877 recipes. Page 29 of 37
As an Amazon Associate, we may earn from qualifying purchases.
Ground beef and pork are combined two to one and worked in one direction for more than three minutes, until the mix sticks to the hands and turns smooth; that stickiness gives the thick patties their firm bite. The onion is minced fine and pressed lightly, leaving it a little moist rather than wrung dry.
Dried pollock strips turn pleasantly chewy as they absorb a soy and gochugaru glaze, while the potatoes go soft and floury around them. That chewiness depends on a short soak: five minutes in lukewarm water is enough, and anything longer leaves the fish limp and stringy in the pan. The potatoes get a head start for the same reason, so the pollock only needs a few minutes in the sauce. A little oligosaccharide syrup rounds off the saltiness, and the dish holds up well in the fridge for the next day's lunchbox.
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.
Chopped shrimp in the pork filling gives these dim sum a springier bite than pork alone. The wrapper is pressed up around the sides and left open on top, and by the time they come out of the steamer the thin skin has turned translucent.
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.
Twenty perilla leaves go in, but they never actually cook over the flame. The soy-marinated beef is stir-fried, the heat is turned off, and only then are the leaves folded in for twenty seconds of residual heat; any longer and they blacken.
Grilled chicken thigh picks up a sweet, salty glaze and a few charred edges as the tare, a reduction of soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake, is brushed on in thin layers. The scallion pieces between the chicken lose their sharpness on the grill and turn sweet, which softens the saltiness of the glaze. For a plainer version, shio style skips the tare and seasons with salt alone, letting the chicken juices carry the flavor.
On drying racks in Gangwon-do, pollock freezes and thaws dozens of times over the winter to become hwangtae, and the flesh ends up full of sponge-like pores. Braised in soy sauce with gochujang, it takes the salty-sweet seasoning in through those pores, all the way to the middle rather than just on the surface.
The only cooking in this salad is poaching a chicken breast, since soy protein noodles are ready once drained of their packing water and rinsed. The dressing of soy sauce, vinegar and olive oil gets its sweetness from allulose instead of sugar, which keeps it sharp and light. Baby greens go on last and stay perky as long as they are not tossed in early.
When fresh salmon roe comes in each autumn, Hokkaido cooks free the eggs one by one and leave them in sake and soy sauce that has been boiled and cooled. The eggs take on the seasoning but their skins stay tight, so each one pops with a salty burst.
King oyster mushrooms are cut lengthwise into thick planks and scored in a crosshatch, which gives them enough heft to stand in for meat over rice. They are seared in a dry pan first to drive off water, then glazed with soy sauce, cooking wine and sugar, and they stay chewy under the sauce.
A light dusting of flour holds moisture in the cut crab and gives the sweet-salty soy glaze something to grip, and it ends up on your fingers as you work through the shells. Buy the crabs live and clean them just before cooking for firm, springy meat; frozen crab loses water as it thaws and turns soft.
Thick onion rings soak up butter and rendered pork belly fat until they turn soft all the way through, with browned undersides. They cook slowly at medium-low and are flipped as little as possible, which is what gets the thick centers tender. A spoonful of soy sauce poured around the edge of the hot pan at the very end sizzles into a toasty aroma; let it reduce for long and the dish turns salty.
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.
Raw Pacific cod roe gets squeezed straight from the sac into simmering soy sauce, sake, and mirin, then cooked down with shirataki until each grain clings to the noodles. This Akita preparation uses true cod roe, not the pollock roe sold as tarako or mentaiko.
Yuki in Ibaraki makes its sudarefu by working flour back into wheat gluten, rolling it thin, salting and boiling it, and sun-drying the sheets on a bamboo blind; the blind leaves ridges that the sesame-vinegar dressing clings to. Drying makes the gluten chewier than fresh fu and lets it keep, which once made it a valued pantry item. It was used in temple cooking around the castle town, and since the late Edo period it has been served at weddings, funerals, holidays, and Obon, when families gather.
Most of the flavor here comes from the scallions. Thinly sliced and fried until their edges turn golden, they leave behind an oil that coats the shrimp and every grain of rice, so soy sauce and oyster sauce are all it needs.
The shishito peppers stay in the oil until a few dark blisters appear on the skins, which is where their slightly bitter aroma comes from. The tiny anchovies are toasted separately in a dry pan beforehand until crumbly, and they only rejoin the peppers when the heat is lowered and the syrup goes in.
The soy marinade gets its sweetness from grated pear and onion juice as much as from sugar. With honey in there too, the ribs catch easily, so this is not something to walk away from while it cooks. The batch serves four, sized for a holiday table or guests.
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.
Black vinegar and chili oil hit at the same time, sour and hot, over a chicken stock with slippery, springy sweet potato starch noodles. Both are added to the bowl rather than the pot, leaving each person free to tune the sourness. The noodles turn clear before they are fully done; the real signal is when the firm center disappears but the bounce remains.
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.
Brown rice is topped with pan-seared salmon, blanched spinach, shredded carrot and avocado, then dressed with soy sauce, lemon juice and sesame oil. Against the chewy rice, the salmon is cooked only until its center is still faintly translucent and stays moist.
Kohlrabi is firm and a little sweet, and even stir-fried it still crunches between pieces of springy shrimp. The red bell pepper is there more for color than flavor.