DashiDashi | The Japanese Food Blog

Recipe: Chawan-mushi

According to economic theory, most assets fall into one of two categories: fixed or consumable. My wok is a fixed asset; my supply of Lindt 70% dark chocolate is alarmingly consumable. So far so good.

We then get to crockery and the boundaries start to blur. Being a certified klutz, when I buy bowls/plates/mugs, it's with a calm Zen-like detachment and full acceptance that at some point in the future I'll be sweeping up ceramic shards into a waiting bundle of newspaper. It may be tomorrow, it may be in 10 years time, but it will come.

Over the past few years, I've totalled: a matching set of four cat-embossed glasses, several plates, one lovely glass tumbler (Tescos, thank goodness), my flatmate's irreplaceable mug, and more than a few pint glasses.

So it was sad but unsurprising, when, after having used my new chawan-mushi cups (pictured above) for the first time, I turned around, caught my elbow on the spoon resting in an empty cup, and sent the whole thing tumbling towards the ground. One down, one to go, I thought, with a weariness born of years of crockery-loss.

Recipe: Japanese Cheesecake

So it's official: the secret of happiness is not love, beauty, or a tax-free jurisdiction.

It's having a signature dessert.

Just imagine: never again will you be left peering into the oven, running an hour late and covered in flour, while your newly-attempted gateau fails to rise to the (special) occasion. Or your panna cotta doesn't quite make it to cotta, and you're left with plain old panna in a ramekin.

With a killer signature dessert, pot-luck parties and 'you don't have to bring anything, really' occasions become a walkover. Soon the host is begging you to make your 'usual', as after several months of Pavlovian (or rather strawberry pavlova) training, it just doesn't feel like a party without it. While other guests wrap up their half-dissected blackberry tarts and untouched supermarket sponge rolls, you're scouring the room in search of your missing cake stand and the miscreant who's proceeding to lick it clean of all crumbs.

A few years ago, at a party far far away, a friend of a friend brought along a dessert that changed my life. It was a cake fashioned by angels - the lightest, softest, most transcendental cake I'd ever inhaled. I'd met my future signature dessert.

Pan-Asia Pandemonium

Pan-Asian is a word that should strike fear into anyone who calls themselves a lover, or at least very special friend, of food. Imagine if you will, a restaurant claiming to serve Italian, French, and German cuisine. Frankfurter bouillabaisse with bruschetta, anyone? Of course not, don't be absurd.

Yet it's not uncommon to find places purporting to serve Chinese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Malay, and Japanese fare all under one roof, more often than not in some noodle-bar-esque guise. Should you happen across a menu that claims mastery over all of prawn tempura, pad thai, any form of laksa, and aromatic duck, please make for the door. Don't even stop to try the edamame beans with garlic-chilli-yuzu-assam sauce.

Cocoa-Dusted Ganaches

Mid-afternoon, New Year's Day. Arriving home to an empty flat, having slept at 4am that morning, motivation levels were not high. 'Proper' cooking was definitely out of the question.

Faced with dwindling sunlight, a block of 73% dark chocolate, and a tub of double cream, there was only one thing to do. I'd happened across a recipe for dark chocolate ganache last month, and now seemed as good a time as any.

Making the ganaches was dead simple: dissolve sugar in boiling cream, pour over cut-up pieces of dark chocolate, mix together into a paste, leave in the fridge for around 2 hours. Dust hands in cocoa-powder and roll into little spheres.

The whole process took less than 30 minutes (excluding the fridge time) and resulted in 20-or-so very classy looking cocoa-dusted ganaches. I piled them into an old Ferrero Rocher box lined with baking paper.

Ganache, ambassador?

As a concession to the blog's Japanese theme, I cut up some Toppo (chocolate-filled pretzel sticks) for the photos. Made by Lotte, the same brand who produce those chocolate koalas, these sticks are dangerously more-ish. Pringles, you ain't seen nothing yet.

Here's the ganache recipe from The Times website. Watch the video too for helpful hints, such as rolling the chocolates using your fingers, not palms, as your palms would be too warm. A few extra tips: make a small batch to start  -- I used a 100g bar and scaled the recipe accordingly -- and cut up the chocolate pieces as small as possible, so they melt easier when the cream is added.

Simple, tasty, with "I can't believe you made these!"-factor. That's next year's Christmas presents all sorted, then.

Recipe: How to Cook Mochi

Many of the great flavours in life come with the warning: "It's a bit of an acquired taste". It took me several teenage years to get my taste buds around the dark mustiness of Parma ham, and it's only lately that I've come to tolerate and grudgingly enjoy those salty bursts of ikura (salmon roe).

My new -- and expensive -- habit of buying random unidentified foodstuffs from the Japanese supermarket, in the hope that Tsuji will shed some light when I get home, most recently landed me with a bag of 'glutinous rice cakes'; flat hard balls, each individually wrapped in plastic.

After staring for a while at the less-than-illuminating instructions, it was time to phone a friend. Ideally, a Japanese one.

Restaurant Review: aqua kyoto

Seeing as people are forever asking me for Japanese restaurant recommendations (which I'm secretly flattered about), here's the first in a series on London's Japanese restaurants.

The waitress knew my name. How odd.

Alas, as we were guided to our seats, it dawned on me that she was neither psychic, nor had I become a minor celebrity overnight. Instead, it was all the work of the nice gentleman with the reservation list, who'd greeted us at the street-level entrance and ushered us into the lift.

In the time it took to ride up five floors, deposit coat, hat, gloves, and scarf with the charming (if over-staffed) bevy of receptionists, Mr Ground-Floor had the opportunity to radio my name, description, and possibly shoe-size, to the wait staff above. Cunning.

Recipe: The Secret of Agedashi Tofu

When in need of a serious sushi fix, any Japanese restaurant trip morphs into a fiendish optimisation problem, involving maximising the amount of raw fish, rice, and nori consumed, while minimising the  mounting bill. Handrolls usually fare well under this cost-benefit analysis, as do the large rolls (futomaki). Sashimi, on the other hand, should really be a sporadic treat, but London property prices have consigned me to the rental market for the foreseeable future, so what the hell, bring on the o-toro.

If I'm feeling particularly cavalier in the spending department, I may even venture into the cooked dish section. When this happens, first up is always the agedashi tofu.

It made financial sense, therefore, to put top of the cookery agenda. After all, it's just tofu, flour, and a bit of oil, right?

Wrong.

There's a secret to making agedashi tofu.

Where To Buy Japanese Ingredients

It's not uncommon, amongst those vaguely acquainted with their kitchen, to attempt and even succeed at a Chinese stir-fry, Thai green curry, or Vietnamese beef pho.

So why is cooking Japanese often that one step too far?

"I just never have the right ingredients," said a friend recently, as we chatted about my current culinary bend.

She had a point. The average (even well-appointed) kitchen is often bereft of basic Japanese items such as mirin, sake, miso, and the ingredients for dashi. Without these, though, you must as well try baking a cake without flour. Even the bedrock of Japanese mealtimes, a bowl of plain white rice, is hard to come by -- local grocery stores often don't stock Japanese short-grain rice.

So where can you get your hands on the fundamental ingredients of Japanese cookery?

Getting a Japanese pen-pal and taking out shares in Fedex is one option. So is upping and moving to the country itself. However, for those of you who aren't big on written correspondence / uprooting your families, here's the DashiDashi guide to sourcing Japanese ingredients.

DashiDashi : Where To Buy Japanese Ingredients 
(In increasing order of convenience)

• Local supermarket
• Health food / organic stores
• Oriental supermarkets (non-Japanese)
• Japanese supermarkets
• Internet shop

Local Supermarket

If you live somewhere that calls itself 'cosmopolitan', you might find a handful of key ingredients here, but don't hold your breath otherwise. Look out for soy sauce (try to get a Japanese brand like Kikkoman), and common ingredients like aubergine/eggplant, courgettes/zucchinis (you lot across the pond, what's with the alternate lingo?), sesame seeds, and ginger.

The more upmarket the store, the more likely they are to stock key Japanese ingredients.

UK: The larger supermarkets often sell products by Clearspring (an organic food company), including soy sauce, mirin, and various types of udon, soba, and miso paste.

Health Food / Organic Stores

My local 'organic' shop, apart from selling gluten-free everything and a dozen types of rabbit-food-esque muesli, has a small but decent selection of tofu and various Japanese noodles. Dig around.

Oriental supermarket (non-Japanese)

These often have a small Japanese section which should cover all the basics, if not more. Bulk-buy the long-life tofu, a tub of miso paste, and if you're confident, get the large-size bottles of soy sauce, mirin, and sake (these go faster than you'd think).

Japanese supermarket

This is as good as it gets. Try to find out the Japanese words for ingredients beforehand, as asking for 'dried kelp' instead of konbu, and 'buckwheat noodles' instead of soba, won't get you very far.

UK: Check out Eat Japan (see the search bar on left), for a list of Japanese and other oriental supermarkets in your area.

US: Maki at Just Hungry has a list of Japanese grocery stores by state, as well as specific lists for New York, California, etc. (see top of same post).

Internet shop

Going online is a last resort (due to delivery charges), but if you know what you want, load up that virtual basket and go crazy. Run the keywords buy japanese ingredients online [your country] through your favourite search engine and see what turns up.

UK: A quick search throws up the Japan Centre (I buy my food at the real-life store) and Japanese Kitchen.

US: Similar search comes up with AsianFoodGrocer and eFoodDepot.

Note: I've not used any of the above online stores, so let me know how you get on!

Recipe: Foil-Wrapped Enoki Mushrooms with Mint

It always surprises me to meet people who hate mushrooms. It's like not liking bread. Or kittens. At least mushrooms don't scratch and make you wheeze.

As a kid, my favourite mushrooms were straw mushrooms, which (for some unfathomable reason) my mother nicknamed 'Great Wall of China' mushrooms. Presumably the longer name was intended to tongue-tie us before we could demand third, fourth, and fifth helpings. It didn't work.

I've yet to see fresh straw mushrooms being sold in London, but enokitake mushrooms seem to be all the rage -- at least, in upmarket joints like Waitrose and Borough Market. Which suits me, as these long pale noodle-ly specimens (aptly called 'golden needles' in Chinese) long ago usurped the lowly straw mushroom as my all-time favourite fungus.

It was therefore a no-brainer when my cookery bible flopped open at Tsuji's Foil-Cooked Enokitake Mushrooms. Simple, yet exquisite (hopefully) -- and a combined prep and cooking time of less than 10 minutes. All in favour of impressive-yet-lazy cuisine? Read on.

I substituted finely-chopped mint leaves for the impossible-to-source kinome sprigs (a seasonal garnish from the Japanese prickly ash tree) in the original recipe, on the basis that Tsuji describes kinome as having "the mildest hint of mintiness". Okay, so you don't get much more minty than mint, but it was worth a shot.

Five minutes later, my culinary innovation had me on tenterhooks, as I ripped into the foil parcel and teased out a steaming strand of minty enoki.

Pure genius, it turned out. The only problem was waiting another whole eight minutes for the next helping.

Foil-Wrapped Enoki with Mint

Inspired by Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

Prep time: 3 minutes
Cooking time: 5 minutes

Ingredients

• Enokitake mushrooms  (these will reduce to at least half the volume when cooked, so be generous)
• Butter, salted
• Mint, finely-chopped

Cut out a large (say 25cm) square of tinfoil, and butter the middle (where the enoki will go).

Wash the enoki, and chop off the browny root (1cm-ish).

Place the enoki in a bunch in the centre of the tinfoil, and top with a few pinches of chopped mint and a few small lumps of butter.

Fold the tinfoil loosely around the enoki, to trap a pocket of air inside. Cook mid-shelf in a preheated oven (245°C) for 5 minutes.

Serving tip: leave this dish as the last thing to cook, then serve and eat straight away - cold mushrooms are no one's idea of fun. If you're feeling really swish, make up individual parcels for each guest.

The Daikon Question

The other day, I accidentally bought a daikon.

This was at the local supermarket, a place where exotic produce is normally limited to rock-hard mangoes and suspicious pineapples. So a basket of long white tubers, the size of cucumbers, naturally caught my eye. Mooli, the label said.

I was pretty sure I'd had mooli before, in some kind of nouveau-style dimsum. And here was one, in Tescos. This was my chance to create my own brand of cutting-edge contemporary asian cuisine, from the comfort/cramp of my own kitchen. I had to buy it.

The first hitch was the self-service scanner, which denied all knowledge of this new vegetable. The second was when I got home, opened Tsuji's A Simple Art to the index, and found no mention of mooli. Mochi, moon noodles, mugicha, mushimono, all present. Mooli? Nada. What was I meant to do with this thing?

As for all great questions in life, Google came to my aid, and informed me that what I was holding (and absent-mindedly bashing against the table) was a daikon, a giant white radish. Turning back to Tsuji, I found over a page dedicated to daikon description and cooking advice, and a handful of recipes.

Watch this space. This daikon is going dowwwwn.

Dashi - How To Make Dashi Stock

To the uninitiated, boiled-up kelp and fish flakes appear to be an unlikely basis for an entire national cuisine. But according to Tsuji, good dashi is "the first secret of the simple art of Japanese cooking".

A fitting place to begin, then. Not least because this innocuous, one-size-fits-all stock features in at least every other recipe in the Japanese cookery bible. If I was going to get anywhere, this was Square One.

So what is dashi? Simply put, it's a clear stock made from konbu (dried giant kelp) and katsuo-bushi (bonito fish flakes). And for all my ravenous consumption of Japanese foodstuffs, up until this point I'd never even heard of either of them.

Time to go shopping.

The Japanese supermarket at Piccadilly Circus had recently moved into larger premises, and the place had the feel of a newly-occupied apartment - it was all in there somewhere, but woe betide anyone asking where we packed the corkscrew/coffee-grinder/chainsaw (delete vice as appropriate).

Eventually, I enlisted the help of the mop-haired shop assistant to guide me to my new holy grails. The konbu, labelled Dried Kelps, was a packet of greeny-black sheets, thin as tree bark, covered in an uneven layer of white powder. This powder, Tsuji writes, holds much of the flavour of the seaweed. (I also discovered that konbu has nothing to do with those perfectly-formed squares of nori seaweed used to wrap sushi. Different plant altogether.)

The katsuo-bushi manifested as a large bag of onion-skin-like pencil shavings. For anyone who's ever partaken in the whole asian-fusion-noodle-bar fad, you might recognise this as the topping they like to sprinkle on stir-fry noodles - those sad little onion-y shreds that wave forlornly at passers-by from atop your dinner.

I had just one more purchase to make.

Tsuji describes this "excellent" product as capturing "the aroma of the original quite succesfully". With such encouragement ringing in my ear, and a full-time job impeding (only slightly) my ascent to black-belt-level chef-dom, I had no qualms about reaching for that little cardboard box...

Dashi (Version 0)
a.k.a. "It's 8pm, I've just gotten home, and I'm starving..."

1. Buy a packet of dashi-no-moto (instant dashi stock)
2. Dissolve powder in hot water, to taste

I have to confess, this has been my cunning plan all along: to use instant dashi in all recipes where a superlative stock is not the key component. Estimated hours per week saved: enough to finally justify that gym membership. Residual guilt: rather little, I'm afraid. I'm obviously a culinary philistine at heart.

Times when a great dashi is of great importance? In my mind: soup, glorious soup.

Primary Dashi (Ichiban Dashi)
Adapted from Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art by Shizuo Tsuji

Ingredients

• Konbu (dried giant kelp), postcard-sized piece
• Katsuo-bushi (bonito flakes), handful

Soak konbu in a pot, in an inch of cold water - overnight / for 30 minutes / as the water heats up (depending on who you believe).

Heat up slowly until bubbles form in water. Remove konbu just before the water boils (else bad things happen, apparently).

Add in a bit more water to bring down the overall temperature. Throw in the handful of katsuo-bushi and bring to boil for just a moment (any longer and more bad things happen).

Take pot off heat, and let the katsuo-bushi sit (30 seconds to several minutes, experiment to suit your taste), then sieve/strain/filter.

For those who keep a messy kitchen, you should now have a soggy piece of konbu by the stove and some even soggier katsuo-bushi flakes sitting in a sieve. You can use these to make secondary dashi (niban dashi) using the same process as above, rather like getting the most out of one tea-bag.

For me, once was enough. Riffing on Tsuji's clear soup recipe, I threw in a dash of soy sauce, a few blocks of tofu, chopped spring onions and shimeji mushrooms (you didn't think I went all that way for just some kelp and shaved fish, did you?), and sat down to consume Japanese Cookery 101.

Japansese Cooking - A Simple Art?

This was never going to be the Julie & Julia of Japanese cooking.

Reason 1: The JenJen/Tsuji Project, apart from the appalling lack of media-friendly alliteration, sounds more like an avant-garde architectural disaster than a daring cookery self-challenge.

Reason 2: A resounding lack of cat and husband to provide comfort during the inevitable breakdown of social interaction, necessary to execute over 200 dishes in any reasonable time frame.

Reason 3: My bordering-on-pathological inability to follow recipes.

Still, 'Add to Basket' was dutifully clicked, and three days later, Shizuo Tsuji's 500-page masterpiece, Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art, thudded onto my desk.

Flipping through A Simple Art over lunch (trying not to smudge my take-away sushi on the pristine off-white pages) was something of a revelation. A cookbook with no pictures. Just a handful of simple sketches where necessary. And I loved it.

Normally, I'm a huge stickler for photographs in recipe books. How else will I know what my Baby Rack of Lamb Marinated in Paprika and Hand-Crushed Peppercorns with Thrice-Caramelised Onions and Puy Lentils should look like? But here, reading Tsuji's clear, concise instructions, the art of photography was rendered useless. Frivolous. And best of all, even if the final concoction missed the target zone by several aesthetic miles, no one would ever know.

No more 'Gosh, it looked so much better in the pictures'. No more 'It's okay, sometimes soup is meant to be blue'.

Here they were, 220 recipes covering the everything from stocks and soups, to simmering and grilling, to steaming and one-pot cooking, passing through in-depth treatises on key Japanese ingredients and suggested dish pairings. First published in 1980, A Simple Art was recently re-issued for a 25th anniversary edition with, get this, next to no changes. Not bad for a book written when ABBA were topping the charts, floppy disks were still floppy, and I hadn't been born yet.

So here we go.

Nobu, eat your heart out. Tsuji and I, we've got some cooking to do.