Sukiyaki, Japanese big dinner

As Christmas is approaching, I wish you a nice holiday season. So let’s have a sukiyaki party !
It’s a party meal designed to showcase delicious premium Japanese beef and season produce. A hot pot to cook and share on the table.

The ingredients are cut, cleaned, prepared and presented on big trays on the table.
First tray : fungi, konnyaku noodles and grilled tofu.
There were 4 types of mushrooms : shimeji, enoki, dry and soaked maitake and fresh kikurage.

Second tray : negi leeks, onions, soaked yakifu (gluten croutons) and kikuna (chrysanthemum greens).

Third tray : the beef. Wagyu, Japanese traditionally raised cows. Beside you can see cubes of beef fat.

Each eater is given a bowl with a good fresh egg. Whisk your egg with the chopsticks and get ready to dip you ingredients in this sauce.

First step : greasing the pot with fat and roasting the first slices. They can be enjoyed this way as the beef is delicious, just on its own.

That’s the technique : melt some fat, add some meat, pour a little sugar, then a little shoyu (sauce sauce), a little sake. Mix and cook.

All the other ingredients are added in small batches…

For dessert… well, there are no desserts for Japanese meal. So that’s a French tarte Tatin, made with Japanese apples.

Gifu squash and fondue-pa’

A little early Autumn party around cheese fondue ! There is a special guest, here is :

宿儺かぼちゃ suguna kabocha. , from Gifu Prefecture. This monster makes about 3 kg. Inside, it’s kabocha pumpkin, a potimarron and it does taste very chestnutty.

We are far away from the fondue savoyarde with mountain cheeses. Today : pumpkin, red wine and… processed cheese.

The result is incredibly yummy…

Dip in bread. Or toasted bread.

Or veggies.

Butakimchi nabe, spicy Japanese steamboat

A meaty nabe today. As previously, I only show the preparation for the night time hot pot. Buta is pork, and kimchi well, there is some in it :

That spice pickle will flavor the broth. I add miso and raw ginger too. That will even be too spicy and salty, so some more neutral ingredients are necessary for balance.

Konnyaku, made from some kind of root veggie. It has nearly no calories, and no flavor but the texture in the hot soup is very pleasant.

Enoki are not full of flavor either. They soak the soup and bring some texture.

Chrysanthemum greens, they have some sourness like aragula.

The meat. It’s pork sliced very thinly. The amount seems important, but that’s only 100 grams.

So everything is ready… curtain.

Post-scriptum : miam miam miam…

Preparing the tonyu nabe (soy milk Japanese hot pot)

The nabe (hot pot) has saved generations of Japanese from freezing in Winter in the chilly houses.

The broth makes the pot. It’s a tonyu nabe, the soup is tonyu (soy milk) that I freshly made.

Flavoring for the soup.

Veggies, many : spinach, bean sprouts, onion, carrot, red kabu turnip, edamame beans, shungiku, negi and nanohana greens.

Seafood : shrimps and cuts of tai fish. So it’s ready for tonight, when it will be too dark for photos.

It’s simple, heat the broth (don’t boil the soy milk), add flavoring… and dip in ingredients.

Sukiyaki, beef and sake

Sukiyaki. That simmered nabe (Japanese hot pot) used to be my favorite Japanese dish before I came to Japan. Well, maybe that was the only thing I knew. It’s true that it travels well, it’s easy to adapt and you can’t get it wrong.

It’s meat based. The beef is cut very thinly. It’s good to have fat for the flavor. Not a big amount is needed, as there are all the other ingredients. Maybe 70 g per person.

A egg yolk to dip the cooked meat and making it feel like velvet in your mouth.

For the sauce, shoyu (soy sauce) and nihonshu (Japanese sake). That doesn’t need to be a great sake, I refill the nice bottles. I’ve added mirin too.