Weekend Menu

Just one "fancy" meal on the weekend with an old classic on Saturday. Recipes to follow.

The first meal is classically Italian, of course, but the ingredients came from a Japanese store. They have higher standards of quality.

The correlative in the Japanese meal is the blackness. It comes from the black rice which is representative of squid ink but there's none of that in the rice. The "toban djan" is Chinese in origin but it's amazing how the Japanese have converted the quick stir-fry to their own tastes. The "burdock salad" has mayonnaise but Japanese-style which is much much lighter and once again umami-laden. Okra is emphatically not Japanese but once again their love of slimy substances (natto!) means they've made it their own. There's very little "Japanese" about the second meal except that they have taken all these influences and converted them into a coherent Japanese meal.

The CC has said this many times but he'll say it again. One of the pleasures of cuisine is to be able to see the world through a different pair of eyes. We're all stuck with our origins but we can surpass them with imagination and empathy.

Cuisine is the fastest and easiest way to get there^†.

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Pasta with mushroom sauce

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Japanese meal

Three-taste mixed rice (white, brown, black)
Okra ohitashi
Burdock salad (ゴボウサラダ)
Squid toban djan
Miso soup
Smashed-cucumber pickle (タタキキュリ); Myoga

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† This is the 1000^th post. No need to get all misty-eyed. There will be many more to come.

Dancing Fish Flakes

One of the spookiest presentation tricks used in Japanese pub food (izakaya) is topping hot food like takoyaki (fried octopus balls) with very thin shavings of katsuobushi.

The heat rising from the freshly fried food makes the thin shavings vibrate to and fro like seaweed.

It's both spectacular and creepy at the same time!

Maldive Fish Flakes

They are fish flakes that are made from skipjack tuna which is the same fish that the Japanese use to make katsuobushi.

The difference is that while the Japanese process involves smoked drying followed by a precise fermentation and sun-drying, the Sri Lankan process involves just sun-drying the lean parts of the fish.

They "dissolve" in the dish and lend it a deep umami flavor, and it's absolutely indispensible to Sri Lankan food.

Dashi

The making of dashi is the foundation of Japanese cooking.

It is to Japanese cuisine what veal stock is to French cuisine. In fact, it is so fundamental to the very grammar of traditional Japanese cuisine that it can be safely said that there can be no Japanese cuisine in its absence.

However, its importance looms even larger in a multi-cultural universe.

Dashi is a umami rock-star.

Master it, and you can give a little more ooomph to all foods from Italian to Indonesian. (In fact, this is the "secret" to the success of many professional chefs. All they ever did in life was to add a ladle of dashi to their sauces, and suddenly they were "jeniuses" - yes, with the less common "j"-spelling.)

Well, you can be one too. But, first you must learn the basics of Japanese tradition.

The classic dashi begins with konbu -- also spelt kombu because in Japanese, the pronunciation is in-between the "em" and the "en" sounds -- and katsuobushi.

Konbu is a seaweed that is absurdly potent in umami flavor. When you buy it, it will look like it has a patina of whitish dust over it. Do NOT wash it under any circumstances. That patina is the source of the umami.

Katsuobushi is dried skip-jack tuna which is another rich source of umami. Most likely, the supermarket version will be the pre-sliced, paper-thin, pale-brownish-pink stuff but the real stuff is like an elongated rock-hard block of wood. It lasts forever, and has to be shaved fresh on an inverted wood-plane -- katsuobushi kezuriki. (Needless, to say, the CC heaps scorn on the supermarket one but it's not bad in a pinch.)

Both ingredients are dry, and will last forever in your pantry.

Classical Japanese technique calls for making two broths -- ichiban dashi and niban dashi -- quite literally, the first and second extractions.

Ichiban dashi is a clear, golden-hued, light stock with a delicate flavor meant for clear soups.

Niban dashi is a darker-hued, robust-flavored, all-purpose stock to cook with.

The recipe makes a little over 4 cups of each. The CC frequently doubles the recipe if needed. If you only need the more robust version, you can just skip the intermediate steps but make sure you understand all the details below.

There are many many other styles of dashi -- niboshi dashi with dried sardines, dashi made with shiitake mushrooms, entirely vegetarian versions made for Buddhist temple cuisine (shōjin ryōri), etc.

It's a world unto itself.

Ingredients

4 cups water
a 5" piece of konbu
3 handfuls of katsuobushi (two initially, one for later.)

Recipe

Soak the konbu in 4 cups of water at room temperature for 30 minutes. Heat the water until just before it starts to boil. Remove the konbu, and set aside. If you don't remove it before the water boils, the broth will taste bitter which you don't want.

Bring the water to a boil. Turn off the heat. Add about 1/2 cup of water to cool it down, and toss in two handfuls of the katsuobushi. If the water is too hot, it will be cloudy which is aesthetically unpleasant. (Note the similarity to classical French stock-making.)

Strain the liquid with a cheesecloth. Under NO circumstances press down on the solids which would also cause the broth to be cloudy.

The liquid is ichiban dashi.

To make niban dashi, add the solids and the retained konbu to four cups of water. Bring to a boil. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat, add an extra half-cup to cool it down, and add the extra handful of katsuobushi to it -- oigatsuo -- "chaser" katsuo. Steep for 3-4 minutes.

Filter with a cheesecloth but this time wring to extract the maximum flavor from it.

You have niban dashi.

Kikunae Ikeda

Who?

One of the two greatest scientific contributors to food (the other would be Louis-Camille Maillard.) Unfortunately, this is the one that the world has never heard of.

He discovered the concept of umami by identifying glutamic acid as the common component of meat, kombu (type of seaweed) and tomatoes!

Exotic

Two days ago, while shopping at the Temple of Food™, the CC encountered a middle-aged woman muttering to herself about "exotic ingredients" while her nervous bored husband hung around the edges wondering what exactly he had gotten himself into.

Then finding what she wanted, she looked at the CC and murmured in a soothing matronly voice, "Cumin is so exotic."

And the CC wanted to tell her, "Lady! Cumin is not exotic. Katsuobushi blocks and dried whole caper fruits are exotic. You need to get out more often."

But he was unerringly polite. This was a mistake. Someday in his anec-dotage, he will regret being polite.

Who are we kiddin'?

The CC hates to admit it but every once in a while he peruses the food rags. Of late, he's been seeing a spate of articles featuring what can only be absurdly exotic food substances for the vast majority of the readers.

One of the articles feature goat's milk. Another features abalone mushrooms.

Really?!? C'mon now, pull the other one.

The CC lives in New York, arguably where it's easy enough to find the most exotic of exotics, and he hops on the train to hit the regional markets in Queens pretty often.

However, even something so basic as "unhomogenized milk" was hard to come by before last year. You can't even find katsuobushi blocks and a box grater (which costs about $2, he might add!)

Fresh epazote? fresh curry leaves? fresh holy basil? Hope you like to travel!

The CC understands the need for these rags to "be ahead of the curve" and "push the envelope" but goat's milk? Forget about it! It ain't happenin'.

It makes you want to reach out for a cheeseburger instead.

More Musings on Umami

There are three sources of umami known.

The ones that were first discovered historically were glutamates (present in konbu, parmesan, sun-dried tomatoes, tomato paste.) Others found in short order were various isosinates (present in broths made of dried bonito flakes,) and guanylates (found in high concentrations amongst shiitake mushrooms.)

The key idea here seems to be a sort of synergy. A small amount of any of them enhances the small quantities of natural umami substances already found in hundreds of foods, and the most important point is that when glutamates and isosinates are combined, they have a powerful multiplier effect, which enhances the umami-ness of the underlying food.

This pretty much explains a huge number of historical phenomena, from all over the world.

Consider the Japanese dashi. It's made from both konbu, and dried bonito flakes (katsuobushi.) You're getting a potent mix of glutamates, and isosinates. Sometimes, they add shiitake mushrooms to further enhance the mix.

Same goes for the simple pasta sauce recipe of fried pancetta, tomatoes, and dried porcini mushrooms. Talk about a triple whammy!

We can also explain the powerful spread of the tomato. In a few hundred years, it radically transformed ancient cuisines (Italy and India.) The point is that the local recipes were already very attractive before the tomato, but the addition of the tomato unleashed more of the umami qualities that were already present in minute quantities in the underlying substances.

It also explains certain truths that chefs hold dear -- young peas over older ones, ripe tomatoes over fresh ones, aged cheeses over unaged ones, and oysters in winter over summer (the latter has a health component but one that has been irrelevant for at least half a century.) Same with aged hams, and dry-aged beef, and sun-dried tomatoes (even when fresh ones are available.) Your palate is selecting for the more powerfully concentrated glutamates (and drying is just one way of achieving that.)

It should be clear why fermented fish sauces (garum/liquamen in Roman times, nahm pla in Thai food, nuoc mam in Vietnamese food), fish pastes (allec in Roman times, gkapi in Thai food), dried shrimp, and intense meat products have been popular for millenia. Likewise meat extracts (Bovril), and autolyzed yeast extracts.

This is why pizza (tomato paste and parmesan), and hamburgers, french fries, and ketchup practically constitute two religions in and of themselves.

Free glutamates are most commonly found in vegetables. Isosinic acid most commonly in meat, and animal products. This is responsible for the strong intensification when meat and vegetables are cooked together.

This is why certain Italian recipes start with "fry the pancetta, or the prosciutto" even when the ingredients are all vegetarian, and the instructions call for the pancetta to be fished out after the frying. Even a relatively poor family could afford the modest amount of meat required, but the combination of meat and vegetables is a powerful one.

That's why anchovies have been popular through the millenia, and why Thai curries and pastes can never truly be approximated in vegetarian terms. They are too dependent on the grammar of seafood and its umami. There is simply no mechanism to substitute the intense mouthfulness (= umami-ness) of gkapi (shrimp paste.)

Umami

The fifth flavor; it is sensed by specialized receptor cells on the tongue which detect the presence of glutamates.

The best way to describe it is "savory" or "meaty", and it is a major part of virtually every world cuisine except it took till 1908 to identify it conclusively.

Here's a brief list of foods high in "umami":

aged Parmigiano-Reggiano (off the charts, actually!)
aged blue cheese (in general)
anchovies
nam pla (Thai fish sauce)
fresh tomatoes
tomato sauce (with salt -- read below)
boiled potatoes
mushrooms (particularly shiitake)
fresh oysters
fresh clams
dry-aged steak (the only kind the CC will eat)
kelp (konbu -- which is where this was first detected.)
katsuobushi
soy sauce

The flavor is particularly enhanced in the presence of salt, the glutamate ions, and the Na+ ions work in conjunction.

Hmmm... looks like the CC's taste buds are particularly zoomed in on this taste.