2010 was probably the best year of my life, therefore there were very few KF articles this year, sorry!! KF does still get lots of access, encouraging comments, links and mentions. Thank you!

To ring in the new year, to hope for a year of happiness and contentment, people like to have good food and drink. Here is some inspiration, KyotoFoodie style!

Uni Ikura Donburi and Champagne

Uni Ikura Donburi - detail

Even before I was the KyotoFoodie, I dreamt up this breakfast for Japanese ’Oshogatsu’ New Year’s Day. Japanese have osechi on New Year’s Day morning, all together, at home, a family meal, all out of one box. Osechi is real Zen master food, it is great. However, I couldn’t really call it delicious, and that is fine. Traditionally, the idea was to give the womenfolk three days rest by eating preserved food for the first three days of the year. Truly delicious or not, you only eat osechi once a year and it definitely gives you a taste of life from like 1000 years ago. How Zen master!
I like osechi but this is my idea of how to celebrate the new year. This is my take on Japanese zeitaku (luxury).

How to Do It:
1. You wake up on Jan 1st, not too early, hopefully not hung over from the previous evening’s festivities.
2. You see a big box of excellent Osechi on the dining room table. But, you save that for later. Hey, this is New Year’s Day. You should go back to bed – drunk on champagne, real soon.
3. You have the most zeitaku donburi imaginable – for breakfast. This meal is:
Rice cooked in dashi, heaps and heaps of konbu and maybe sake and mirin. (I thought about cooking the rice in champagne this year, but chickened out. Maybe another day?)
On the rice you heap tons of uni (sea urchin roe) and ikura (salmon roe). This is New Year’s Day, so don’t hold back! I aim to make it about 1 inch thick, this is at least 5 times more than you would get if you ordered this dish at a decent donburi restaurant.
4. You drink a bottle of champagne, with your zeitaku breaki. (One bottle per capita. No sparkling wine, go with the overpriced French stuff today.)
5. You go back to bed and sleep for another few hours.
6. You wake up and think: Hey, this is starting out to be a really great year! (And, its only like half a day old.)
7. What to say to your lover: I hope I don’t need to explain this part on this PG13 site.

Champagne Chilling in the Snow - Japanese Garden Style!

Eating with a Spoon Makes it More Luxurious

All Gone!

What to do if you can’t get, or eat, uni and ikura: Ah, how about steak and lobster, etc? The point here is to:
1. Have one of the most luxurious dinners of the year – for breakfast!
2. Drink a bottle of champagne.
3. Go back to bed (or futon).

’Recipe’
1. Get your lover close and be sweet.
2. Cook rice.
Use really good water, preferable from a shrine with the best, or second best feng shui in the prefecture.
Cook that rice in dashi with, and I quote, an ’insane’ amount of konbu. Miwa, said that my white rice is black, because of so much konbu. Good, good. Make your white rice ’black’ with flavor on New Year’s Day!!!
3. Serve and Indulge
Heap with tons (and I mean tons) of fresh uni and ikura. Authentic KyotoFoodie style is that it should exceed 1 inch in thickness!
4. Go back to bed.

Kurogome - Black Heirloom Rice

Black Rice - Kombu Overload!

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Roast Salt Pork Okowa with Root Vegetables and Yuzu

Recently I have made a lot of okowa because I got sick. I got a nasty cold (twice) for the first half of February and when I get sick, I get cookin, or at least eatin! I eat out or cook plenty of high calorie meals. Wagyu yakiniku is my favorite foodie cold remedy!

I happened to have several big chunks of fatty pork shoulder on hand because I had just finished making an epic batch of charcuterie with Brendon E. Also, I had also discovered a nikuman (meat-filled steamed ‘baozi’ bun) at FamilyMart this year that I liked a lot, it was filled with shio buta (salt pork). So, I salted up one of the pork shoulders and let it rest in the refrigerator for several days and then roasted it in the oven, until a lot of the fat had melted away. After it cooled I chopped it up into bit sized pieces for okowa. If you know Chinese cuisine, you can see this is heading in that direction.

Mochigome and Kome: Sticky glutinous rice compared to regular short-grain rice.

About Okowa (おこわ)
Okowa was originally casual expression used by women working in the Imperial Court. The proper name for the dish was kowameshi 強飯 (こわめし). Kowameshi literary means strong, hard (kowa) rice (meshi). This is because as the dish is made with mochigome it has a much more firm and chewy texture than normal white rice or takikomi-gohan.

Throughout history mochi rice was very precious and was only enjoyed on special occasions such as festival and new years. Even today mochi rice is far more expensive than regular rice.

As mochi rice has its own sweetness in Japanese cuisine a simple seasoning with some seasonal ingredients is favored. Popular ingredients for seasonal okowa recipes include chestnuts, mushrooms, sansai mountain vegetables, bamboo shoots, white meat fish. This is then cooked with a cooking sake, mirin (sweet cooking sake) and soy sauce. Properly okowa is steamed, however modern rice cookers can make it very well with the push of a button.

There is now an okowa specialty chain shop in many of the department store food courts that offers seasonal okowa steamed to perfection.

Some of the ingredients.

Hearty Mid-winter Fatty Pork and Root Vegetable Okowa
Okowa is usually not at all oily but I needed some cold fighting power from this so I put plenty of pork in. Japanese believe that it is very healthy to eat root vegetables in the winter, so I added a lot carrot and burdock root. The aburaage deep-fried tofu came from Otokomae Tofuten, it is very thick and has a rich tofu flavor. I made this dish 3 times over the last 10 days or so and I must say that I liked the oiliest, sweetest, stickiest and most caramelized version the best, which this slightly more healthy recipe is not.

Shio-buta Roast Salt Pork

Gobo Burdock Root: Washed and Unwashed

I garnished mine two different ways; one with chopped scallions and the other with julienned yuzu peel and a squeeze of yuzu juice. Yuzu was far better. If I were serving guests, I thought that I would make three versions and serve each guest all three in small portions. That would be very ‘Kyoto’, I thought. For the third garnish I thought that go with fine chopped pork that had been re-sauteed in oil with additional salt and then a squeeze of grated ginger through muslin over the rice. Or, perhaps long strips of paper thin sliced deep-fried gobo.

Roast Salt Pork Okowa with Root Vegetables and Scallions

Roast Salt Pork Okowa with Root Vegetables and Yuzu

Roast Salt Pork Okowa with Root Vegetables and Yuzu

Okowa Recipe: Hearty Mid-winter Fatty Pork and Root Vegetable Okowa
Shio Buta (Roast Salt Pork) I ground sea salt onto the fatty pork until it has well covered and then wrapped it in cellophane and let it rest in the refrigerator for about 2 days. Next I slowly roasted it in the oven for several hours until a lot of the fat has cooked off. My unscientific analysis is that all the salt runs off the surface with the melting fat. However, the roasted pork still comes out salty enough that you couldn’t really eat more than a few bites at a time and this makes it just right for flavoring the okowa.

Gobo Burdock Root Burdock root must be well washed and then cut into strips or chunks, depending on how thick the actual root is. Next you need to perform the ‘aku-nuki’ to remove the bitterness. Normally you place the cut burdock root in water and allow to soak for 30 minutes or an hour and change the water several times. The water will turn brown and the burdock whiter. Traditionally aku-nuki is considered essential for any preparation of gobo. However, recently it has been revealed that the ‘aku’ in gobo is not aku at all but polyphenol and other desirable nutrients. Modern preparations of gobo call for soaking it in vinegar water for just several minutes to remove the dark color which will stain soups and rice dishes.

Gobo needs a good deal of heat and/or time cooking and the time required to cook rice doesn’t suffice. So, you can either cut your burdock paper thin or blanch it. This is a hearty recipe so I went with chunks of burdock and blanch them for a few minutes.

Mochigome Just mochigome can be used, however I made mine about 20% oshimugi (pressed barley), the same that is used in mugi-gohan. It is essential to first soak the mochi rice in hot water. I put my mochi rice into a metal bowl and poured on 60º C water and allow to soak for about an hour.

After soaking well, rinse the mochi rice with fresh water several times.

Caramelizers – Cooking Sake, Mirin and Soy Sauce Mochi rice has a natural sweetness but okowa gets sweeter thanks to these ingredients. A lot of chefs in Japan add and measure these ingredients with a ladle and that is what I did. My ratio is 3:2:1; 3 parts cooking sake, 2 parts mirin (sweet cooking sake) and 1 part Japanese shoyu soy sauce. One Japanese ladle full is about 35 ml, or 4 tablespoons. I think that you could even double the amount of sake and mirin from the above.

Ingredients

• 3 cups mochi rice (Japanese short grain glutinous rice)
• water
• 1 cup chopped fatty pork (salt roasted if possible)
• 1 cup chopped carrots
• 1 cup sliced gobo burdock root (blanched)
• 1/2 cup sliced shiitake mushrooms
• 1/2 cup sliced aburaage tofu (deep fried tofu)
• 90 ml cooking sake
• 60 ml mirin
• 30 ml shoyu soy sauce
• scallions and yuzu for garnish

Preparation
Rinse the rice well and add to rice cooker. Add desired amount of sake, mirin and shoyu then add required amount of water according to your rice cooker settings. I made mine with just the same amount of liquid as for regular white rice and it came out just fine.

Rinse gobo well and add all other ingredients to rice cooker. Stir the ingredients a bit to even out distribution then close the lid and start cooking.

Serve and garnish as you like.

Roast Salt Pork Okowa with Root Vegetables - Leftovers 24 hours later, wow! What a color.

Links and Reference
Just Bento has a good article on a more typical preparation of okowa here.

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Things had been slow going between us, I must have gone to Kichisen five times to try to explain to him what I wanted to do. I even took Miwa with me a few times. He was always friendly and polite but never said yes, he didn’t say no either.

On one occasion that I went Chef Tanigawa lent me this old, out of print book about Kyoto cuisine written by one of his masters. After a month or so I thought I should return it, but before doing so, I photocopied the book as I thought that I wasn’t going to be able to get my hands on a copy again. I brought it back and he asked me if I was really done with it. I matter-of-factly said that I photographed the book. He was surprised, I assured him that I photocopied it literally from cover to cover. He said that as New Year’s was fast approaching I ought to do an article on his Osechi. I gladly agreed to that and quickly planned it into a major series!

He yelled into the kitchen for the apprentices to wrap up a big round daikon radish for me and told me to make tsukemono with it. This was the first time that I saw Kichisen apprentices scurrying about for me. Next came a bag of shinmai new rice. When I got home I laid them out on my desk in the sunny south room and photographed them.

I think that photocopying the entire book might have impressed him into taking me seriously. I really don’t know.

Almost a Year Has Passed: 2008 New Rice from Chef Tanigawa

2009: The other night the telephone rang and it was Chef Tanigawa saying that he had received his 2009 new rice and that he had made some onigiri rice balls and was having an apprentice run them up to my house. I had actually just finished dinner when the telephone rang and was not very hungry.

The onigiri were nearly gooey soft yet there was tons of okoge in them. They were not wrapped in nori seaweed or stuffed with anything. They were especially salty though and I distinctly feeling grains of salt crunching between my teeth! On the side was his beni shoga pickled ginger, also over-the-top salty.

This is what arrived in a natural wrapping of bamboo sheath.

Kichisen Shinmai Onigiri and Bamboo Sheath Wrapping

Kichisen Shinmai Onigiri Unwrapping and Green Leaves

Kichisen Shinmai Onigiri with Beni Shoga

Notice the yellow okoge in the onigiri. The beni shoga pickled ginger is separated with a still green ginkgo leaf.

Kichisen Shinmai Onigiri with Beni Shoga

I decided that at least for myself, I wanted to recall this last year. I can’t count how many times Chef Tanigawa has called me over to Kichisen to tell me something, taste something, photograph something or give me something. It has been an experience that I never could have (or would have thought to) wish for. I am quite sure that there is no one else like him in Kyoto. He not only defeated Chef Masaharu Morimoto on Iron Chef, he beat him in a clean sweep. Yet, Chef Tanigawa is very down to earth and very accessible, open and friendly. The kind of master Kyoto needs a whole lot more of!

He is such a nut and is really into Ed Hardy. When he is not in his hard starched and pressed white chef/priest robe, he is decked out in Ed Hardy clothing, Chrome Hearts bling and a Louis Vuitton bag and Gucci shoes.

One more than one occasion I have called him around dinner time, when he is most busy to ask him how to make something in particular. Just for a pointer or two, not even a recipe and he says I’ll be up to your house in like 45 minutes! Like the day I called to ask about the broth he used for his boiled tofu dish.

Chef Tanigawa Explaining His Turtle Soup (or the effects thereof)

After Sake at Asakura

On the last night Zenchef and Norecipes were in town we went to Sake Bar Asakura to taste some real sake.

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Donabe Yakiguri Gohan (Roasted Chestnut Rice) 焼き栗ご飯

Kuri-gohan and O-koge
Kuri-gohan is an autumn favorite, as are yaki-kuri (yakiguri), or roasted chestnuts. This dish is slightly novel in that combines the two. Kuri-gohan is wonderful but it lacks the smokey aroma of well roasted chestnuts. Peeling chestnuts is a bit of a pain, but it is worth the effort and cannot be beat. Roasting and peeling chestnuts can be done with family or friends and makes for a nice time. This dish goes well with seasonal tsukemono pickles and grilled fish.

This dish has a good deal of sugar content from the chestnuts, sake and mirin, so if cooked in a donabe earthenware pot you can be sure that you will get a nice crust of o-koge (お焦げ), slightly burned rice, at the bottom of the donabe pot.

Yakiguri Gohan – Roasting Chestnuts Over Open Flame

The same effect can be accomplished with charcoal, an electric broiler, or even a torch.

Yakiguri Gohan – Roasted Chestnuts, Still Smoldering

These are a bit underdone.

Yaki-kuri Gohan Recipe
Using roasted chestnuts makes this recipe different from the usual kuri gohan.

Ingredients

• 20-30 medium size fresh chestnuts
• 1 1/2 – 2 cups short grain white rice
• fresh water, equal to amount of rice after washing (if using donabe)
• 2 tablespoons sake (ryorishu cooking sake or sake)
• 1 tablespoon mirin
• 1/2 – 1 teaspoon salt
• dashi kombu (kelp for dashi broth)

Preparation
Peeling the chestnuts: There are numerous ways to peel chestnuts in Japan; boiling, roasting and just peeling raw with a sharp paring knife. Yakiguri (roasted chestnuts) gives a more kobashii (smokey and aromatic) flavor so we flamed the chestnuts to peel them. A charcoal grill could be used as well, the point is the infrared heat.

Chestnuts can be peeled easiest when they are hot, the hotter the better. Try roasting them in small batches to keep them hot while peeling. I burned away most of the outer shell over the gas range and then peeled away the inner skin with my fingers and sometimes favorite ceramic paring knife.

I returned the peeled chestnuts to the flame for just a few seconds to give them some additional ‘yaki’ roast flavor and aroma.

Donabe: Rinse the rice with water several times and place in colander while preparing the donabe and other ingredients. Remeasure rice and add to donabe. Add the same amount of water as rice. Then add sake, mirin and salt. Mix chestnuts into the rice and liquid and place small sheet of dried dashi kombu on top. You could use up to 1 cup of sake in place of water if you want to be very luxurious. Don’t skimp on salt, chestnuts need a good deal of salt to bring out their sweetness.

Heat until near boil and cover donabe. Reduce heat and set timer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, remove heat (if you are using an electric range, move the donabe from heat source) and set timer for another 10 minutes.

Uncover and mix gently with shamoji rice paddle and break chestnuts into pieces. You could leave them whole if you like, but that creates a presentation conundrum, or at least in Kyoto it might.

Yakiguri Gohan – Roasted Chestnuts, Ready to Peel

These are well done, the shell has almost been burned away completely. The trick is to peel the inner skin while the chestnut is still hot.

Yakiguri Gohan – Peeled and Roasted Chestnuts

I put these to the flame again for a few seconds after peeling.

Cooking Yakiguri Gohan in Donabe

Cooking Yakiguri Gohan in Donabe

Cooking Yakiguri Gohan in Donabe – Boiling and Ready to Cover

Cooking Yakiguri Gohan in Donabe – 20 Minutes Later, Dekita! (Done)

Generally the kombu is discarded, but I (Peko) like to bite off a chunk and chew it while I am serving the meal.

Yakiguri Gohan – Two Ways to Serve

The Presentation Conundrum
The presentation conundrum is with the whole chestnuts, on the right. Some will probably have been broken in the peeling process and the rice sticks to the tops and sides of the chestnuts in an unnatural and icky way. While the whole chestnuts look much more sexy, gently breaking them with the shamoji rice paddle solves the presentation conundrum and creates a uniform taste. This dish has only three main flavors: rice, chestnut and salt. If you don’t have whole chestnut in every bite, you might be disappointed.

Yakiguri Gohan – Whole Chestnuts

Nice o-koge charring on rice from the bottom of the donabe, this maybe a little too much. The o-koge should never make the rice become hard nor black, golden brown is what you are after. A tiny bit less heat would have made the o-koge come out perfect.

Yakiguri Gohan – Rice and Chestnuts Mix

The bit of rice at the top right of the bowl sticking out is very bad form, you can tell a foreigner served this! Everything inside the bowl, no stray rice sticking grains to the mouth of the bowl!

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Sansho Chirimen Jako is a condiment in Japan that is usually eaten with, or sprinkled on rice. It is made by simmering dried sardine fry (jako) and fresh sansho pepper fruit (sansho-no-mi) in soy sauce, cooking sake and mirin. I got this much sought after sansho chirimen jako from Tanigawa-san at Kichisen. Kichisen only serves it at the restaurant and sometimes gives it as a gift to customers to take home.

Many households make their own sansho chirimen jako and it can be purchased at any supermarket or department store food court. There are a number of companies in Japan that just make sansho chirimen jako. Of course there are many grades of this condiment available. Tanigawa-san says that Kishisen’s sansho chirimen jako is different from other stores and restaurants because with his technique the dried fish doesn’t get ‘soggy’ while cooking.

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako – Wrapping

Kichisen’s sansho chirimen jako comes in a beautiful wooden box, branded with the Kichisen logo on the cover. Tanigawa-san says that they use only the freshest sansho pepper fruit, his apprentices then handpick out the best. It is surprisingly high powered for Japanese cuisine.. If you have had Szechuan pepper you know this tongue and lip numbing sensation. In Japanese cuisine, sansho is used green, not ripened and dried and I think that it is even more numbing than the Chinese variety. So, a little goes a long way, especially in Japanese cuisine.

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako – Unwrapping

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako

To do justice to this excellent sansho chirimen jako, I made white rice in a gohan nabe, not the electric rice cooker. Miwa made this side dish with some interesting vegetables that I got at the Kyoto Central Wholesale Food Market; they were a traditional Yamato (Nara) vegetable and a traditional Naniwa (Osaka) vegetable. The Nara vegetable I had never seen or heard of before. It is very long and slender Japanese togarashi peppers, called Himo Togarashi, or yarn peppers. Like other Japanese peppers, they are not very hot and spicy. They were rather bitter, which I found interesting and unexpected. The Naniwa vegetable is a kind of eggplant that is fairly common but is usually used to make tsukemono pickles.

Gohan Nabe Rice

Gohan Nabe Rice

Gohan Nabe Rice

The slightly burned rice at the bottom of the gohan nabe is called o-koge and is usually considered a treat to Japanese. O-koge is proof that the rice was cooked the old fashioned way.

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako – Served on Rice

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako – Served on Rice

Kichisen Sansho Chirimen Jako and Summer Vegetables

Heirloom Nara Vegetable: Himo Togarashi (Yarn Pepper)

Chirimen Jako – Uncooked

This is what the dried sardine fry look like before simmering. (image from this OpenKyoto article)

Gohan Nabe: Earthenware Pot for Cooking Rice
Rice cooked in a gohan nabe is noticeably tastier than in an electric rice cooker. Of course electric rice cookers are the norm in modern Japan. But there is a lot interest in gohan nabe recently, especially among the younger generation. The gohan nabe is different from a regular donabe in that it has an inner and outer lid. Any donabe needs to be seasoned before its first use.

I have noticed from comments and search access keywords that there is a fair amount in interest in donabe and gohan nabe among foodies abroad now. We have a good discussion going on in our Kyoto Support forum about how to season a donabe.

I thought that it would be useful to make a demonstration video on how to season a donabe as well.

Video: How to Season a New Donabe

Steps to Season a Donabe
Seasoning is done by boiling cooked rice in the donabe until it becomes a thick porridge. This fills microscopic pores in the donabe and will help to prevent breakage and damage by heat.

• Fill the donabe to about 80% with water then add cooked rice.
• The amount of cooked rice should equal about 1/5 of the volume of water. A little more rice is said to be better than less.
• Simmer gently over until the rice forms a thick porridge. This took me about an hour. Be careful not to cook it down so much that it burns.
• Allow donabe and porridge to cool to room temperature and then discard. Don’t leave to porridge in for more than a few hours.
• Wash and wipe well. Allow to dry overnight before first use.

Donabe Maintenance

• All donabe accumulate hairline cracks with use.
• When not in use never cover a dobane if it is not completely dry inside.
• Avoid mold developing inside the donabe.

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Sea of Japan Heshiko Furikake へしこ ふりかけ
Heshiko is a specialty of the Sea of Japan side of Japan, the other side of the island from Kyoto. It is a preserved dish made of fish, usually mackerel or sardine. It is preserved in salted rice bran for at least a year. It is usually very salty and goes well with beer or sake.

I recently made blog friends with a blogger who is the okami-san, or proprietress, of a nice ryokan inn and restaurant in Fukui prefecture, on the Sea of Japan. They make handmade furikake from their local meibutsu (famous product), heshiko.

I ordered several bags and they arrived this morning. I opened on up and had a sniffy-sniff, and wow, it was high powered stuff! My first reaction was ‘Sea of Japan!’, their culinary culture is really different from Kyoto. It is still pretty close to Kyoto, so we have quite a bit of heshiko in Kyoto. This is preserved, not fermented fish, but it is pungent, but not in an overly challenging way. I think that most Western folks, especially foodies could handle this.

I decided to cook up some rice for lunch. To go with gourmet furikake, I knew that it had to be excellent rice cooked in the donabe earthenware pot, which tastes better than made in an electric rice cooker.

The main ingredients are: mackerel heshiko powder, daikon radish leaf powder, sesame seed, katsuo powder, shiitake powder and ichimi chili powder.

Heshiko Furikake

Iwashi Heshiko

This is what heshiko looks like when you buy it. This is sardine heshiko. To prepare heshiko, you simply wash the rice bran-salt mixture off and saute it in a bit of oil. It is very salty and pungent, so a little goes a long way. It can be put on plain rice or used as the flavoring for ochazuke. It is also a favorite tsumami (hors d’oeuvres) for drinkers.

Furikake on Rice Cooked in Donabe

Furikake on Rice Cooked in Donabe – detail

Donabe Takenoko Gohan (Bamboo Shoot Rice Cooked in Donabe) 土鍋竹の子ご飯
The variations of takenoko-gohan are many, I made this with chicken thigh. Shiitake mushroom is another popular ingredient. Using just takenoko is also very common and perhaps the most ‘Kyoto’ way to make this dish as it is simple, straight forward and focuses just on the taste of the natural, seasonal ingredients.

See ‘How To’ below and this KyotoFoodie article on How to Cook Fresh Bamboo Shoots.
・How to Cook Rice in a Donabe
・Takenoko Gohan Recipe (Bamboo Shoot Rice)

Precooked Takenoko

Simmering in Dashi Broth
Note the dashi pack on the upper right.

Simmering with Chicken
The amount of dashi has cooked down to about half. Ideally this will be the amount of liquid needed to cook the rice in.

Before: In Donabe with Atsuage Tofu and Kombu Added

After: Done Cooking, Ready to Enjoy

Donabe and Takenoko Gohan Served

Takenoko Gohan – detail

How to Cook Rice in a Donabe

Water to Rice Ratio
For donabe, the main point is the ratio of liquid to rice. More water is needed than for a modern, electric rice cooker. The ratio is very simple though; use the same volume of water as rice. (If you add dashi, cooking sake etc to the rice, count that as part of the water.) Some say that you should calculate this after you have thoroughly washed the rice as it will absorb some water and swell a little bit.

Heat and Cooking Time
Cook for 7-8 minutes and allow to sit for 10 minutes after removing heat.

A donabe is very thick and heavy and can take 5 minutes or so to bring to a boil. After it begins to boil, reduce heat. Every donabe is different so you need to learn the unique characteristics of yours. If you cover the donabe immediately after turning down the heat it might boil over immediately. Not all do though, it depends of the shape, thickness of the walls and whether or not it contains a small hole in the cover to release steam.

So, bring to a boil, reduce heat, cover and simmer for another 7 or 8 minutes.

Then, remove heat and allow to sit for another 10 minutes. As the donabe is very thick, even once you remove the heat, it will just keep on cooking for several minutes as though the gas were still on.

DO NOT remove the lid during these 18 or so minutes.

One of the delightful things about cooking in a donabe is that the rice at the bottom of the pot will burn, or caramelize slightly. This is considered good, and is called koge in Japanese. However, if it smells burned, remove heat immediately. If it does burn, don’t worry, you will likely just have lost the bottom few millimeters of your dinner.

If the donabe has a steam release hole, this will make it much easier to understand what is happening inside the donabe. Once there is no more steam escaping, dinner is done. At this point if you remove the heat, dinner ought to be perfect. Just a slight koge at the bottom, but not burned.

In Japan, newer gas ranges have a sensor that magically senses when the rice is done and automatically turns off. That is really totally awesome. My current gas range doesn’t have the sensor and my dobabe doesn’t have the steam release hole.

＊Again, each donabe design is different, so cooking times cannot be standardized. You will have to find the ‘Zen of Rice Cooking’ for the particular donabe that you have. Even the season and the freshness of the rice influences how much water will be required. Shinmai, or ‘new rice’ has more water content.

Takenoko Gohan Recipe (Bamboo Shoot Rice)

• 3 cups or rice (I use a combination of lightly milled brown rice, white rice and oshi-mugi, or pressed oats)
• 5-6 cups of dashi
• 2-3 cups of sliced (precooked) bamboo shoot
• 1-2 cups of chicken thigh, with skin
• atsuage toru (deep fried tofu)
• cooking sake
• mirin
• shoyu
• kombu
• ki-no-me (sansho pepper plant leaves)

This is my recipe. I start with 5 or 6 cups of water and bring to boil and add ‘dashi pack’. See photo, it’s the tea bag looking thing. Of course dashi powder or concentrate is available, but if you use a dashi pack with natural ingredients, the taste will be completely superior.

Add the sliced bamboo shoot and bring to boil. If you are using canned or packaged bamboo shoot you can probably add the chicken right away, but I did my takenoko fresh today and it was still somewhat bitter after I ‘precooked’ it, so I boiled it alone in the dashi for about 20 minutes then added the chicken.

I simmered the takenoko and chicken in the dashi for about an hour total, until the amount of liquid had been reduced to about half.

I put about half cup of cooking sake (OK, probably a whole cup) in the donabe, added the rice after washing it and then measured out the required amount of dashi, which came to be all I had left. On top of this, I add the bamboo, chicken, sliced atsuage tofu and a few pieces of kombu. Finally one tablespoon each of mirin and shoyu. (If you can’t obtain mirin, you can skip it completely or add a tiny bit of sugar.)

Cover and cook as shown above.

After cooking (and sitting 10 minutes) turn over gently with a rice paddle or similar utensil, mixing the ingredients in the donabe. Re-cover for several minutes and then serve in a large bowl and garnish with ki-no-me (sansho pepper leaf) if you can obtain it.

Of course, this dish can be cooked in a conventional rice cooker or metal pot.

Sea bream, or ‘tai’ in Japanese is one of the best loved fish and an important symbol in Japanese culture. It is in season in the spring and is called the ‘King of Fish’ in Japan. A whole tai is quite expensive and is enough for an entire meal. Here are three ways to eat one tai.

Itadakimono: Yesterday I was over at Kichisen with a friend chatting with Mr Tanigawa, as I was leaving Mr Tanigawa ordered one of his students to get a tai for me to take home. When they showed the beautiful red fish, I couldn’t believe my luck. It was huge! He also gave me some greens that I had not heard of before: hakusaina.

Sea Bream Feast Served

Sea Bream ‘Tai’

Sea Bream ‘Tai’ – Cleaned

Sea Bream Feast Served

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Ready to Cook

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Cooked

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Removing Meat from Head

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Removing Meat from Head

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Removing Meat from Bones

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) – Removed Bones

Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice) Served with Ki-no-me

Ki-no-me is the leaf of the sansho plant.

Tai Meshi
Tai-meshi is made a number of different ways and Mr Tanigawa recommended that we use the head for that. (We put the spine in too and that was a mistake as it left a fair number of bones in the rice. Surprisingly, we were able to strip the meat from the head, even the lips — with only getting a few small boney bits in the rice,)

The idea here is that the head of the tai will make a lot of excellent dashi (soup stock) for the rice. And that it did! Also, nothing should go to waste. First, the tai head is grilled shioyaki style, just for a minute or so on each side. Then the head goes in the rice cooker and is cooked on top of the rice with some ryorishu (cooking sake), salt and a bit of shoyu.

Removing the meat from the head is not as difficult as you might expect. Tai-meshi is usually garnished with ki-no-me, which is the leaf of the sansho pepper bush.

Tai Nitsuki – Simmering Sea Bream with Greens

Tai Nitsuki – Simmered Sea Bream with Greens

Tai Nitsuke
We made a light dashi with just a few small slices of ginger and simmered half the tai in it. As the end, we added the hakusaina greens as per Mr Tanigawa’s instructions. For me, it is hard to beat fish simmered in sake and shoyu.

Tai Sashimi

Tai Sashimi
The bottom half of the fillet is eaten raw, the skin is stripped off and it is simply sliced. Meanwhile, on the other half of the upper half of the fillet, and the skin that was stripped off the lower half, Mr Tanigawa poured boiling water and then plunged it into ice water.

The scalded skin is sliced thin and mixed with scallion and ponzu. (Ponzu is a citrus juice and vinegar based shoyu dipping sauce. I got this ponzu at a shoyu shinise in Kyoto and it includes grapefruit juice, a novel ingredient!) This is similar to the fugu ‘teppi‘ dish.

The ‘scalded’ sashimi with skin is dipped in ponzu and the ‘raw’ sashimi is dipped in the usual shoyu and wasabi. This contrast was particularly wonderful and the kind of surprise you get at a restaurant like Kichisen.

UPDATE: My bad, I called ‘tai’ red snapper, rather than sea bream in this article and was kindly corrected by Marc@NoRecipes. (22 April 2009)

Itadakimono: Early spring is the time to enjoy uri, a cucumber-like gourd that is in season here for just a few weeks. The only way I know to eat this vegetable is as tsukemono. In March and April, I often go to Nishiri to buy their uri that is simply and lightly pickled with salt. The other morning I got a call from Kichisen telling me that the boss had some fresh uri from me, so come on over and pick them up. It turns out that it was an entire box! As we are making homemade pickles now, I am putting these beautiful uri to good use.

Fresh ‘Cucumbery’ Uri Tsukemono
Uri is best lightly pickled, so I buried several in nuka and in less that 24 hours removed, washed and sliced them for our onigiri lunches tomorrow.

Uri is quite ‘cucumbery’, fresh and ‘springy’. The idea is that even though they are pickled, they should still taste very just off the vine fresh. The pungent taste and sourness of the nuka quickly penetrated the uri, it was the perfect balance of early spring fresh veggie with sour and pungency. The flesh is still firm and crunchy.

I can’t wait for lunch tomorrow! Hidden inside my recently perfected mixture of white rice, 30% milled brown rice, rolled oats and gokokumai, simmered in well water, sake, kombu and a dash of salt and wrapped in nori is uri nukazuke.

Itadakimono: Spring Pickling Vegetable Uri

Spring Pickling Vegetable Uri Washed and Ready for Pickling

Spring Pickling Vegetable Uri Washed and Ready for Pickling

Note beagle for scale.

Uri Split and Seeds Removed

Burying Uri in Nuka

Day Two

Uri in Nuka

Digging out the Uri

Uri Nukazuke Ready for Washing

Uri Washed and Slicing

Making Onigiri for Tomorrow’s Lunch

Making Uri Nukazuke Onigiri

Making Uri Nukazuke Onigiri

Uri Nukazuke Onigiri Served (with Kasuzuke Sujiko Ikura Onigiri)