230 recipes. Page 9 of 10
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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.
Doenjang, not gochujang, seasons this crab stew, so it tastes nutty and savory before it tastes hot, with the chili flakes and Cheongyang pepper staying in the background.
Blue crabs in spring are packed with meat and taste noticeably sweet. Here they are halved and simmered in their shells with chili flakes and Cheongyang peppers, and the closer to live the crabs are when they go in, the more of that sweetness comes through.
Bean sprouts go into a milky broth made from toasted dried pollack, and it is the soup many Koreans make the morning after drinking. The sprouts cook briefly with the lid off, so their stems stay crisp.
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.
This is a soup for November through February, the months when maesaengi (a seaweed as fine as thread) and oysters are both in season. The seaweed spreads loose through the broth, so every spoonful lifts green threads along with an oyster or two.
The flavor of this broth comes from the innards packed in the crab's top shell. That is why the shells go into the pot with the radish before the bodies, so the innards can be stirred loose into the gochujang broth. It sits on a tabletop burner, and as it cooks down, a little water goes in so everyone can keep eating to the bottom.
Cod and pollock are soft-fleshed fish, so once the pieces are in the pot they are never turned; the spicy broth is just spooned over them. That is how the pieces stay whole all the way to the table. Swap in clams or shrimp and it becomes a seafood maeuntang.
Pieces of catfish simmer in a gochujang broth, and thin pinches of flour dough go in partway through, so fish and sujebi dumplings come out of the same pot. Before cutting, the catfish is rubbed well with salt to strip off its slippery coating, which otherwise leaves a muddy taste in the broth.
Mideodeok, a small sea squirt, holds a pocket of briny liquid inside its tough skin, and it bursts in your mouth when you bite down. To keep that liquid in, the stems are left uncut and the sea squirts get only three minutes in the pot, and the doenjang is dissolved in rice-rinsing water rather than anchovy stock. Around Tongyeong and Geoje on Korea's south coast, it is everyday home cooking.
Pinch two corners of a square of wheat dough together and it takes the shape of a mi, a winnowing basket. In Jikkoku, in Fujikawa, Yamanashi, that shape is said to scoop up good fortune, which is why the soup appears on New Year's morning and at celebrations. The dough goes straight into the broth with the root vegetables instead of being boiled separately, and the flour on its surface gives the soup a light body.
This is the dried pollack soup Koreans often make the morning after drinking, with a handful of spring water dropwort (minari) added. Pollack strips toasted in sesame oil give the broth its base, beaten egg drifts through it in soft ribbons, and the grassy minari lightens the whole heavy bowl.
Brisket simmered for about 25 minutes gives a clear, light brown broth. The cooked beef can be torn along the grain and returned to the soup, or lifted out and dipped in a seasoned soy sauce.
Add beef and this becomes beef radish soup; add dried pollack and it becomes pollack radish soup. This is the plain version underneath both, and the one thing that takes care is cutting the radish a little thicker than usual so it does not fall apart in the long simmer. Winter radish makes a noticeably sweeter broth, and the radish is softer still when the soup is reheated the next day.
Mulmegi is caught off Korea's east coast from December to February, and its flesh is so soft that it nearly dissolves into the pot once cooked. Even in this clear soup that gives the broth some body, enough that it sets almost like jelly as it cools. Once the fish is in, shake the pot rather than stirring it.
Most of the work in this spicy beef offal soup happens before cooking: the mixed tripe is scrubbed with salt and flour into every fold, then soaked in cold water to draw out blood and odor. After a quick blanch the first water is thrown out, and a 50-minute simmer in fresh water softens the thick pieces while building the stock.
Hot soy-seasoned broth with matchstick tofu goes into each bowl, then gets a ladle of raw grated nagaimo yam loosened with daikon juice, which spreads softly over the surface. This is the formal nuppei style from Iwate's Buddhist cooking, rather than the hachihai variation that thickens the whole pot with potato starch. The name hachihai is linked either to making eight bowls from one block of tofu or to wanting many refills. Gloves help when grating the nagaimo, which can irritate skin, and the topping goes on just before eating.
The radish simmers alone for more than 8 minutes to sweeten the broth, and the squid goes in afterwards for only 4 to 5. The rings are right when they turn opaque and begin to curl; any longer and they toughen fast. No chili flakes go in.
Eight tablespoons of ground perilla seed turn this duck broth milky and thick, provided they are stirred in after the duck is fully cooked; added too early, the powder turns gritty with a bitter finish. Plain raw duck slices, not smoked or marinated, keep the broth tasting only of duck and radish.
White fish firms up in about 4 minutes, and after that every stir breaks it apart. The radish cooks halfway first to flavor the broth, then the fish follows and is ladled out as soon as the flesh begins to flake.
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 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.
Thin slices of radish simmer first to flavor the broth, because the clams and spinach themselves cook in moments. Turn the heat down as soon as the clams open and the meat stays tender.
Filipino families often make this on rainy days and ladle the broth over rice. The sourness comes from tamarind paste, and if it tastes too mild, another tablespoon goes in. Tomato and onion, added in big pieces, melt into the broth over 30 minutes of simmering.