Soba with Miso

This is a classic example of Japanese nabemono which are "one pot" dishes.

nabe (pot) + mono (food) = nabemono "one-pot food"

Which tells you right away that it's for regular consumption, and relatively straightforward.

One of the important things to note about this format is that it is endlessly malleable. This is the criterion by which cultures save themselves from boredom. Once, you get the knack of it, and the rules of the washoku which seem to arise from both an aesthetic and a nutritional perspective, you can shuffle this stuff endlessly and not repeat yourself in a year.

The dish may seem to have a lot of ingredients and it may "seem" complex but it really is not. You could assemble it fairly easily with about twenty minutes of effort. It will take about an hour in real time but you can spend most of it with your feet up with a glass of wine if you so choose.



Ingredients

4 cups dashi
tofu
1 carrot (cut thin at a steep angle)
1 cup spinach
8-10 shiitake mushrooms

2 tbsp miso paste

2 scallions (sliced at a steep angle)
hijiki (soaked cold for 30 minutes)
wakame (soaked cold for only 5 minutes)

2 eggs
mirin
soy sauce
rice vinegar

soba

Recipe

First prep the egg. Mix the egg with 2 tbsp mirin, 1 tsp soy sauce and 1/2 tsp rice vinegar. Make a very thin omelette on medium-low heat and set aside.

When cool, roll it tight and slice it into thin rounds.

Assemble the ingredients in a pot — tofu, carrots, spinach, shiitake mushrooms, soba. Heat the dashi with some mirin and pour it over the mixture. Bring to a low boil. After about 10 minutes, turn off the heat. Stir in the soy sauce (to taste) and the miso.

Do NOT boil after adding the miso.

Serve with the scallions, hijiki and wakame as toppings.

Seaweed

One of the great glories of Japanese cuisine is their consumption of edible seaweeds.

They consume at least seven kinds but there are four that you must actually understand well.

Seaweeds contain very high amounts of iodine, calcium and magnesium. You don't really need iodized salt (which sucks anyway!) if you consume these things on a regular basis. (In fact, you can smell the "sea" in them which is a mixture of iodine and calcium compounds.)

The first, and arguably the most important is kombu. The CC has spoken about it extensively here. It is absolutely indispensable in the pursuit of umami.

The next up, in no particular order of importance is nori. If you've eaten sushi, you will recognize this one. It's the crisp wrapper that is used to enclose rice. It's paper-thin, and when toasted gives off this wonderful aroma.

Then there's hijiki. It has this wonderfully crisp/slippery texture that is impossible to describe. Crisp and slippery? You'll just have to try it for yourself.

Finally, there's wakame. You may have had it in miso soup but this is a tougher nut to crack (so to speak.) You really have to appreciate its slippery texture because it's all about the texture here.

One of the great beauties of seaweed is that it comes dried. Effectively, that means that in a cool, dry pantry, it will last forever. (Not that it does in the CC's house but anyway ...)

You need to rehydrate three of them (nori is consumed as is) and you need to know the timings involved. They need to be rehydrated in cold water because hot water will decompose them, and make them, well, unappetizing.

We've already talked about kombu. Thirty minutes in cold water, followed by a boil but it needs to be yanked out just before the water boils or else the dashi will turn bitter.

Hijiki requires about 30 minutes of rehydation in cold water. Wakame requires only about 5 minutes.

These are wonderfully glorious objects. Masterpieces of texture and taste.