Japanese

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Oh, snazzy block of tofu, where have you been all my life?

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By Leslie Brenner

One of the best things I’ve made from Emiko Davies’ charming new book, Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking, is what she calls Chilled Dressed Tofu.

It’s a block of tofu dressed as her obaachan (grandmother) used to prepare it for her: with soy sauce, sliced scallions, grated ginger and katsuobushi (shaved bonito). Her innovations are setting it on a shiso leaf, and adding a drizzle of sesame oil. No cooking required. Does it sound simple? It’s spectacular!

It comes together in a flash; really the only work involved is grating a piece of ginger and slicing a scallion. If you have access to a good Japanese supermarket, you should have no trouble finding fresh shiso leaves. But even if you leave off the shiso, the dish is really a treat — unexpectedly sumptuous and luxurious.

Silken (or soft) tofu is nicest for this dish, giving it a custardy, slippery texture. You could also use medium.

For the katsuobushi, any kind you find or have on hand will be fine; the fresher, the better. But if you’d like to make it really special, buy the most premium bonito flakes you can find.

READ: Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

Premium katsuobushi — dried bonito flakes — can be found at well stocked Japanese markets.

Best of all, if you prepare Japanese food with any kind of frequency, you may well have all the ingredients at hand (except probably the shiso). When the craving strikes, you’re just five minutes away from the treat.

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Recipe for Today: Chilled Oroshi Soba

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By Leslie Brenner

There’s an unforgettable flavor and a soothing, cooling ritual I inevitably crave when temperatures soar: oroshi soba. That’s the name for the traditional Japanese dish of cold buckwheat noodles served with grated daikon and tsuyu, a savory chilled dipping sauce. Often served on a basket or a mat, it’s a humble dish, but it’s one of my favorites in the world.

Here’s the recipe:

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Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

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Topped with bonito flakes, the Century Egg and House Tofu at Fat Mao in Vancouver (shown above) inspired our recipe for Silken Tofu with Mushrooms and Bonito Flakes.

By Leslie Brenner

Put yourself in possession of a bag of bonito flakes — or katsuobushi, as it’s called in Japanese — and your cooking life may never be the same. Shaggy, delicate and seemingly lighter than air, the ingredient is at once essential and superfluous, ephemeral and timeless. Paradoxical! Shaved bonito looks like sawdust, but it’s way more delicious.

The reason it’s so life-changing, if you’re a certain kind of cook, is that understanding how to use bonito flakes opens up a world of easy and outstanding Japanese dishes, as well as the ability — in the wave of a hand — to drop a mood-altering, umamiful flourish on a fun assortment of other dishes.

Let’s start with the traditional Japanese part of the katsuobushi equation. (Japanese cooks must be chuckling by now, for Japanese cooking simply cannot exist without the stuff.) Bonito flakes are a key component of dashi, the cuisine’s foundational stock. Packed with powerful yet easy-to-control umami, that dashi gives soups and dishes depth and breadth, a soft roundness that makes everything inviting.

Dashi could not be easier or quicker to make: Just steep a piece of kombu briefly in steaming water, drop in a flurry of bonito flakes, wait two minutes, then strain the liquid — dashi achieved. It’s the essential ingredient for miso soup. Just whisk in some miso, drop in tofu and other garnishes (scallions, carrots, onion, spinach, turnips), and it’s done. And delicious. With that dashi in your fridge or freezer, you can make miso soup in a flash, whenever the mood strikes.

Miso soup is made with dashi — of which bonito flakes are an essential ingredient.

RECIPE: Dashi

RECIPE: Miso Soup

Dashi is so essential that it’s the first recipe in many Japanese cookbooks, including star chef Masahuru Morimoto’s excellent Mastering the Art of Japanese Cooking.

The broth may be used to dress spinach, kale or other vegetables (a dish known as ohitashi), make a fabulous dipping sauce for soba, create nimono — Japanese-style simmered dishes, or the heart-warming egg, chicken and rice meal-in-a-bowl called oyoka don. Or pour hot dashi (instead of green tea) over a bowl of garnished rice, for a deluxe version of the homey leftovers-moment called ochazuke.

For anyone eager to dive into Japanese cooking, writes Morimoto, “making dashi should be your first order of business. Your cooking will never be the same.”

Katsuobushi, straight up

Making dashi isn’t the only thing you can do with katsuobushi — you can also use it straight out of the bag. Grab a handful of flakes and drop them on top of okonomiyaki — a savory, saucy pancake stuffed with seafood and vegetables. Watch it dance! The bonito flakes are so light that the heat from the pancake stirs it to catch air currents and wave around on the plate.

Our recipe is adapted from one in Sonoko Sakai’s inspiring book, Japanese Home Cooking.

RECIPE: Okonomiyaki

Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art offers a recipe for an ohitashi (those dashi-marinated greens) garnished with katsuobushi. It’s super easy, delicious, fun and dramatic.

RECIPE: Spinach with Dashi and Bonito Flakes

OK, wait — what is katsuobushi exactly?

Yes, let’s back up a moment to talk about the ingredient. Although it’s commonly referred to as bonito flakes or shaved bonito, katsuobushi can be made of either bonito or skipjack tuna; the fish is dried, smoked, sometimes fermented and then shaved. “In the old days,” writes Morimoto, “all cooks bought the fish in blocks that resembled petrified wood and shaved them by hand into fine, feather-like flakes. (Today, most buy preshaved katsuobushi, one modern convenience I can get behind.)”

Some experts write that katsuobushi should be refrigerated once it’s opened, and not kept more than a few days; Morimoto says it lasts “virtually forever” in your pantry. I used to keep — sealed in an airtight container — it in the pantry after opening it, but noticed that after six months or so it dried out. You want the flakes to be soft, not brittle, so I recommend storing it (sealed) in the fridge once it’s open.

You can usually find bags of katsuobushi in Asian supermarkets, usually in cellophane bags with red and white or red and black graphics. Sometimes you can even find them in well stocked generic supermarkets (they have them at the Whole Foods in my neighborhood). You can also find it online (including in the Cooks Without Borders Cookshop). The brands you find most often in Pan-Asian supermarkets and on Amazon are mostly similar in quality, but if you go to an excellent dedicated Japanese supermarket, such as Mitsuwa Marketplace, you can often spend a few more dollars and find katsuobushi of a higher quality (such as the one shown above). To me it’s worth it, especially if you’re using it as a garnish.

Do try these at home

My favorite dish on a recent trip to Vancouver, Canada was at a super-cool, laid-back spot called Fat Mao — Century Egg with House Tofu. (It’s pictured at the top of this story.) The dish consisted of that a thick layer of fabulously creamy house-made tofu topped with cilantro leaves, scallions, crispy fried shallots, a delicious “black garlic sauce,” quartered century eggs and a flurry of katsuobushi. Century eggs, in case you’re not familiar with them, are a Chinese delicacy made by preserving eggs in an an alkaline solution and ash — which renders the yolks intensely flavorful (funky! stinky!) and the whites gelatinous.

I sought to create a dish at home that conveyed a similar vibe, but that didn’t require making or procuring century eggs; I wanted something easy and relatively quick for instant gratification. In place of the century eggs, I found that dry-steamed crimini mushrooms tossed in a sauce made with black garlic was a weirdly excellent analog, providing a chewy-tender texture and loads of umami. Of course the organic silken tofu I picked up at the supermarket didn’t hold a candle to Fat Mao’s house-made tofu, but altogether I think the dish works really well.

Finally, there’s chef José Andrés’s Dancing Eggplant — from his 2019 cookbook Vegetables Unleashed. Quick to make — by zapping Japanese eggplants in the microwave till tender, slathering them with a sweet, salty glaze, then topped with katsuobushi. And yep, it gets its name from the fact that the bonito flakes wave around like they’re dancing on of the eggplant.

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On a hot summer evening, nothing refreshes like a basket of chilled oroshi soba

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By Leslie Brenner

There’s an unforgettable flavor and a soothing, cooling ritual I inevitably crave when temperatures soar: oroshi soba. That’s the name for the traditional Japanese dish of cold buckwheat noodles served with grated daikon and tsuyu, a savory chilled dipping sauce. Often served on a basket or a mat, it’s a humble dish, but it’s one of my favorites in the world.

Here’s how the ritual goes. You drop the grated daikon into the tsuyu; it sort of dissolves into it like a snowball. (“Oroshi” means grated vegetable.) You can also stir in some sliced scallions and a little wasabi, if you like. Pick up some noodles with your chopsticks, dip them into the sauce, lift to your mouth and revel in the moment: The nutty, earthy noodles, the sauce’s direct umami and the snappy, uplifting bite of the daikon all combine into an incredibly resonant flavor-chord, made all the more fabulous because it’s so refreshingly cold and wet.

It’s that unmistakable flavor-chord that plays in my memory summer after summer — a taste-memory loop that’s lasted now for decades.

I first happened upon oroshi soba 21 years ago. I had just moved back to Los Angeles from New York, and the L.A. Times’ Food editor at the time, Russ Parsons, invited me to lunch at a modest family-style Japanese diner in Little Tokyo, just a couple blocks from the Times’ historic headquarters. Those cold noodles and their flavor chord did a number on me, and I was hooked. When I joined the paper two years later, the diner — Suehiro (it’s still there!) — became a favorite. I always ordered the same thing: Not the plain and also traditional zaru soba, served without daikon, but the oroshi soba. For me, the chord’s high daikon note is essential.

Two recommended brands of dried soba: Kajino Kokusan Soba (left) and Shirakiku Japanese Style Buckwheat Noodle. Dried soba often comes bundled in 100-gram portions.

A few years later, Russ and I had another soba lunch, this time with me as Food editor and Russ as our California Cook columnist. It took place just south of L.A., in Gardena, at a tiny, under-the-radar spot called Otafuku. There the chef-owner, Seiji Akutsu, made incredible soba by hand — a rarity at the time, even in Southern California with its deep Japanese culinary culture. I can’t remember if Russ had been there before that, but he wound up writing about Otafuku (which is still open a quarter-century after it debuted). Russ’ piece, “Art of the Noodle,” is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about soba.

Weirdly, oroshi soba played a key part in my decision to move to Dallas, Texas some years later: Communing with a zaruful of exquisite handmade soba at Tei-An, an extraordinary Japanese restaurant that had just opened the previous year, I could suddenly see myself living there. (To this day, Tei-An one of my favorite restaurants — not just in Dallas, but anywhere.)

Still. A person can’t eat at Tei-An whenever she wants, and so there are times I’d like to enjoy an icy plate of oroshi soba at home.

Recently I started looking into how to make that delicious tsuyu, the dipping sauce. If I could do that and find a decent dried noodle, the rest would be a breeze.

Dashi, shown with its two components besides water: kombu (top left) and bonito flakes. The resulting stock is a key ingredient in tsuyu.

A recipe in Shizuo Tsuji’s seminal 1980 book Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art solved the tsuyu part of the puzzle lickety-split: One taste, and I knew it was exactly right. Make a batch, and you’ll have a goldmine in your fridge: It keeps for several months, and the recipe yields enough to keep you in cold noodles longer than a Texas heat wave. Whenever the oroshi soba craving bites you, you can have it on the table in the time it takes to boil the noodles and grate the daikon.

READ: Katsuobushi (bonito flakes) will put a spring in your step and umami on your plate

Preparing the sauce might seem a little daunting, as it involves first making dashi — Japan’s essential stock. But it’s totally worth it: Dashi is quickly made and you can freeze what you don’t use in the tsuyu, which means you can later make scratch miso soup at a moment’s notice. Once you have the dashi, the tsuyu is quick to come together as well: Just add soy sauce, mirin and a touch of sugar over the heat, then drop in a flurry of bonito flakes. Wait 10 seconds, strain, let cool and it’s ready. You can put together both in the span of 30 minutes.

The dried noodle part is a little tricky, as those made from 100% buckwheat can be a bit sawdust-like. The best dried noodles combine buckwheat flour and wheat flour, with a high enough proportion of buckwheat for great flavor, but enough wheat flour so the texture’s right.

I asked Teiichi Sakurai, Tei-An’s chef, owner and soba master, if there’s a one he finds tolerable. He recommended Kajino Kokusan, which I found at the best Japanese supermarket in our area, Mitsuwa Marketplace. I also looked there for the brands recommended by Mutsuko Soma in a taste-test story published in Food & Wine magazine in 2019. (Soma is chef at Seattle’s renowned soba restaurant, Kamonegi.) I didn’t find those exactly, but did find a dried soba from Shirakiku — one of the brands she recommended. (The specific noodle is Shirakiku Japanese Style Buckwheat Noodle.) Both it and the Kajino Kokusan are very good. Even better, with a lovely, springy texture and deeper flavor, was a fresh noodle I also found at Mitsuwa — Izumo Soba Noodles from Soba Honda.

If you find yourself staring down an assortment of unfamiliar dried soba, I’d suggest choosing one imported from Japan that lists both buckwheat flour and wheat flour in the ingredients, with buckwheat listed first, and no other ingredients besides salt.

OK. You should have what you need. If you want to turn your soba moment into dinner, you don’t need to add much — I like to start with something vinegary, like a simple sunomono salad. Or pick up some tsukemono at that same Japanese grocery — shibazuke, the purple one made with eggplant and shiso, would be dreamy.

And then enjoy that cool, slurpy, umamiful tangle of buckwheaty goodness.

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One of our 5 (five!) fabulous potato salads is sure to make your Fourth phenomenal

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Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

Our ‘Best Potato Salad Ever’

My family has put me on a potato salad time-out.

That’s because I’ve made so much potato salad during The Great Confinement that we’ve each gained about 9,000 pounds. OK, I’m kidding — but it’s surprising we haven’t, considering the carbo count these past few months.

In more normal times, I try to avoid potatoes in favor of lower-carb vegetables — and when I eat them, they’re a rare treat (like sweets for some people). But in confinement, I’ve given myself license to eat them at will. After all, they’re so delicious. And comforting. And affordable. And available. You get my drift. If ever we deserved to indulge in a potato fancy, it’s now!

Plus, it’s great to have potato in the fridge. We have to cook every night, and it goes with most everything. It’s great with a work-at-home lunch. And it can even be a dazzling little stand-in for boiled potatoes in a main-course niçoise salad.

It’s been so omnipresent in our kitchen these months that one day we’ll probably describe something that’s everywhere as “ubiquitous as potato salad in a pandemic.”

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Herb-Happy Potato Salad

Potato salad is an ideal vehicle for a garden’s-worth of herbs, as in the Herb-Happy Potato above. With its vinaigrette dressing, this is the sole vegan entry in our bunch; it’s also gluten-free.

Jubilee+Potato+Salad+Portrait.jpeg

An old-fashioned one, such as Toni Tipton-Martin’s from her Jubilee cookbook, can take you all the way back to childhood. (Both are super-quick and easy to make.)

I love the Jubilee one because it’s rich in hard-boiled eggs, whose yolks blend lusciously into the mayo-based dressing, there’s a hint of sweet pickle relish and a nice celery crunch. If you’re going all-American classic with your July 4 menu, this is the one for you.

On the other hand, if you want to play it a little more exotic, consider a Japanese potato salad — we have two to choose from. One is from Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking (which we recently reviewed); the other is the one chef Justin Holt serves at his Dallas ramen hot-spot, Salaryman. (And that one sports a prize on top: halved ajitama marinated eggs — like the ones you find garnishing bowls of ramen.)

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.

Each serving of Salaryman Potato salad is topped with half an ajitmama marinated egg.


Oh, man — I’m getting a starch high just revisiting them in my brain!

Finally, there is the one that predates the other four on Cooks Without Borders — the one we named Best Potato Salad Ever before we knew there’d be such heavy competition.

Best-Ever Potato Salad Lede.JPG

That’s Wylie holding a batch of it, before he and Thierry put me on potato salad time-out.

What makes it so good? It gets a luxurious richness from soft-boiled eggs, delightful tang from cornichons and shallots and lift from an array of herbs, all in the form of a New-Wave Gribiche.

I think any one of the fiHve would be a welcome guest at your picnic or party tomorrow. You can make them ahead, or not. Oh, and by the way, they’re all easy-going — in case you want to swap potato types, or swap shallots for scallions, and so forth. Whichever you choose, enjoy. I’ll be jealous.

Happy Fourth!

[RECIPE: Herb-Happy Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Jubilee Country-Style Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Salaryman Potato Salad]

[RECIPE: Sonoko Sakai’s Potato Salada]

[RECIPE: Best Potato Salad Ever]

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Cool as a cuke: Four cucumber-happy salads to refresh you through a hot and heavy summer

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Blimey, we all need a chill pill! In the absence of an effective one, we’ve been turning to the coolest of vegetables, the cucumber.

The Oxford Companion to Food tells us that the cucumber is “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables,” that it has been grown for some 4,000 years, that it may have originated in South India and that Christopher Columbus introduced it to Haiti in 1494. Jessica B. Harris points out, however, in The Africa Cookbook, that the some scholars feel that the cucumber may have come from Central Africa.

But wait — isn’t “one of the oldest cultivated vegetables” technically a fruit?

“It is a fruit,” says my friend Tim Simmonds, a Dallas botanist — and so are squashes, both summer and winter, including pumpkins. “Same big happy family.”

The curcurbit family, that is: the vine-y plant group that also includes watermelons, chayotes, gourds, cassabananas (a.k.a. melocotón) and the kiwano (a.k.a. African horned cucumber or jelly melon).

Given the cucumber’s origin story, it’s not surprising that it is popular in India — especially in the form of raita.

Cucumber Raita.jpg

The cooling cucumber salad accompanies just about any kind of Indian meal, of course. But I’ve been known to enjoy a bowl of it on its own for a soothing lunch (particularly in a pandemic!).

Ours features grated cucumber, toasted cumin and a touch of lemon juice.

A Cucumber Sunomono was literally the first recipe we test-drove for our recent review of Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, since the cucumber salad is a frequent starter of Japanese meals. This one, which weaves wakame seaweed in with the cukes, sports a jaunty grated-ginger garnish. We fell in love, not surprisingly. Maybe you will, too (let us know in a comment!).

Sunomono tight.JPG

Cucumbers also make appearances in Sakai’s recipe for Potato Salada and Dallas chef Justin Holt’s Salaryman Potato Salad.

But we’re not counting those in our four, so wait, there’s more!

Radish-cuke overhead leandscape.JPG

This pretty Cucumber, Radish and Feta Salad came together as we riffed on a Levantine dish called khiar bel na’na, starring thin-sliced cukes, dried mint and orange-blossom water. We added radishes, scallions, feta and fresh mint (which layers beautifully with the dried). Lately it has become a house favorite.

And finally, this Scandanavian Cucumber-Dill Salad — which is wonderful with poached salmon, Cold Poached Arctic Char or even Swedish meatballs.

Cucumber dill salad.jpg

A happy development, at least in my neck of the woods, is that organic Persian cucumbers have become more readily available, even during the pandemic. They have lovely texture (as long as they’re nice and fresh), they’re less watery than English cukes but more flavorful than most hothouse cukes, and they don’t require peeling — a win win win. Though sizes for all kinds vary, generally speaking you can figure two Persian cucumbers for one medium English cucumber, or three for a large English cuke.

As you’ll see from the above recipes, many cultures salt cucumbers and let them sit to draw out the water and ensure great texture; sometimes gentle squeezing is called for as well. Hope you enjoy these refreshing treats.

Stay cool. Think cuke. Wear a mask. Stay healthy.

[RECIPE: Cucumber Raita]

[RECIPE: Cucumber Sunomono]

[RECIPE: Cucumber, Radish & Feta Salad]

[RECIPE: Cucumber-Dill Salad]

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Sonoko Sakai's 'Japanese Home Cooking' is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years

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Japanese Home Cooking.JPG

A few years back, when Cooks Without Borders was just a wee thing, I developed an obsession with okonomiyaki.

A thick, luscious savory Japanese pancake, okonomiyaki is filled with vegetables and seafood or meat, painted with an umami-rich okonomiyaki sauce or tonkatsu sauce, perhaps squiggled with mayonnaise and definitely topped with bonito flakes. The bonito flakes — katsuobushi in Japanese — are so thin and light that they catch air currents and wave around, looking like they’re alive.

There’s a bit of a cult in the U.S. around okonomiyaki. After I wrote a story about the crazy pancake for The Dallas Morning News (in 2016), I decided to find or develop a recipe for Cooks Without Borders.

Easier said than done! Too thick, too pasty, too gloppy, too weird — I couldn’t manage to get it right. Recipes were scarce, sketchy, flawed, and I was flailing developing my own. Unable to nail the batter, I resorted to buying something called “okonomiyaki flour” in a Japanese supermarket. The store-bought okonomiyaki sauce I was painting them with was cloyingly sweet. None of it was working.

After something like Okonomiyaki Number Twelve, Thierry begged for mercy. “Stop!” he cried. “Yamero, kudasai ! やめろください!”

Kidding. Thierry does not speak Japanese (nor do I).

The point is, there is now a book that has an okonomiyaki recipe that works: Sonoko Sakai’s delightful Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

Thanks to Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, we can now make okonomiyaki at home.

Thanks to Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking, we can now make okonomiyaki at home.

Whether or not a wild-looking savory pancake speaks to you at all, if you are looking to dive (or tip-toe) into Japanese cooking and seeking one great book to guide you, you can do no better than this delightful volume. Published last November, it is now a finalist for a prestigious 2020 IACP Cookbook Award in the International category.

To so many of us, Japanese cuisine means high-flying restaurant food — the kind of precise and specialized dishes chefs spend years (or even decades) learning to execute. I’ve never wanted to make nigiri sushi at home, for instance, as it depends on sourcing the best and most interesting fish, treating them properly, having the knife mastery to slice them to their best advantage— oh, and getting the rice right, which is an elaborate subject in itself. Yakitori — skewered chicken — involves grilling the poultry over blazing-hot binchotan (Japanese charcoal), something I wouldn’t be able to manage at home, even if I could find the binchotan. Because the places I’ve lived — Los Angeles, New York, the San Francisco Bay Area and Dallas — all have such great Japanese food, I’ve always preferred to leave it to the pros.

However, going back to my childhood in L.A., I always loved another kind of Japanese cooking, something much closer to home cooking. It’s the kind of humble, approachable fare that Sakai features in Japanese Home Cooking.

You might start with something quick and easy, like a cucumber sunomono. One taste of the Sanbaizu dressing — mirin, rice vinegar and soy sauce simmered very briefly then cooled — and I was back at Tempura Hiyama, the beloved neighborhood mom-and-pop of my childhood in the San Fernando Valley.

Sakai’s cucumber sunomono with wakame seaweed is garnished with grated ginger and toasted sesame seeds.

Sakai’s cucumber sunomono with wakame seaweed is garnished with grated ginger and toasted sesame seeds.

Sakai adds wakame (the same seaweed that’s common in miso soup), along with glass noodles and grated ginger, but you could go even simpler with just the cukes, dressing and sesame.

If you want to go into Japanese cooking in any kind of depth, you’ll want to put dashi in your bag of tricks; not surprisingly, Sakai leads off her book with a chapter about it. A quick stock made from nothing more than katsuobushi (those same shaved bonito flakes that wave around on top of the okonomiyaki), kombu (a dried seaweed) and water, it is the basis for much of Japanese cooking — just as veal stock is the foundation, or fond in French, of French cooking, but it’s even more ubiquitous in Japanese dishes. Dashi is easily achieved — just heat a piece of kombu in water, remove it, and drop in a bunch of bonito flakes, let them steep for two minutes then strain them out.

Kombu (upper left), katsuobushi (lower left) and water combine to make dashi (right).

Kombu (upper left), katsuobushi (lower left) and water combine to make dashi (right).

Miso soup with shimeji mushrooms, tofu, lemon zest and scallions

Miso soup with shimeji mushrooms, tofu, lemon zest and scallions

I like Sakai’s approach to it. She’s quick to let readers know that rather than discarding the spent kombu and bonito flakes, you can (and should) use them to make a secondary dashi. While the first one is good enough to sip on its own (and has lots of culinary uses), the secondary dashi is good for miso soup and for seasoning a wide variety of dishes. Miso soup, by the way, is super easy to make once you have dashi: Just stir in some miso and add whatever else you like — tofu, mushrooms, wakame seaweed, etc.

Sakai provides recipes for several other dashis as well, including two vegan versions (one using only kombu, and the other kombu and shiitakes). That’s a splendid solution for vegans who are limited to what they can eat in a Japanese restaurant: It’s super easy to make vegan miso soup at home.

Also useful is a section about shio koji — which is the easiest way for home cooks to get in on the koji craze that has captivated chefs. To prepare it, get your hands on rice koji — rice that has been innoculated with koji (you’ll find a link to purchase it in the recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon below). Massage that together with salt and hot water, let it ferment 5 days and you’ve got a useful ingredient that you can use to rub into napa cabbage leaves to make a quick pickle, or onto meat, chicken, salmon or other fish as an overnight (or up to three-day) marinade. As Jonathan Kauffman explains in the Epicurious story linked above, it concentrates the flavors in those proteins, adding umami depth.

Sakai’s recipe for Koji-Marinated Salmon, which she calls her “‘no-recipe’ salmon dish,” proves the point; the extremely simple prep is a great one to add to your repertoire. See some nice fillets in the supermarket? Slap that shio koji all over them and figure out when you’ll eat them later. After overnight koji marination, give the fillets a quick wipe, run them under the broiler and dinner’s ready in less than minutes. While the salmon’s broiling, you can grate some daikon and ginger, which make a really nice garnish.

Koji-Marinated Salmon with grated daikon and ginger

Koji-Marinated Salmon with grated daikon and ginger

Looking for dishes to round out the Koji-Marinated Salmon? Sakai’s “Potato Salada” (as it is called in Japanese) is wonderful, with lots of cucumber along with carrot and green beans. (And we have other dishes in our new Japanese section — check out the Spinach with Sesame Dressing.)

To make the Potato Salada, Sakai has you whip up some Japanese mayo and nerigoma (Japanese tahini). Our adaptation includes those instructions, but also provides a hack using store-bought mayo and tahini. (We hope Ms. Sakai doesn’t object — it was pretty good!)

Potato Salada Tight.JPG

I have not yet had a chance to make any of the noodles in the book, but the chapter is enticing, with beautifully photographed recipes showing how to make handmade soba, udon and ramen. Sakai, who was born in New York and grew up in Japan, Mexico and California, lives in Southern California, where she gives cooking classes — including very popular classes on soba-making. So this is definitely something I’ll want to explore. There are also recipes for tofu and miso (which takes from six months to a year and a half to ferment!), and for mochi. A pandemic’s worth of projects!

Meanwhile, what she writes about rice is illuminating. I’d been pulling my hair out during the pandemic because I couldn’t find sushi rice, and Thierry, Wylie and I were all craving sushi.

Sakai explains that any short-grain rice can be used for sushi — including Arborio, which I had in my pantry. I’d had no idea! I cooked that Arborio according to her instructions for Basic White Rice, and turned it into sushi rice, using her seasoning formula — 2 batches of basic white rice (about 8 cups) seasoned with 1/3 cup unseasoned rice vinegar, 3 tablespoons sugar and a tablespoon of sea salt. Perfect sushi rice! With it I made some simple maki rolls. We couldn’t have enjoyed it more.

With hardly an exception, the recipes in Japanese Home Cooking work perfectly — which is incredibly rare for any cookbook these days. I test-drove a lot of them (fifteen, at last count), and still have many on my can’t-wait-to-try list (Kombu-Cured Thai Snapper Sashimi, as soon as I can get my hands on some great fish, and Soba Salad with Kabocha Squash and Toasted Petpitas in the fall!).

Honestly, this is one of the best new cookbooks to come along in years. The writing throughout is clear, charming, thoughtful and frequently illuminating, and Poon’s photos are gorgeous. Already it has given me the tools to feel like a pretty confident Japanese cook, which is quite a gift indeed.

Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors by Sonoko Sakai. Photographs by Rick Poon. Roost Books, 300 pages, $40.