyday American home bake, and the sauce is butter and flour cooked together, then loosened with chicken stock and cream.
It's fried twice, exactly like Korean sweet-and-sour pork, but with oyster mushrooms torn along the grain in place of the meat. The sweet-sour soy sauce comes on the side, so everyone decides for themselves whether to pour it over or dip.
Spinach, bean sprouts, carrot and zucchini are each cooked on their own rather than tossed together, which keeps their textures distinct even after everything is mixed. Blanched greens that are not squeezed dry leave the rice soggy.
The sheet fish cakes (eomuk) start with 20 seconds in boiling water to rinse off their surface oil. Skip it and a stale, oily taste lingers after the stir-fry is done. Once the fish cake joins the onion and carrot, it is all over in about three minutes.
Most of the filling is a flat omelet of shredded cabbage and carrot, cooked to the size of the bread. The sugar is not stirred into a sauce; it is scattered straight onto the toasted bread, followed by mayonnaise, the omelet, ham and ketchup.
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.
Raw beet, apple and carrot are blended whole with water and drunk unstrained, pulp and all, which makes it thick. Apple and lemon cover much of the beet's earthy taste, which is why the honey goes in only after tasting, and only if needed.
Sliced into rounds after grilling, each piece of this stuffed squid shows rings in cross section: chewy squid outside, sticky glutinous rice, then soft tofu. Soaked rice swells as it cooks, so the tubes are filled only 70 to 80 percent. Packed full, they split on the grill.
Barley soaks up the stock as it swells, and the whole soup turns thick and hearty. The grains grow to two or three times their size while cooking and keep drinking liquid into the next day. Leftovers need a splash of extra stock when reheated.
Garlic chives make up most of this pancake, with just a little carrot and onion. The batter is loose enough to run off a spoon, and instead of one big pancake it is spread thin in several small ones. Small rounds are easier to keep even and to support on the spatula when flipping.
It also goes by dak bokkeumtang, and although the name ends in tang, meaning soup, it is reduced for about 25 minutes until the sauce clings to the chicken. The chicken pieces are blanched for three minutes and rinsed of bone fragments before they go into the pot. Sugar in the sauce makes the sweetness as clear as the heat.
The dish is done when the glass noodles have drunk up the soy braising liquid and turned glossy brown; they go in only for the last five minutes, since added early they soak up all the sauce and go limp. Its current form is said to have settled in Andong's old market in the 1980s, though chicken braised in soy sauce in Gyeongsang Province goes back much further.
Thin slices of cucumber, eggplant, lotus root and carrot share the bowl with chewy wood ear mushroom, shiso and ginger, and each bite lands somewhere different on the crunch scale. Each vegetable is prepped on its own terms: the hard lotus root and carrot get a short blanch, while the softer cucumber and eggplant are rubbed with salt instead. The sweet vinegar with sliced red chili is boiled once and then cooled all the way down. Poured on while still warm, it costs the cucumber and lotus root their snap. Squeezing the salted cucumber and eggplant hard after rinsing keeps the dressing from going watery. Half an hour in the fridge is enough before serving it cold with its liquid.
Beef and shiitake share one soy and garlic marinade and hit the pan together, letting the mushrooms soak up the meat juices instead of tasting like a separate vegetable. What sets this japchae apart is the last step: after everything is tossed in a bowl, it goes back into a hot pan just long enough to drive off loose seasoning. The noodles should end up clear and bouncy with no thin sauce pooling underneath. Sweet and salty japchae like this is a fixture of Chuseok, Seollal and birthday tables in Korea.
Milk simmered into the tomato for 80 minutes rounds off the acidity and leaves this ragu soft-textured and mellow. The depth is set earlier, when the ground beef browns over high heat until it catches on the pot and red wine lifts that browned layer into the sauce.
Fried thick tofu (atsuage) and toasted white sesame are ground together into a thick dressing that clings to shredded daikon and carrot. The grinding goes on until no flecks of the tofu skin remain, which is what makes the coating smooth enough to wrap the fine shreds. It resembles shiraae, the Japanese tofu-dressed salad, in its nutty richness, but vinegar and Japanese mustard make it tart with a little nasal heat. Wringing the salted daikon and carrot out firmly in two or three goes keeps the coating thick after the vinegar is added and lets the vegetables keep their crunch. Thin diagonal slices of blanched snow peas add green against the white and orange.
Most of the sauce's color and depth is decided when the beef browns in bacon fat, before any wine is added. Crowding the pot drops the temperature and steams the meat, so it browns in two or three batches; a thin, well-shaken dusting of flour keeps the sauce from turning cloudy.
Inside go browned pork, carrot and daikon pickled in vinegar, and cilantro, and nothing else. The pâté and cold cuts common on Saigon street carts are left out, which puts more weight on the bread: the baguette is filled the moment it comes out warm with a crackling crust.
White, slippery mung bean jelly is mixed with strips of cucumber and carrot in a tangy soy and vinegar dressing. The thin jelly breaks if stirred, so it is lifted from the bottom with chopsticks about six times and no more.
Brown rice goes in first, then pan-browned tofu, broccoli, carrot, red cabbage and avocado, each in its own section and none of them tossed together. The avocado is sliced just before serving.
Mung bean jelly (cheongpomuk) is nearly tasteless and breaks easily, and keeping the pieces whole takes most of the care in a stir-fry. A 30-second blanch firms the surface a little and washes off loose starch, which helps the soy sauce stick.
Curry powder goes into the frying mix, so the batter is yellow before anything touches the oil, and it coats sweet potato, carrot and onion. With the spice already in the coating, no dipping sauce is needed. Carrot is the hardest of the three and gets sliced a little thinner.
Beef shank marinated in fish sauce and garlic simmers for one to two hours with lemongrass and tomato paste, until the meat pulls apart and the broth turns red and lightly thick. It is often traced to southern Saigon kitchens where long French braising met Vietnamese aromatics, and street vendors in Ho Chi Minh City sell it from early morning. Some spoon it over rice; others dip a baguette.