32 recipes. Page 2 of 2
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This Ishikawa miso soup comes from the Buddhist temple tradition and uses no meat or fish stock: kombu dashi is mixed with the water the adzuki beans cooked in. The first boiling water is thrown out for its astringency, and only the second goes into the soup.
No heat touches namero, so the cold, fresh horse mackerel keeps its texture while miso adds salt and ginger, green onion, and shiso add sharp aromatics. It is a fishermen's dish from the Boso Peninsula in Chiba, and the name is said to come from the urge to lick the plate clean. Two knives chop the mix until the pieces of fish all but disappear and the paste turns fluffy and slightly sticky, lifting with the blade.
Nothing else goes into the pot as filling. Yamataro crabs, with only the top shell removed, are pounded with miso in a mortar, mixed with water and strained three times, and as that liquid heats, the crab protein sets into curds like soft tofu. Ginger juice and sliced scallion are the only things on top.
Round eggplant slices, slit into pockets and stuffed with sugar-sweetened miso, sit inside a plain wheat wrapper. Nagano's oyaki can hold many seasonal vegetables, and in this filling the eggplant turns soft and juicy as it steams, soaking up the salty-sweet miso. Some oyaki are only grilled or only steamed, but these are browned in a pan first and then steamed, leaving the wrapper chewy-soft with a toasted bottom. The batch makes twenty.
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.
Mackerel fillets simmer skin-side up under a glossy glaze of miso, mirin, sake, and sugar, a staple of Japanese home cooking. Pouring boiling water over the fish first takes away surface odor, and thin slices of ginger in the pan deal with the rest.
Cooked with finely ground rice, agar extracted from tengusa seaweed sets into a jelly from Wajima in Ishikawa that is firm like agar yet carries the gentle softness of rice starch. It is cut into thin strips and arranged in a ring like petals, then served with a sweet-salty sauce of black sesame, brown sugar, miso, soy sauce, and kelp stock, plus peeled mandarin segments. In Wajima it appears at Buddhist memorials and funerals, set out in local Wajima lacquerware.
Small new potatoes are fried whole and slowly until their thin skins wrinkle, then simmered in dashi and rolled in miso, sugar, and mirin until a thick glaze clings to them. The dish belongs to Yuzurihara in Uenohara, Yamanashi. Seida honors Nakai Seidayu, an official who promoted potato growing after a famine in the late Edo period, and tamaji means small potatoes, a reminder that undersized tubers were never wasted. The fried skins turn savory while the centers stay fluffy.