286 recipes. Page 11 of 12
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The water used to poach the chicken breast is kept, and a spoonful goes in whenever the rice vermicelli starts to look dry in the pan. The thin noodles soak up the chicken flavor along with the soy and fish sauce and finish loose, with no liquid pooling underneath.
The name suggests a cold soup, but Yonezawa's hiyashiru is really ohitashi: blanched vegetables steeped in plenty of chilled soy-seasoned stock and eaten with their liquid. The stock comes from the water used to soak dried scallop, while porous freeze-dried konnyaku and dried shiitake soak it up. Spinach, cabbage, soybean sprouts, and carrot share the bowl with yukina, a local winter green given only a quick dip in boiling water to keep its snap. An hour to a night in the fridge lets everything take on the broth.
From Shiga Prefecture, oae dango combines flat boiled rice dumplings with konnyaku, shiitake, carrot and komatsuna, all coated in a shiraae dressing of tofu and ground sesame. Everything is cooled completely before mixing, and the dish is served at room temperature rather than hot.
Nanbu wheat crackers broken by hand into a soy-seasoned broth of chicken, burdock and vegetables soften at the edges as they drink up the liquid, while their centers stay chewy. In the Hachinohe area of Aomori, crackers have long gone into soup this way. Snack crackers tend to dissolve, and the ones sold for soup are used instead.
Chicken thigh goes into the pan first, and the fat and juices it releases carry the carrot and cabbage through a quick, high-heat toss. Water or stock is added only a spoonful at a time, so the egg noodles drink it up along with the soy and oyster sauce and no broth is left in the pan.
Gardenia fruit turns the rice a clear yellow, and a brothy stew of crumbled tofu, minced lizardfish and root vegetables is spooned over it. The dish comes from Usuki in Oita. One story credits the frugal local domain, which used yellow rice in place of costly red bean rice; another ties the color to paella seen through Nanban trade. Merchant households cooked a large pot of kayaku on New Year's Eve and reheated it through the first three days of the year.
This royal court hot pot was once served in a special vessel with burning charcoal in its center; here an ordinary hot pot does the job. Meatballs of beef and tofu go in the middle, and shiitake, carrot and napa cabbage are arranged around them in separate sections. The egg never touches the broth. Yolk and white are fried into separate thin sheets, sliced, and laid on top in yellow and white strips.
Crisp fried thin noodles are buried under a hot, glossy sauce of pork, shrimp, squid, and vegetables thickened with potato starch. Chen Pingshun of Shikairo created it in 1899 as a soupless version of champon. Nagasaki still distinguishes the original thick-noodle style from the thin, crunchy style most people eat today, and this recipe follows the latter with store-bought fried noodles. Kamaboko, bean sprouts, and shiitake are added late so the sprouts keep their snap. Where the sauce soaks in, the noodles soften, and the rest stays crunchy.
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.
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.
Konjac noodles, blanched for 2 minutes to lose their faint odor, keep a bouncy, almost rubbery chew that plays against crisp shreds of cucumber, carrot, and onion. The dressing is gochujang sharpened with vinegar and softened with a little sugar, soy sauce, and garlic, finished with sesame oil and toasted sesame seeds. Served cold after a short rest in the fridge, it works as a banchan or a light side, with the translucent strands stained red by the sauce.
Ketchup rice, fried in butter with ham, vegetables and peas, is folded inside an egg still moist in the middle, using the curve of the pan. Cut into, the half-set egg runs over the rice, and the peas show up as flecks of green.
Everything left after filleting a cod, from the head, backbone and skin to the liver, roe or milt, goes into one big pot here. Jappa means scraps in the Tsugaru dialect of Aomori, yet these parts make a full-bodied winter miso soup. Liver mashed into the broth near the end gives it a soft richness, and fresh milt is treated as a prize. In Tsugaru cod was the fish for welcoming the New Year; families bought a whole large one at year's end and dragged it home over snowy roads, which gave rise to the phrase tara shogatsu, cod New Year.
Cold soba, rinsed until the strands feel clean, gets a light coat of soy sauce, rice vinegar, sesame oil, and sesame seeds. Cutting cucumber, carrot, and red cabbage as thin as the noodles lets each mouthful pick up vegetables and buckwheat together instead of leaving the cabbage in a heap at the bottom of the bowl. The salad tastes best the moment it is tossed; left sitting in the dressing, the noodles go soft and the flavor turns watery.
Korean snack bars serve omelet rice in its plainest form: ketchup fried rice with ham, onion and carrot, wrapped in thin egg and topped with more ketchup. The ketchup and Worcestershire sauce bubble at the edge of the pan before being stirred into the rice. Turned out onto the plate, it takes the familiar oval shape.
In Kagoshima, tonjiru is made with barley miso, which is sweet and mellow. Pork, daikon, taro, konjac and atsuage (thick fried tofu) go in so generously that they nearly fill the bowl, and thin scallions and slivers of ginger go on top.
Each vegetable is cooked on its own and folded in at the end, so the spinach stays green and the carrot stays bright instead of fading into the glass noodles. The beef is marinated in soy and garlic first, and the noodles soak up that seasoning in the pan before the last of the soy sauce adds gloss. Spinach that is not squeezed dry leaks water and thins the dressing.
Thick slices of fresh shiitake sit on the rice as it cooks, staying moist in the steam while their aroma drifts down into the grains. With dried shiitake instead, the soaking water becomes the cooking water and the mushroom flavor gets deeper. The finished rice is mixed with a sauce of soy, sesame oil, green onion and sesame seeds.
Seven ingredients, all diced to the same 1.5cm, float in a clear soy-seasoned broth: chicken, shiitake, taro, chikuwa, konjac, carrot and grilled tofu. In the Hitoyoshi and Kuma area of Kumamoto, families keep the count odd, seven or nine, and serve the soup with red rice and nishime at occasions such as the Okunchi festival. It also grew out of thrift, since trimmings left from making nishime could become a complete dish. The tofu is added last so the cubes stay neat.
Dough made from sendango, a fermented sweet potato preserve, is pressed through a dedicated extruder called a rokubei-segi so short, thick noodles drop straight into boiling water. The dish has been made in Shimabara and Tsushima in Nagasaki since the Edo period. The noodles are smooth outside, chewy inside, and faintly sweet from the potato. Once cooked, they are moved straight to cold water and rinsed to wash off the harsh surface. They are served in a clear broth of burdock, carrot, and shiitake seasoned with two soy sauces and sake, topped with fish cake and scallion.
Large shrimp are split lengthwise before rolling, which packs the middle of every slice with pink shrimp. Egg strips, sauteed carrot and cucumber go in too, but nothing strongly seasoned, and it eats lighter than most gimbap.
Buckwheat flour kneaded with crumbled firm tofu is pressed into willow-leaf shapes, pointed at both ends and slightly plump in the middle, which keeps a springy buckwheat bite. This miso soup from northern Iwate takes less work than cutting fine soba noodles yet still tastes clearly of buckwheat. Anyone with a buckwheat allergy should not be served it.
Glass noodles, shrimp, squid, pork, napa cabbage, and wood ear fill a clear chicken broth, finished with half a hard-boiled egg on top. The dish came from Fuzhou in China's Fujian province, where it was a celebration food, and reached Kumamoto by way of Nagasaki in the late Meiji era. Today it appears at Chinese restaurants and home tables in central Kumamoto as lunch, dinner, or a meal after drinking. The seafood is added only after the pork and firm vegetables have cooked, which keeps the shrimp and squid from turning rubbery. To keep the broth clear, the glass noodles are boiled and rinsed separately, warmed in the soup only at the end, and the heat is cut as soon as the sesame oil and scallion are added.
The shrimp are split into two uses. Heads and shells simmer into the stock the rice cooks in, while the meat is minced, given a quick turn in sesame oil with garlic, and set aside until the grains have fully broken down.