120 recipes. Page 3 of 5
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A winter side dish from the Tsugaru region of Aomori, where cod was eaten from head to innards and the roe was salted for keeping or saved for New Year and celebration food. Carrot, koya-dofu (freeze-dried tofu) and shirataki are cooked in sake first, then fresh roe scraped from its membrane is stir-fried in until it turns opaque and scatters into dry little grains that cling to every piece.
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.
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.
Split blue crab grills shell side down first, then gets turned so the cut meat can take brushing after brushing of butter, garlic, soy sauce and lemon whenever it dries. Crabs vary in size and any time given is only a guide. The crab is done when the thickest meat reaches 63°C (145°F) and looks pearly and opaque.
Pacific saury is pounded in a mortar until sticky, mixed with miso, egg and sake, and shaped into balls that go into plain water first. The miso and fish in the balls turn that water into broth, and daikon, carrot and tofu follow.
A small piece of butter on each scallop melts into the juice pooled in the shell and becomes a salty, rich sauce with no extra step. Cleaning is simple and the steaming takes six or seven minutes, which makes it easy to put out when drinks are being set up in a hurry.
The salt is kept at twenty percent of the anchovy weight, and the jar stays in the fridge for the whole cure. The jar stays shut until brine rises over the fish, and only then do garlic, ginger, chili flakes, and rice wine go in, their aroma sitting on top of an already mellowed, salty base. A little stirred into kimchi paste adds savory depth, and a spoonful over hot rice works as a side dish on its own.
The dish takes its name from the Song dynasty poet Su Dongpo. Thick squares of pork belly are tied with string and braised for a long time in soy sauce, rice wine and sugar until the fat turns translucent, then cut into thick slices and served under a spoonful of the reduced, glossy brown sauce.
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.
Despite the name, this soboro has no minced meat: pork belly, fried fish cake, konnyaku and carrot are all cut into sturdy 5 cm strips. The burdock is shaved thin and the bean sprouts go in last for just 90 seconds, giving each ingredient a different bite. Light soy sauce, sugar and sake with filtered shiitake soaking liquid make a short simmer, and the dish is served while a little liquid is still in the pan.
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.
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.
There is no stock in this pot: the mussels open over a splash of rice wine and garlic, and their own juices become the broth. Everything happens fast over high heat, and the main mistake is letting it go on, since the meat shrinks and toughens within minutes. Green onion and cheongyang chili (a hot Korean green pepper) go in only once most shells have opened, adding fragrance and a clean bite. Any broth left at the bottom is worth saving for kalguksu noodles or a pack of ramen.
Pollock roe sacs tear easily, and every stage of this jeotgal, from rinsing to coating, comes down to handling them lightly enough to keep the membranes whole. A 30-minute salt cure with a piece of kelp firms the surface before rice wine and a thin red coat of chili flakes, garlic, and sugar go on. During the cold cure the eggs tighten and pop when bitten, with the chili warmth staying behind the salty sea flavor. Slices of it go on hot rice.
Dote means riverbank. Miso is spread around the inside rim of the pot like an embankment and worked into the liquid in the middle a little at a time, and that is where this Osaka dish gets its name. Beef tendon and konjac cook slowly in sweet country-style miso; by the time the tendon turns soft and gelatinous, the sauce coats a spatula thickly.
Inside each squid body, glutinous rice and chopped tentacles absorb a simmering liquid of kombu dashi, sake, and soy sauce and turn dense and chewy. Every sliced round shows white rice framed by a ring of squid. The bodies are only partly filled because the rice swells as it cooks, and overfilled squid split.
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.
Eelpout is so soft that a spoon breaks it apart, and the pot is gently shaken rather than stirred while it simmers. Gelatin from the fish gives the clear broth a slight body. On the east coast of Gangwon and North Gyeongsang it is a winter dish, served at harbor restaurants in earthenware bowls.
The eel is steamed once with a splash of rice wine, and only after the flesh has turned white and given up some of its fat is the soy glaze brushed on for a second round. Brushed onto flesh that has lost some of its fat, the glaze settles in and sets glossy. In Korea it is a common dish for the bok days at the height of summer.
Sardines salted in spring sit through the summer, then are cooked down in late autumn into a thick liquid that pickles whole daikon. Spanning two seasons, this Kakudahama, Niigata tradition is closer to a yearly project than a quick pickle. The radish stays firm but takes on the strong salt and smell of fermented fish. It is sliced thin and eaten with rice a little at a time. The makers use shirokubi daikon, and bottled fish sauce does not stand in for the brine the spring cure produces. A ventilated space for handling and cooking fish, a large barrel and heavy weights matter as much as the ingredients.
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.
Freshly cooked rice pounded only halfway, rather than all the way into mochi, gives these grilled skewers a toasted outside and an inside with distinct grains. The topping is junen miso: egoma (perilla seed, called junen in Fukushima) toasted, ground until slightly oily, and mixed with sugar, miso, and sake. Pull them from the heat at light char marks, since the sugar in the paste turns bitter once it blackens.
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.
Diced skin-on sweet potato stays in pieces, while raw sweet potato grated in at the end melts into the broth, giving mild sweetness and a rustic body. Hikado is a Nagasaki winter soup, and its name is linked to the Portuguese picado, meaning finely chopped; it is said to have grown out of a stew that arrived through contact with the West and was remade with local fish and vegetables. No flour slurry is used, and with yellowtail and chicken in the same pot, fish and meat flavors overlap.