LY : the first step of Japanese cooking
Tag Archives: niboshi
Soupe du jour : Summer Chinese fragrant lake
Sichuan pepper and star anise… and you’re in eternal China, waving slowly your camphor fan.
The base is wax squash. This big white melon becames melty and transparent after boiling. It’s very refreshing.
Dry treasures : niboshi (small dry fish), shiitake mushrooms, kampyo (a very long white bean, dried), goji berries.
kanpyo
4 scents : star anise, Sichuan pepper, cinnamon, chili pepper. And a little soy sauce.
Oops and douchi… a kitchen blunder transformed into a new dish.
The initial idea was to do a simple “Chinese” sauce for tofu and mushrooms. A kind of black bean sauce.
I decided to make it from scratch… well from these… no, no, it’s not rabbit’s…
It is douchi, the Chinese dried black natto, well dry salted fermented beans.
Salted, write that down, don’t forget.
So start stir-frying those beans with garlic, ginger, onion, a hot chili, a few veggies… Like here ?
NO.
Don’t imitate that photo. Read further.
Ideally, you add a cubed aubergine, tomato puree, water, you simmer longly… all that melts. You have your sauce. You can pass briefly the mixer to have it perfectly smooth and velvety.
BUT
I had forgotten how salty were the douchi. I said salted ? That was not a joke. That was way too salty… I should have used 1 tablespoon only, not 4.
So I’ve added tons of veggies, more tomato, broccoli stalks, celery stalks, carrot, even a baked sweet potato. Re-simmered. That gave me a huge amount of veggies to reach the proper seasoning. My wok was full.
I took 1/4 th of the veggie mix, added mushrooms, cubes of tofu and a few “niboshi”, small dried fish.
Negi leeks to refresh this. Then that was great ! No regret, except for the quantity.
Cal 376 F12.4g C46.9g P26.1g
Epilogue :
I put the lest-over of veggies in the rice-cooker, added one more sweet potato, and set it for 15 hours of crock-potting.
I obtained a thick a soup like this :
Take a serving, reheat it more tomato puree, a little harissa, that makes a couscous soup :
Quick dashi from scratch… or from fish flakes
Fish flakes… I am cheating, I could start with a block of dried fish and shave it, but I don’t do that. You can buy this “kezuri katsuo”, bonito flakes in Asian grocery stores.
Dashi is the stock. It will take 2 minutes of your time to do it. That’s a basic for decent Japanese cooking.
What’s wrong with instant dashi ? Not much, only MSG, preservatives, flavoring and higher price.
This is one recipe, among others. I use a combo of 3 ingredients, each one could be used alone.
If your Asian grocery is sophisticated, or if you are in Japan, there is a choice of different fish flakes. The taste varies. Usually, the dark color and thicker flakes give a dashi with a stronger taste. The nearly transparent flakes give a delicate flavor.
Kombu seaweed. It’s dry too. The full name is “dashi kombu” as it is so regularly used for dashi.
The white dust is salt, pass a humid cloth on it to clean it off before using.
Niboshi, iriko… whole dry fish. They are very small (2 cm). Some are a little larger, in that case, you can see a black part in the tummy, it’s a little bitter, take it away before using. No need here as you can see. They give stronger taste than the flakes. Well, it’s different. That’s why I use a mix.
1 : In a sauce pan, put 1 hand-full of flakes, 1/2 of dry fish and one small piece of kombu seaweed. Add 4 cups of water. Program your stove for 5 minutes on 2/3 of power. Forget it 20 minutes.
2 : Pass it. The fish and seaweed can be eaten (see below) or not (that’s called wasting).
Here you have dashi, Japanese all purpose stock.
Quicker trick : You can buy empty paper dashi bags (like paper tea bags, which you can use too), and fill them with the ingredients. Store them in the box, so whenever you need dashi, you throw one in a pan of water, or even in the pitcher of your electric coffee maker.
GOURMANDE in OSAKA 