120 recipes. Page 4 of 5
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Steamed in the shell with only green onion and ginger beneath it, abalone keeps its sea-sweet aroma, with seasoning limited to a little soy sauce, rice wine and sesame oil spooned over afterward. A shallow crosshatch on the thick side lets heat reach the center so the edges do not toughen while the middle catches up.
Thin strips of dried squid spend ten days in the fridge in rice koji and a soy-based seasoning, slowly softening and taking on the koji's sweetness. The old method aged it in weighted crocks; here nothing sits at room temperature, and it matures in the refrigerator from start to finish. A little goes on rice or alongside a drink.
This is a braise meant to be reheated and eaten the day after it is made. Overnight, gelatin from the dried cod coats the taro, and the ebiimo turn sticky and glossy. Ebiimo is a dense, striped taro from Kyoto; the cod is the dried kind traditionally brought down from Hokkaido, first simmered on its own in bancha tea to take off its smell and leftover salt. In Kyoto it is made in autumn and winter and also served at New Year.
In southern Aomori this soup was served at Bon, New Year, weddings, and other celebrations, and its name comes from golden sea urchin in clear broth looking like wild strawberries seen through morning mist. The roe is heated only until its surface sets; a hard boil breaks it apart and dulls its aroma.
Whole garlic cloves and rice wine come to a boil before a mix of clams is added, giving the broth they release a slow, mellow garlic note. With the clams bringing their own salt, the measured salt is stirred in only after tasting, a little at a time. Green onion and cheongyang chili steam for just half a minute at the end to perfume the broth; any longer and the clam meat shrinks and toughens. Purging the clams in salted water beforehand matters as much as the cooking, because any sand ends up in the bowl. Clams that stay shut are thrown out, and the leftover broth makes a base for noodles or porridge.
A small spoonful is enough to flavor a bowl of rice: young sansho leaves bring a bright, citrusy aroma and a faint tingle on the tongue, and dried whitebait adds salty savoriness. The preserve comes from the mountain villages of Kyoto, where sansho trees grew wild and the spring shoots, called kinome, were cooked down with sake and light soy sauce until almost no liquid remained. Spoon a little over rice, onigiri, ochazuke, udon, or chilled tofu.
Ray carries so much collagen in its skin and cartilage that the broth it simmers in, sweet and salty with ginger, sake, mirin and soy, sets like jelly once it cools, with no gelatin needed. In Katsuragi, Nara, ray has long been chilled in its broth this way. Nara has no coast, but seafood landed in Osaka came in quickly along the Takenouchi road.
Thick bone-in rounds of carp and the head simmer for close to three hours, until the flesh flakes at a touch of the chopsticks and the miso broth turns thick. This style from the Saku area of Nagano adds miso in three stages. The first portion is added with sugar to season the fish, a middle portion ground smooth with cooked rice thickens the broth, and the last is stirred in near the end for aroma.
A knob of butter dropped in as the first clam opens turns the salty mix of rice wine and clam juice cloudy and rounded. No stock is used, so the broth tastes only as good as the clams and how well they were purged. Tilting the lid as it comes off sends condensation away from the pot instead of back into the liquid, and a scatter of chopped chives cuts through the butter. In Korea this is a drinking snack, brought to the table while the shells are still steaming.
A hollowed white melon is packed with green chilies wrapped in shiso leaves, and each slice shows pale melon around a green center. The look of a gun barrel loaded with ammunition gives teppo-zuke, gun pickle, its name. It began as a winter preserve around Narita and Katori in Chiba, became a crisp, spicy side for rice and sake, and is a well-known souvenir near Naritasan Shinshoji Temple. The salted melon first spends two days in water, changed as it goes, to draw out the salt. Reboiling only the marinade and returning it cold each day for several days is how the seasoning reaches the center of the dense melon.
Diamonds of buckwheat and rice flour dough, boiled and coated in junen miso: toasted perilla seeds ground with sugar and miso. Hatto belongs to Hinoemata, where it marked the end of rice planting or roof work. One story links the name to gohatto, an Edo-period ban on eating too much grain, with villagers making the food in secret; another says a lord liked it so much that commoners were allowed it only at celebrations.
This soup comes from the Shimanto, Niyodo and Monobe river basins in Kochi, where it was made in autumn as the mitten crabs move downstream. The crabs are ground shell and all and strained, and as the liquid boils the crab protein gathers into soft curds; eggplant and a stalk vegetable called ryukyu go in with them. Raw freshwater crab can carry parasites and contaminants, so the recipe never uses crabs you caught yourself, only ones sold for cooking by a licensed supplier.
Steaming a whole blue crab keeps more of its sweet juices inside the shell than boiling does, and the meat comes out briny and moist. In spring and autumn the crabs are full of roe and tomalley, which adds plenty to eat beyond the white meat. A simple dip of soy sauce sharpened with vinegar brings the sweetness forward. Eating it is hands-on work, cracking each leg joint and pulling the meat out piece by piece.
Finely chopped wasabi stems and root are folded into sake lees sweetened with sugar, and after a few days the sharp nasal heat of wasabi cuts through the fermented aroma of the lees. After Shizuoka Station opened in 1889, the pickle began selling inside the station and became a standard regional souvenir; it is still eaten in small amounts with hot rice or sake.
Two rounds of refrigerator drying, one before an unseasoned grilling and one after, firm small sea gobies enough to keep their shape through a long final simmer in sweet tamari broth. Grilling also cuts surface moisture and fishy aroma. The result, a preserved side from the Mikawa Bay coast of Aichi, is nearly dry, concentrated in soybean savor and sweetness, and eaten a little at a time with rice or drinks.
Seven hundred grams of clams, a spoonful of rice wine and water make up nearly the whole pot. Once the shells start opening the soup is minutes from done, and the chilies, green onion and garlic should all be cut before the heat goes on.
The croaker keeps its white flesh and mild flavor instead of tasting of soy because the soy sauce stays out of the pot until the radish is tender and only then gets stirred into the broth and spooned over the fish. Thick slices of Korean radish line the bottom, shielding the fish from direct heat and sweetening the liquid as they soften. Rice wine and thinly sliced ginger handle any fishiness, which is why the seasoning can stay this light. The green onion cooks for just 1 minute at the end to keep its aroma. Croaker has fine-grained, delicate flesh, and a gentle steam-braise rather than a hard boil keeps the pieces whole for a shared table of four.
The deep reddish brown of hong shao rou comes from sugar melted to caramel in the pot before any soy sauce goes in. The caramel-coated pork belly braises in soy sauce and rice wine until the sauce clings to it in a thin glaze, and it goes over plain rice, sauce and all.
A salted salmon head and backbone with some flesh still attached give the kombu stock its fish oil and savor. Sanpei jiru is a Hokkaido winter soup, and unlike Ishikari nabe, which is seasoned with miso and uses fresh salmon, it relies on the salt already cured into the fish.
The shrimp steam on a bed of onion, green onion, and garlic, and the rising vapor carries those aromas in between the shells. Apart from a splash of rice wine and a squeeze of lemon there is no seasoning, which puts the shrimp's own sweetness at the center. The steaming stops within 8-9 minutes, before overcooking can shrink the flesh and make it stiff.
Despite a name linked to the liquid that tofu and vegetables release, this simmer from central and eastern Tottori ends with only a shallow layer of broth in the pot. Chicken thigh, firm tofu, burdock, carrot, shiitake, fried tofu pouch, konjac, and Japanese leek cook together in a small amount of soy-seasoned dashi, and the pieces are plated whole rather than ladled like soup.
The mackerel's head and backbone go into the stock along with the fillets, and the clear broth still tastes strongly of fish. Pouring boiling water over the pieces and dunking them straight into cold water to pull off blood and scales is what keeps that broth clear. Each bowl gets a few drops of ginger juice, yuzu peel and two kinds of slivered onion.
A whole rockfish cooks in a broth of soy sauce and gochugaru (Korean chili flakes), and each spoonful takes some of the spicy liquid, the white flesh and a piece of radish that has soaked up both.
Thin slices of duck breast are dredged generously in flour before going into the broth, and that coating does two jobs: it protects the meat and gives the sauce its body. This is a Kanazawa dish from Ishikawa, with sudare-fu (ridged wheat gluten sheets), taro, shiitake, and flower-shaped fu each cooked separately in the same sweet-salty soy and mirin dashi. They are plated with the duck and blanched spinach under the thickened sauce, and a small mound of fresh wasabi cuts through the sweetness.