Kitchen Geeks

I skip the cream in favor of a briny emulsion of spicy cod roe, olive oil, and butter in my version. By omitting it and making the sauce with mentaiko, olive oil, and starchy pasta water, you get a clean, briny sauce highlighting the simple ingredients’ flavors. The fish it comes from is called the “Alaskan Pollack” in English, but this fish is technically a member of the genus Gadus (cod), not Pollachius (pollock), which is why it’s translated both ways. First, you need to make the sauce by removing the cod roe from the roe sac and whisking it together with olive oil and black pepper.

With tender steamed salmon and veggies blanketed in rich, savory miso butter sauce, Miso Butter Salmon, or Chan Chan Yaki, is an easy Japanese comfort food hailing from the northern region of Ishikari. Spreading the miso butter onto the salmon not only seasons it, the butter slowly renders out of the miso, basting the salmon as it percolates down into the veggies below. How to How to Make Chan Chan Yaki Spread the miso butter on the top surface of the salmon filet. Chan Chan Yaki is to stir-fry and steam the vegetables, salmon, and miso on a large steel griddle called a teppan.

With ultra-crispy panko surrounding plump juicy shrimp, I've developed several techniques for making the best Ebi Fry (エビフライ) or Japanese fried shrimp that I'm going to show you in this recipe. Ebi Fry, or panko fried shrimp, is a dish beloved by children across Japan, and it’s often included as an option for teishoku meal sets and bento box lunches. Ebi Fry is a Japanese fried shrimp dish made by breading shrimp with panko and deep-frying it. Ebi” is a two-syllable word, and “fry” is a three-syllable word when pronounced in Japanese as follows: e like enter bi like beef

He proposed the link between this amino acid and the taste he called umami (旨味 – literally the “essence of taste”). Just like we have taste buds to detect salty, sweet, sour, and bitter tastes, we have several taste receptors(mGluR1, mGluR4, and TAS1R1 + TAS1R3) capable of recognizing various compounds as umami. It is a taste we have specific taste receptors for in our mouths triggered by being exposed to foods that contain amino acids and or nucleotides. Meat and dried mushrooms are other abundant sources of amino acids, but these also contain nucleotides such as IMP and GMP, which can synergize with certain amino acids to act as a multiplier of umami.

ume braised chicken”) in Japan, is a delicious braised chicken dish that uses flavor-packed umeboshi as an all-in-one seasoning. After the chicken is done, the braising liquid is reduced to make a thick sauce used to glaze the chicken. The glutamate in the konbu and mirin synergizes with the chicken’s nucleic acids to give this dish a ton of umami. Texture: Most ume has been cured with salt, which changes their texture from crunchy to soft; however, there is a variety of ume called karikariume (カリカリ梅), which literally means “crunchy ume” made by pickling unripe ume with calcium.

With a crisp shell holding a molten filling of pork, vegetables, and mushrooms, Harumaki (春巻き), or Japanese spring rolls are a delightful Japanese-Chinese appetizer that's a favorite here in Japan. Although anything wrapped in a spring roll wrapper is considered Harumaki here, the most common version is made by filling the wrapper with a stir-fry of vegetables and meat that’s been bound together with a thick savory sauce. Japanese spring roll wrappers are like thin square crepes that have been precooked; however, any thin spring roll wrapper will work. This recipe includes ground pork and chicken stock; however, it is easily converted to a plant-based dish by substituting my vegetarian ground meat for the ground pork and vegetable stock for the chicken stock.

By separating the marinade and the sauce, you get a well-flavored beef teriyaki that doesn’t burn prematurely and a shiny glaze that’s true to its name. Teriyaki Sauce – Teriyaki literally means “shiny grilled,” so sauces that include ingredients that cloud it up are technically not “teriyaki.” Teriyaki Steak is made by grilling a beef steak and then glazing it with teriyaki sauce. Teriyaki steak is delicious served on a bed of rice with some extra teriyaki sauce drizzled on top, but it’s also good alongside a baked potato with miso butter or in a sandwich with caramelized onions.

Glazing the Crispy Tofu Bites in a savory-sweet sauce right after they come out of the oil ensures they absorb a ton of flavor without going soggy. You also want to avoid mirin with salt added as this will make the sauce too salty as is, and you’ll need to reduce the amount of soy sauce to compensate. I use a standard Japanese soy sauce for this, but other types of soy sauce will probably work for this particular sauce. Unlike teriyaki sauce, you don’t want to get it super thick; otherwise, the sauce won’t absorb into the fried tofu properly.

A thin coating of potato starch helps make the onigiri crispy and binds the rice on the onigiri’s surface together Potato starch – Oil lubricates the grains of rice, which can make it fall apart, but a thin coating of potato starch creates a crust that binds the surface of the onigiri together. Unlike regular onigiri, you want to compact the rice well for Yaki Onigiri, so it holds its shape in the pan. Add a bit more oil to the pan and move the Yaki Onigiri around to make sure you have some oil between the rice and the pan.

With loads of savory crab, creamy avocado, and crisp cucumber on a bed of sushi rice and nori, this California Roll Sushi Bowl is an easy delicious meal that you can make without any special tools like a sushi mat. Normally in a sushi roll, using white short-grain Japanese rice is essential to get the roll to hold together, but for a bowl, you could get away with using brown rice or even long-grain rice since it doesn’t need to stick together. A California roll would normally be dipped in soy sauce and wasabi, but since the rice in a bowl isn’t compacted like it is in a roll, it’s hard to dip. A sushi bowl is basically a deconstructed sushi roll with sushi rice served in a bowl, topped with all of the ingredients that would normally go inside the roll, such as nori, avocado, crab, and cucumber arranged on top of the rice.