What is Ryorishu? Japanese Cooking Sake かくし味 料理酒

Ryorishu: Literally, ‘Cuisine Alcohol’
The brand name, Kakushi-aji has a double meaning, I think. Kakusu means to be hidden or secret. This cooking sake is generally only sold to exclusive restaurants which are sometimes called kakure-ga (hidden, or secret house). In Kyoto, some exclusive restaurants don’t even have a sign. The other meaning could be that as this is very high quality cooking sake, it is a secret ingredient in the dishes that it is used in.

When I visited Uehara Brewery, they treated me to kikizake, or sake tasting and I was also given a taste of their ryorishu. Normally you cannot enjoy drinking ryorishu straight. This was good though, it tasted like a light sake. The color is light golden in color and it tastes better than a lot of drinking sake that I have had. I am especially looking forward to using this sake for nizakana (fish simmered in sweetened soy sauce) because of the delicate taste and absence of salt.

Ryorishu has a low milling ratio, only about 80-90%, so while it wouldn’t have the refined taste for drinking, you get a much bigger and complex taste that can stand up to cooking and other tastes like sugar, soy sauce and so on. I hadn’t realized that before.

Cooking Sake: Kakushi-aji Ryorishu from Uehara Sake Brewery

The label reads, from right to left; 本格 authentic, かくし味 ‘hidden’ taste, 料理酒 cooking sake.

I just tasted this again and compared it to the cooking sake we usually use, which I think is not bad stuff. We buy it at a liquor store and it isn’t cheap. The Uehara Brewery’s is fairly fruity and drinkable. The other has a sake smell to it, but the taste is all salt. I guess on fish, chicken, etc that isn’t real fresh and you need lots of salt anyway, the regular ryorishu is probably ok. You’re going to have to cook the heck out of it anyway! For fresh fish and vegetables, especially cooking ‘Kyoto’ style, the Uehara Brewery ryorishu would leave you much more room to build the flavors of the dish the way you like. For example, emphasize taste and freshness of the ingredients, not salt!

Cheap cooking sake usually has enough salt in it that you don’t need to add any additional salt to the dish that you are cooking. That is quite a bit!

Ryorishu is quite similar to Western white cooking wine, it is of course made with rice, rather than grapes though. It is used to marinades and sauces. In order to sell ryorishu in grocery stores, salt is added, several percent by volume. This is required by law. This is fine for cooking if you want or need a good deal of salt in the dish. We use quite a bit of ryorishu in our home cooking, probably 2 or 3 liters per month. We end up not using very little additional salt. Generally, that is fine, but the quality of the salt that goes into cheap ryorishu is surely not very good, it is likely not natural sea salt. For subtly flavored dishes, you might not want to use salt, so high quality cooking sake like this is desirable.

Miwa on Cooking Sake and Mirin
Both ryorishu and mirin ‘kill’ any bad odors in fish and meat. They also help the flavors of the ingredients uses in the dish to ‘sink in’ to the fish, meat, etc. Of course, it gives a nice smell too.

Mirin is sweet cooking sake. It gives dishes a nice sheen, especially sauteed dishes, because it has glucose sugar in it. (Fructose sugar and cooking sake will not produce the same effect.)

Cooking sake softens meat, brings out the depth of flavor of the ingredients and adds a pleasant fragrance to the dish.

In Japan winter is the season for crab and the best, fresh sake. We were given two beautiful crabs from the Sea of Japan and after doing kani nabe I wanted to cook the kani miso in the shell with sake over an open flame, so I bought some fresh, unfiltered ginjoshu sake from the north of Japan. With the leftover broth and bits of crab meat and vegetables we made kani zosui, a rice soup. This all makes for a wonderful dinner on a mid-winter night!

Mottainai: No Waste in Japanese Culture

One thing I would like to show in Japanese culture, through the lens of food, is ‘mottainai‘, or not wasting anything. You might have heard a bit about mottainai recently in relation to environmental conservation. With device and invention even the kani miso, or crab guts, which don’t amount to much are enjoyed. (The ‘miso‘ in kani miso is actually a reference to the brain of the crab, rather than miso paste/soup. In reality, the brain only makes up a fraction of the kani miso.) The raw kani miso, difficult to remove from the shell with an eating utensil, is just cooked with sake right in the shell over an open flame. In the end, it all comes out. It is fun, efficient and tasty!

There are at least two dishes in Japanese cuisine that employ this strategy; one is sake warmed in the crab shell and drunk and the second is the miso well cooked in the shell often with some broth and sake. Our rendition here is sort of a combination of both; too much sake to be proper kani miso korayaki and cooked too long to be proper kani miso korazake.

These crabs were another itadakimono, or gift humbly received which are very common in Japanese culture, especially gifts of food.

Kani Miso Korayaki

Crab ‘miso‘ cooked in the shell with plenty of sake over an open flame. We cooked it for about 2 minutes. In a nice restaurant this would be done over a mini charcoal hibachi right at your table.

Crab Dinner, Japanese Style

Kani Nabe かに鍋: Crab hotpot. (Sorry, no pictures.) We slowly simmered kombu and an assortment of winter veggies to make a nice, light broth then added the crab. Cooking the crab takes about 3 minutes. We squeezed fresh yuzu juice on the crab meat, however just plain crab meat was very sweet. I much prefer yuzu on crab to lemon I realized, because the taste is more complex and mellow. (However I did long for butter!)

Kani Miso かにみそ: We used the body and miso of one crab for korayaki 甲羅焼き- korazake 甲羅酒, cooked over an open flame as shown below. We scooped it out with a spoon and ate it like ice cream, one scoop plain and the second with just a squeeze of yuzu. The flavor of kani miso, … we are trying to describe. It tastes like crab, the texture is often creamy, and it has a taste that is distinctly ’kani miso’, which I am at a loss to describe. Part of the kani miso is eggs, so it has a bit of the Shanghai crab taste, if you have had that. That is feeble, I know. I guess I can only say that it is indeed a treat, and if you like crab, you will probably like kani miso. By the way, many sushi restaurants offer kani miso sushi, which is usually quite good. It is just the crab internals in a miso-like paste, usually not cooked like this though.

Kani Zosui かに雑炊: Zosui is a wonderful dish in Japan, the taste and texture is a bit like risotto. After a nabe, after the fish, chicken, veggies, etc have been finished, what remains is the very best broth as it has the taste of everything that went into the nabe in it. Japanese wouldn’t just let this go to waste. Rice — or udon can be added to the nabe and cooked in the broth as the final course of the meal. Egg is often added too, which we did. This mixture is cooked in the nabe for a few minutes until most of the broth has been absorbed. Then eggs can be added and just stirred a bit and removed to a bowl while the egg is still a bit runny.

We used the kani miso from one of the crabs to add additional flavor to the zosui. Though the preparation method is quite different, as is the texture of the rice, zosui is really is quite similar to risotto. Just imagine crab and egg with vegetable broth.

Nabe: A Tasty and Easy to Eat Meal for Travelers in Japan
Even if you are not really into Japanese food, and not an extreme eater, you would probably have no trouble with these dishes. Nabe is always a good bet for anyone that doesn’t want to get too adventurous with their meals when they visit Japan. In nabe cuisine, everything is well cooked and the ingredients are all things that we often eat in Western food (vegetables, fish, chicken, etc).

Kani Miso Korayaki Cooking: Crab ‘Miso’ Cooked in the Shell with Sake

Kani Miso Korayaki Cooking: Crab ‘Miso’ Cooked in the Shell with Sake

Kani Miso Korayaki Cooking: Crab ‘Miso’ Cooked in the Shell with Sake

Kani Miso Korayaki Served: Crab ‘Miso’ Cooked in the Shell with Sake

IKani Zosui, Kani Miso Korayaki, Tsukemono and Yuzu

Kani Zosui: Crab Rice Soup

Kani Zosui: Crab Rice Soup – detail

The Sake: Muroka Ginjoshu from Kamonishiki Brewery in Niigata

This sake is muroka (unfiltered) ginjoshu (high quality) okedashi (from a wooden vat) and shiboritate (just pressed) from a brewery in Niigata, a region that produces Japan’s best rice and some fine sake. This sake was pretty dreadful. It lacked the fresh, fruitiness of muroka shiboritate, I could taste no wood though the label says that it comes from a wooden vat. What I could taste was the sickening and lingering taste of jozo alcohol (distilled alcohol) that is added to cheap sake. If you have had sake that you didn’t like, jozo alcohol is likely the culprit.

The milling rate of this ginjoshu is 60%. At 980 yen for a 720ml bottle, it is not particularly expensive, but is rather price for ryorishu, or cooking sake, which I ended up using it for. This sake was nicely packaged and in the refrigerated section at the liquor store. It ought to be a whole lot better, I thought.

Muroka Ginjoshu Sake – package

Funky package, crappy sake!

Muroka Ginjoshu Sake

Even serving this sake in a nice glass couldn’t improve it!

Links

The Sake: Kamonishiki website (Japanese language)

加茂錦酒造
新潟県加茂市仲町2-6
tel/fax 0256-52-0070