Cuisines
Japanese recipes
Dashi, rice, and doing less to good ingredients.
Japanese cooking is organised around restraint and around dashi — a stock of kelp and dried bonito that takes fifteen minutes and underlies a very large proportion of the cuisine. Where French cooking builds flavour by reduction and browning, Japanese cooking builds it by extraction and by leaving things alone: fewer ingredients, less heat, and a much greater emphasis on the quality and the cut of what goes in. Seasonality is not a marketing idea here but a structural one. The recipes in this section range from the fifteen-minute to the genuinely long — a ramen broth that runs overnight is in the same tradition as a bowl of rice and pickles, and both depend on getting one or two things exactly right rather than on assembling many.
2 recipes
Shoyu Ramen with Chashu Pork
A soy-based broth that tastes long-cooked because it is. The pork rolls the night before, which is most of the work and none of the effort.
Silky Miso Mushroom Ramen
A shiitake and kombu broth that starts with a half-hour soak, finished with white miso and topped with seven-minute eggs.