One of my favorite Japanese dishes is eda mame gohan. Eda mame are most commonly served salt boiled and chilled in the summer as an accompaniment to beer. Eda mame are available pre-packaged in the supermarket boiled and frozen, but I prefer the fresh ones, still on the stalk for this dish. They are a little more expensive and preparation takes more time, but the taste is definitely worth it!

This is a dish that is easy to prepare and you ought to be able to get all the ingredients in your country. If you cannot get fresh green soybeans, try adapting the recipe with other varieties of beans or peas. And, of course, tell us what you come up with!

Fresh Eda Mame ‘Green Soybeans’

Boiling Eda Mame

Eda Mame Beans Separated from Pods

Kodai Sea Bream Heads for ‘Kakushi Aji’ Broth

I bought some baby sea bream (kodai) heads for soup stock and broth and added two to the the gohan nabe. To remove any fishy smell, pour boiling water over the fish heads or grill them lightly. I did both.

Kodai Sea Bream Heads Wrapped in Muslin

To prevent bones and scales from getting in the rice, I wrapped the kodai heads in muslin.

Rice and Eda Mame in Gohan Nabe

All Ingredients in Gohan Nabe

Eda Mame Gohan Recipe
Please see our How to Cook Rice in a Donabe article here for lots of details and explanation. Also, we have an article and video on How to Season a Donabe if you have a new one.

Eda Mame Gohan Ingredients
2 1/2 cups rice, 1/2 cup pressed oats (I use a combination of lightly milled brown rice, white rice and oshi-mugi, or pressed oats)
1-2 cups of fresh green beans
1/2 cup cooking sake
2 1/2 cups fresh, clean water
kombu
pinch of salt

Soak rice and pressed oats in warm water for 30-60 minutes.

While soaking the rice, boil the beans in salt water for approximately 5 minutes. The point is to cook them enough that you can easily ‘squeeze’ the beans out of the pod. Be careful not to cook them so long that they become too soft and squish when squeezing them out.

Measure equal parts soaked rice to water and fill donabe. Bring uncovered donabe to a boil. Reduce heat and cover and simmer for 10 minutes. After 10 minutes, remove heat and keep covered for an additional 10 minutes. Again, see this article for how to cook rice in a donabe.

I added some grilled baby sea bream heads for a kakushi aji, or ‘hidden’ flavor.

The Feast

Kichisen’s Matsutake Gohan – Wrapped

Kichisen’s Matsutake Gohan – Unwrapped

Fresh Seasonal Ayu Sweetfish

Ayu Shioyaki (Salt Grilled Sweetfish)

Eda Mame Gohan with O-koge

O-kage is the charring of the rice at the bottom of the earthenware pot. This is slightly too charred, the color should not be black or dark brown and the rice should not get hard. Just the right amount of o-koge makes you remember why you spent the little extra time and effort to make rice the old fashioned way, not just push the button of the electric rice cooker!

Eda Mame Gohan Dinner Served

Eda Mame Gohan – Served

Eda Mame Gohan – detail

This is REALLY good!

Kichisen’s Matsutake Gohan – Served

This is ‘summer’ matsutake mushroom (natsu matsutake). The fragrance is sublime!

My Experimental Tsukudani

This is made with ‘water’ eggplant (mizu nasu), a traditional Osaka vegetable used mainly for tsukemono, wagyu beef tendon and egoma sesame leaves (egoma-no-ha). It was pretty good, but not a masterpiece. The eggplant variety wasn’t quite right for tsukudani. Egoma leaves, popular with beef dishes in Korean cuisine, aren’t usually used in Japanese cuisine but I like the astringent ‘mediciney’ taste very much. I will keep working on the recipe.

My Experimental Tsukudani

Ayu Shioyaki and Tade Kuzu Vinegar

Tade (蓼) is a bitter wild herb that is used to flavor vinegar for ayu. Kichisen adds Yoshino kuzu starch to their vinegar to make it very thick. This helps ‘stick’ more flavor on the fish. Eating the entire ayu, head, guts and all is quite bitter, but with ayu this small the flesh cannot really be removed from the bones very easily. The alternative would be deep frying, but these wild ayu are too good to just deep fry!

Ayu Shioyaki and Tade Kuzu Vinegar

Ayu Shioyaki and Tade Kuzu Vinegar

Matsutake Dobin Mushi

＊Sorry about the photos, I didn’t have a camera with me so these were taken with a mobile phone.

I was over at Kichisen last night for a meeting with the boss. In his mind if he doesn’t serve me half a dozen dishes or so before we start talking the matter at hand, it is bad manners on his part. Right away I tried to take out my notebook but he told me to put it aside; he had some natsu matsutake for me to try. He started out by telling me how astronomically priced it was — not exactly Kyoto-style — and where in Japan it was from.

He served a number of dishes, most of them are not served to customers. The dishes were exquisite and novel, he said that they are esa (feed) for he and the apprentices. Nice feed!

There was chicken cartilage deep-fried and then simmered in vinegared broth served with a dash of ichimi chili flakes. Then there was a mysterious dish, it was a pile of something completely buried in roasted and ground sesame seeds with shoyu and wasabi on top. With my chopsticks I picked up a bit to discover that is was maguro sashimi! It was divine! Drinks were homemade catnip liqueur then glass after glass of this imojochu (yam shochu) ladled out of a clay pot that had just arrived from Kyushu.

Natsu Matsutake Dobin Mushi with Early Summer Yuzu
Then one of my all time favorite dishes in the whole wide world is matsutake dobin mushi. Dobin means earthenware pot and mushi is to stream. This is matsutake mushroom that has been cooked in a small teapot-like vessel with seasonal chicken, fish, or shrimp and some greens. Kichisen being purist only uses hamo pike eel in the summer. Fresh Japanese citrus such as sudachi or yuzu invariably accompanies this dish.

Matsutake is an autumn delicacy. However, some very exclusive restaurants serve it in the early summer and it is called natsu matsutake, natsu means summer. I had never had natsu matsutake before.

Dobin mushi is served piping hot and you pour small amounts into a cup, which arrives atop the pot containing the broth. There is enough broth for about 5 or 6 pours and the taste pleasantly changes with time. You squeeze a drop of citrus into the cup each time before drinking, or squeeze the entire citrus into the pot at once (I suspect that Kichisen would frown on this practice). DO NOT put the citrus itself in as the will ruin the broth by quickly becoming extremely bitter.

Matsutake Dobin Mushi

Matsutake Dobin Mushi

Matsutake Dobin Mushi

Matsutake Dobin Mush: Summer Matsutake and Hamo Eel

Hamo Eel

Matatabi-shu: Catnip Liqueur

I guessed that this is to make your date frisky after dinner, the boss told me in no uncertain terms that that was correct. The name in Japanese is mata tabi, mata meaning more or again and tabi meaning travel — it re-energizes you to travel more.

Sea Bream Rice Served in a Silk Bag
This final course was an amazing rice dish served inside a woven and silk basket. The rice was cooked in a donabe and then chunks of well grilled tai sea bream and slivers of carrot are mixed in just before serving. Dried red shiso flakes are sprinkled on top.

A Bowl of Rice Served Kichisen Style

Rice with Grilled Tai, Carrot and Red Shiso

Rice and Cucumber Tsukemono

Kaga Futo Kyuri (Kaga Cucumber, a Traditional Kanazawa Vegetable)

Tanigawa-san always seats me at the counter which is just off the kitchen. So, whenever he has something to say or a few minutes he appears and we engage in some light-hearted banter. I guess that since dinner including the penis shaped matsutake topics included plently of lewd sex talk, penis sizes (He had a guest once from Sweden that had to tape his penis to his leg when he played basketball he said, it was so big. He was black in case you didn’t guess. I didn’t ask how they got onto that topic of discussion over kaiseki.), virgins (shojo goroshi, a new addition to my vocabulary), the aphrodisiatic affects of catnip (on girls), then it was on to his current passion in life; Ed Hardy, Ed Hardy, Ed Hardy products. The final topic was whether or not the Louis Vuitton shoes that he made Miwa order off the internet for him were real or not. He had an apprentice bring down all his Louis Vuitton shoes, ones that he had bought at Takashimaya or in Paris, in their boxes and we compared everything. In the end I guessed that they were authentic, but Tanigawa-san wasn’t taking any chances, before I had finished my rice, he had sold the ones in question to one of his apprentices — at a slight mark-up.