Satsuma

Where: Japan

The satsuma is a seedless Japanese citrus fruit. The flavor is virtually identical to a tangerine. It's very easy to peel, though finding them fresh in the Midwest isn't all that common.

Nashi

Sometimes known as asian pear, japanese pear, and apple pear, nashi is one of those "best of both worlds" proposals. After all, it's not the flavor of the pear itself that has set it beneath the apple, but the texture being slightly too soft and the shape altogether less pleasing.

Well, nashi has all the shape of an apple, and is well between the firmness of a bosc pear and an apple.

And the flavor is among the best pear you'll ever try.

Curry Rice

"Curry", despite its origins in India, has manifestations in every country. Perhaps especially unique is Japanese curry, or curry rice as it is uaully known, as it's always served with rice.

The Japanese don't especially care for spice, so Japanese curry tends to be toned down quite a bit form its Indian counterpart, and unlike curry, which is thickened through yogurt, cream, or coconut milk, curry rice is thickened with roux, more like a stew or etouffee.

Japanese garam masala isn't exactly like Indian garma masala, although you can use the latter for a slightly spicier mix.

Curry Rice

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 2 1/2 hours

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

1 lb beef stewing chunks

6 large onions, sliced

3 cloves garlic, minced

1 inch piece of ginger

1 can crushed tomatoes (2 cups)

1 beef stock cube

1 bay leaf

1 star anise

2 tbsp garam masala

3 large carrots, chopped

1 medium apple, peeled and grated

salt and pepper to taste

3 tbsp oil or ghee

Roux:

4 tbsp butter ghee or oil

4 tbsp white flour

2 tbsp curry powder

Ingredients:

Heat 3 tbsp oil or ghee in the bottom of a large pot. Brown beef chunks, and then set aside on a paper towel.

Add onions and a pinch of salt. Slowly sautee onions until caramelized. Be patient, as this proces may take a long time.

Once the onions are soft and browned, add ginger and garlic and cook for a couple more minutes. Add the canned tomato, 6 cups of water, beef cube, the bay leaf, star anise, and apple. Bring to a boil, then lower and simmer for an hour.

While this is happening, dry roast 1 tbsp garam masala about 30 minutes into simmering.

Produce a Roux:

Melt the 4 tbsp ghee or oil in a pan over very low heat, and mix in the flour. Cook very slowly, stirring constantly. There's an art to this, and it takes patience. If you burn it, throw it out and try again. In about five minutes the mixture will be peanut butter colored. This mix, known as a Roux (pronounced "roo") will thicken your curry rice.

Remove the roux from heat and add the curry powder to the roux.

When the meat is about as tender as you'd like add the potatoes, and continue slowly simmering until potatoes are soft.

Take the pot off the heat and stir in the roux. Return it to heat and simmer for a couple more minutes. Dry roast the rest of the garam masala and add it to the curry.

Serve over sushi rice.

Ranma

Okonomiyaki is a common Japanese street food, sometimes called "Japanese pizza", although the description is misleading at best. While similarly customizeable, it's more of a savory pancakes, full of onions and cabbage, topped with okonomiyaki sauce.

Okonomiyaki

Prep time: 30 minutes

Cooking Time: 30 minutes

Serves: 1-2

Ingredients:

1 cup flour

3/4 cups dashi

1 egg

1/6 head of cabbage

1/4 onion

Fillings (all optional):

Chicken

Beef

Squid

Octopus

Mushrooms

Cooking:

Mix flour, dashi, and egg into a batter, and then add cabbage and onions. Then add whatever "fillings" you like, and fry it on a large skillet, carefully turning it once.

Absolutely delicious, cheap, and you could feed an army with it.

Ghost in the Shell

Oden is truely unique. It's a thin soup, based around primarily different forms of what is known as "fishcake" available at virtually every Asian grocery store.

Now, condensing oden into a recipe is extremely difficult, although this blog makes a valiant effort.

Oden requires only a few basic ingredients, like kombu, and in some form fishcake, but here's a list of things you might want to throw in yours:

kombu - a type of seaweed used in the production of dashi. One leaf will do for a pot of oden

various fishcake - sometimes you can find variety packages that contain multiple kinds

carrots

potatoes

konyaku - a bizarre block of non-calorific stuff, that you blanch for several minutes before adding

one hard boiled egg per person. It has an interesting flavor, or lack thereof perhaps, and a strangely firm texture

daikon - peeled and cut into rounds, daikon is a long, white Japanese radish

You soak the kombu in cold water for 20 minutes, then bring to a boil. Then you add the konyaku and vegetables, and simmer until almost tender. Then you add the fishcake, and simmer until done.

Miso

Miso soup: if you've ever gone out for sushi you've probably had it. You might have thought it was good. Well think again: restaurant miso is a fraction as good as you can make it at home, with barely more work than it takes to heat up some Cambell's soup.

Miso

Prep Time: Negligible (20 minutes to make dashi, if you have to)

Cooking Time: 5 minutes

Serves: 6

Ingredients:

1/3 - 1/2 cup miso paste

4 cups dashi

a pinch of wakame strips

cubed tofu

Preparation:

Soak wakame in warm water.

Cooking:

Heat dashi. Once hot, remove from heat and add wakame, tofu, and miso.

Now hold on, there's a little more to this than it sounds. Firstly, you're probably wondering what wakame is. Well, it's another kind of seaweed found at your local japanese/asian market.

As for miso, that's a little more complex. Miso comes in hundreds of varieties. The most basic is with or without dashi. Since dashi takes virtually no work, I recommend going without. Beyond that, I'll direct you over to this article, which covers miso paste better than I could.

Mushroom Soup

This wonderful dash based soup a great way to use up spare mushrooms. It takes little effort

and tastes wonderful.

Mushroom Soup

Prep Time: 5 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Ingredients:

1 bunch enoki mushrooms4 shiitake mushrooms

2 oz cellophane noodles

1 scallion

3 1/2 cup dashi

2 tbsp soy sauce

1 tbsp sake

1/2 tsp sea salt

1 tbsp oil

Preparation:

Slice the shiitake and cut enoki into 2 inch pieces, removing the bottom portion. Slice scallion diagonally. Soak cellophane noodles in warm water for five minutes.

Cooking:

Heat oil in a pan, and sautee the mushrooms until soft. Pour dashi over the mushrooms and bring to boil. Skim off impurities. Add cellophane noodles and scallion and heat until hot.

Remove from heat and season with soy sauce, sake, and salt.

Dashi

Dashi is essential to Japanese cooking. It can be made from instant dashi, or substituted with beef stock or base, but those products are entirely inferior in flavor and feel. Moreover, unlike traditional western stocks, which can be made with little effort inch takes hours of slaving over to produce, dashi minutes.

Ingredients:

1 piece kombu (seaweed)

a handful of bontio flakes

4 cups water

Place the kombu in a pot, cover it with water and let it soak, cold, for twenty minutes. Turn heat to high, bring to a boil. Remove from heat and add bonito flakes. Soak for five minutes. And you're done!

Alternately, you can place a kombu oiece, handful of bonito flakes, and 4 cups of cold water into a pitcher and place it in the refridgerator for 6 hours, and you'll get... the same thing. Dashi's that simple.

Kurigohan

Chestnuts have become a seasonal rarity in America, thanks to the chestnut blight that nearly exterminated them a century before.

This autumn Japanese specialty takes few ingredients, and little more than a rice cooker.

Kurigohan (Chestnut Rice)

Prep Time: 40 minutes

Cooking Time: 40 minutes

Serves: 4 servings

Ingredients:

2 1/4 short grain rice

20 small chestnuts

1 tsp soy sauce

1 tbsp mirin

1 tbsp sake

2 2/3 cup water

Preparation:

Soak the chestnuts in hot water for about 30 minutes, then carefully peel the outer shell and skin.

Cooking:

Put the rice, chestnuts, soy sauce, mirin, sake, and water into a rice cooker, and start it.

You can also do this on stove top if you don't have a rice cooker. Just cover and cook until liquid is gone.

Seven Samurai

Kabocha is a type of squash known as "Japanese pumpkin". It looks like a buttercup squash, in fact. Almost identical. If they are one and the same, somebody should let me know- I'll be buying buttercup squash by the bushel.

Just calling these dark green squash pumpkin doesn't do it justice. It has a thin shell, easily removed with a vegetable peeler, allowing it to be cooked in ways one simply can';t a normal Pumpkin.

Simmered Sweet Kabocha

Prep Time: 15 minutes

Cooking Time: 20 minutes

Serves: 4

Ingredients:

1 lb kanocha

1 c water

4 tbsp sugar

1 tbsp soy sauce

Preparation:

Peel the kabocha using a vegetable peeler (unlike Western pumpkins, it will peel easily), and then cut it into 1 1/2 inch pieces.

Cooking:

Put water, sugar, soy sauce, and kabocha into a pot. Turn on high heat and bring to a boil, and then lower to a simmer and cover. Simmer for 15 minutes, or until the water is almost gone.

Akira

Natto

The scariest of Japanese foods might be natto. Natto has relatives, like tempeh and tofu, but natto is whole soybeans fermented. Somehow, the process makes them gooey, and when you stir it with your chopsticks it forms long, gooey strings, like mozzarella on hot pizza slices.

But it doesn't taste like mozzarella. It tastes like bad tempeh, an overpowering aroma of soy attacking your nostrils, prying open your olfactory nerves, and rushing to your brains.

Overall, it's not that bad.

If you bury it in soy sauce.

Chapter 11 : Japan

It was November when we reached the countryside of Japan, a unique archipelago whose cuisine is entirely unlike the rest of Asia's, or even the world. Without access to spices, or even the methods being used across the world for hundreds of years.

The Japanese are a strange people, but we felt right at home.

Japanese Pickles

Pictured: Eggplant, Radish, Daikon, Cucumber, and Umeboshi.

Japanese pickles tend to be sweet and intense, and are well matched with rice. There's no shortage of vegetables preserved this way, frequently found refrigerated in sealed packages.

Umeboshi are the best known. These are small ume (Japanese plums) pickled and extremely sour.

Legend has it, in times of famine, the poor would only have rice and umeboshi. And in extreme famine, they would put their umeboshi on top of the rice, and only think about eating it, and then eat the rice, so they might save their umeboshi for the next day.