Hiroko’s Kitchen | Blog

I am back on the Essentials of Japanese Cuisine teaching at French Culinary Institute. Day 1′s highlight was the preparation of dashi stock (requires a state of zen mind), fun home-made udon noodles and perfect tempura using seasonal vegetables. Here are some of the photos from the class. To roll the dough out I had to stand on a stand….short person’s dilemma. Everyone rolled out the udon dough into perfect thickness, resulting delicious cold udon dish (gomadare udon). We prepared tempura with beets, zucchini, maitake mushroom, shiso and carrot. Careful attention to the temperature of the oil and properly made tempura batter created crisp, light and delightful tempura. Everyone also challenged the kakiage, a thick tempura pancake, and all came out PERFECT. They loved it.

Today’s focus was yakimono, grilling. Chef Jiro of Aburiya Kinnosuke joined us again as a guest chef. Jiro built the bincho-tan grill and taught us how to make yakitori from cutting meat and vegetables into bite sized pieces, putting them on skewers and cooking over bincho-tan fire. Bincho-tan, which creates about 1000 degree F, produces infra red ray. So, every items which are cooked on the bincho-tan acquire crispy outside and juicy, moist inside. We wished that we had a glass of beer with delicious yakitori!

After yakitori, we made nasu no dengaku, eggplant with miso sauce and MISO MARINATED COD (I have recently modified my traditional miso marinade recipe to the one which suits to American pallet – how I did? I added lots of sugar to it….this is how it is done at restaurants here). We made miso soup – no scallion, tofu and wakame – with seasonal vegetables. I added little toban jiang (for slight heat) into the soup and Jiro commented that it was delicious…better than the one from his house..! On your future trip to Aburiya you may taste the miso soup with little toban jinag.

Tomorrow we will work on nimono, simmered dishes.

I enjoy vegetable tempura from time to time…My friend, Suvir Saran (a charming, skilled and successful chef, consultant and cookbook author), told me that his experiences eating tempura at Japanese restaurants have not been satisfactory.  He has found that the dough is…. (more…)

When I was raised in Japan, early spring was announced by the arrival in the markets of takenoko (bamboo shoot), fukinoto (a bud-like plant with a very “green” and bitter taste; see the right hand photo below), and taranome (a young bud of angelica tree). My mother always prepared…

many varieties of dishes using these wonderful vegetables to say the spring has also arrived in the Shimbo household. After moving to New York City, I was deeply disappointed that most of these cherised mountain vegetables are not available in this part of the world. Then, soon I discovered ramps. Ramps return to the Union Square Farmers Market at the very beginning of spring just like the vegetables that I knew from Japan. Ramps, if you don’t know them in your part of the world, are a mountain vegetable. The plants are about 8 inches long and have a white stem topped with deep green leaves (last photo). When cooked or consumed raw in salads, ramps have a very strong but pleasant garlicky taste and aroma. This suggests their close relationship to onions, garlic and chives. I was not raised with this mountain vegetable in Tokyo, but I do know that ramps are found in the cold northern part of Japan. In Japan they are called “gyoja ninniku“. Gyoja are people who withdraw from ordinary society in exchange for the benefits of rigorous religious mountain life.  Ninniku is Japanese for “garlic”. The plant is named so because this plant has long been a part of the healthy diet of these ascetic mountain communities. My husband now visiting Japan made a trip to Hokkaido, the cold northern island of the country. There, much to his surprise, he encountered these vegetables for the first time in Japan and he sent me an exciting message. “I found ramps in Japan!!!”.

After purchasing the first ramps in the season yesterday at the Union Square Farmers Market, I was thinking of making ramps tempura. Very brief cooking at relatively high temperature is one of the best preparation techniques to preserve the natural flavor of this very aromatic vegetable. Here are my ramps and shiitake mushroom tempura. We always serve tempura with dipping sauce (dashi flavored with shoyu and mirin) and grated daikon radish. Dipping hot, crisp tempura in this richly flavored sauce enhances the natural flavor of deep-fried items, and at the same time the dipping sauce removes some excess oil from the food. Daikon radish, which is rich in Vitamin C and digestive enzymes, is a must accompaniment when we eat deep-fried food. I used my onioroshi (see my previous blog) to grate the radish, so it produced chunky and easy to consume form.  Oh, it was so so delicious.