Japanese Cooking 101

I remember now why my forays into Japanese food haven’t gotten very far. It is actually hard to find really good ingredients.

Even with my guide, I’m having trouble. My first big shopping trip was to United Noodles in Minneapolis this past weekend. Asian markets– and we have a fantastic one in St. Cloud where I’ll be going next (I just happened to be in the Twin Cities)– can be confusing. It is a bit like walking into an Auto Supply parts store.

United Noodles is a gigantic warehouse. It is organized both by cuisine and by ingredients. I didn’t know that when I walked in, but right away I was in an aisle that had seaweed. It had some nori but no konbu. Because it was the Korean seaweed section. The Korean section was great. I picked up a bag of soybeans there.

The ingredients in the bag of soybeans was: soybeans. I have regularly bought dals, lentils, and dry beans in shops like this. But since I want to make soymilk, should I worry about the quality, the organic nature, of the soybeans? (Remember the rice with the bugs? Better bugs than chemicals!) At the same time, I don’t want to be all health food store about this project. In the past two days I have spent some time in the “comment-sphere” of online marketplaces and learned not much, except that I’m going to go ahead and just use the soybeans I bought. (Next time, if there is one, I’ll buy Laura soybeans. I mean, Laura soybeans? What I lose in Japanese authenticity I’ll gain in them being almost local, grown in Iowa.)

For more on the GMO issue with soybeans, here is an excellent blog entry. The beans I bought do meet her recommendations for size, shape, color, etc. I love this blog, by the way, Viet World Kitchen. I returned to it for questions on what coagulant to buy for homemade tofu.

Finally, on my shopping trip, I found the Japanese section. And there was no suitable mirin. I was looking for “hon mirin.” I was avoiding “aji mirin.” Aji means flavored, and it tends to have MSG in it. Or other flavorings that make it ready for dashi.

The good news is that I did find the bag of “kelps” I need for dashi. Konbu. That was very important. And by the time I got to the Japanese section, I was reading packages well.

I didn’t have my cookbook with me, or any notes really, so I was just seeing what I could do on my own. The konbu was my chief aim, and also good miso. Again with the miso, there were a lot of choices, a lot of price points, and not a lot to suggest which way to go. I read ingredients. I settled on a beautiful pale package (ingredients: water, soybeans, rice, salt) and as soon as I cut it open at home I knew I’d made the absolute right choice. Boy does it smell good.

The comment-sphere surfaced that it is actually difficult to get good, “pure” mirin in the US. I’m ordering a possible solution online. Also, I went with a ponzu marinade instead of yuzu because I couldn’t bear the price. It’s a citrus, and I’ll also used some orange/lemon/lime substitutions, depending on the recipe.

The big ingredient I couldn’t get was a large chunk of katsuobushi. That’s smoked slipjack tuna (bonito). There are a lot of smoked salmon options. And there are a lot of options for bonito flakes, which is what I’ve ordered. Working through the comments on that one was tough, though, because the number one use for bonito flakes, it seems, is as a cat treat. Yes. People spend $10 or more for tiny packages of “kitty crack” tuna flakes. When I had a cat, it used to slobber itself silly over a small bowl of drained tuna water, a by-product of buying a can of tuna. So why do you need to buy the cat specialty tuna flakes?? Eventually I found a brand where some people were commenting on its use in Japanese cooking.

But I really wanted a big piece of the stuff I could grate myself. Really.

If anyone out there has recommendations, let me know. I’ve looked in NYC, San Francisco, and Los Angeles online stores for both mirin and good bonito flakes. I’m also taking miso recommendations.

Last night I was rushed, so used an Indian red pepper simmer sauce I had frozen to cook the chicken and rice dish we were having. But for the salad, I couldn’t resist a miso dressing. Miso, rice vinegar, sunflower oil, and a little water to thin it. Wowza.