Burdock root is a very familiar ingredient in Japanese cooking, and is apparently just as popular in Korea and (according to Wikipedia) Italy, Brazil and Portugal. It is low in calories, and high in minerals and dietary fiber. I was at loss how to explain the taste, so I’ll just quote from Wiki: The root is very crisp and has a sweet, mild, and pungent flavor with a little muddy harshness that can be reduced by soaking julienned/shredded roots in water for five to ten minutes. The harshness shows excellent harmonization with pork in miso soup (tonjiru) and takikomi gohan (a Japanese-style pilaf).
When I use burdock in simmered dishes, I always soak the burdock in water for a few minutes, otherwise it turns the whole dish brown. In today’s recipe, however, the burdock doesn’t need pre-soaking. It has a fragrant, forest-y fragrance and flavor that Japanese people nostalgically associate with home-cooking and comfort food.
Ingredients:
2 burdock roots (12-18 inches long, and about 1 inch wide), scrubbed clean, but not peeled.
2~3 whole chili pepper pods, seeds removed
soy sauce……3 tablespoons
Directions:
1. Cut the burdock root into 2.5~3 inch segments.
2. Hit the segments with a wooden rolling pin, just firmly enough to cause the segments to split in half.
3. Bring a small pot of water to boil, toss in the burdock, and boil for about 5 minutes.
4. Drain the burdock, and pat it dry with a tea towel or paper towels.
5. Place burdock in a sturdy zip-lock bag along with the de-seeded chili pepper pods and soy sauce.
6. “Massage” the ingredients in the bag well. Then seal the bag and let sit for one hour up to half a day before serving.
Different chili peppers may result in different levels of heat. Find the type and amount that suits you. This is a great accompaniment to steaming white rice.
Filed under: Appetizers, Salad, Vegetables | 2 Comments
Tags: burdock, chili peppers, fiber, Japan
Ingredients:
Turnips w/ leaves attached…………….4
Lemon……………………………………………..1
Salt………………………………………………..2/3 teaspoon
Directions:
1. Peel and quarter the turnips (lengthwise), and then slice each quarter into thin triangles. Coarsely chop the leaves.
2. Slice the unpeeled lemon in half (lengthwise) and then slice each half into very thin half circles.
3. Place (1) and (2) into a sturdy zip-lock bag along with salt. Use clean hands to “massage” the mixture. Then seal the bag and let it sit for 1 hour or up to half a day before serving.
These are light, refreshing pickles in the shiozuke category of Japanese-style pickles. Actually more like a salad than pickles. The lemon slices add a slight, but intriguing, bitterness to the mixture.
Our turnips are about 7 cm (3 in) or less in diameter, so if yours are much bigger, please adjust accordingly.
Filed under: Pickles, Salad, Vegetables | Leave a Comment
Tags: Japan, lemon, Pickles, Salad, shiozuke, turnip
Foil-Baked Salmon and Barley
Those who have been following my food blogs already know how much I like fresh salmon. September is the peak of salmon season around here, and now that it’s well into October, it looks like today’s salmon is the last of the fresh stuff. From now on, until next September, the salmon we eat will be frozen and almost always salted. Today I tried a new combination: Barley and Salmon. For fragrance and flavor, I used sudachi (Citrus sudachi), a small, round, green citrus fruit that is relatively unknown outside Japan. Sudachi is served with a wide range of traditional Japanese dishes, and is considered to have a zestier flavor and aroma than lemons or limes.
Ingredients for two servings:
Fresh salmon fillets……2
Shiitake Mushrooms……2 large
Barley………..1cup uncooked
Sudachi…….1 (or substitute 2 thick lemon slices)
Cook the barley in chicken broth and milk over medium heat. Once the barley is tender, turn up the heat and stir rapidly until most of the liquid evaporates and the barley has the consistency of risotto. Spoon it onto a dish and let it cool.
Rinse the salmon fillets with a little sake (I do this with all fish and chicken) to cleanse it of any off-flavor or smell. Slice the shiitake mushrooms and the sudachi.
Take a large square of aluminum foil and rub a thin layer of olive oil over it. Lay out some cooled barley in the middle of the square. Place a lightly salt & peppered salmon fillet on top of the barley. Lay sliced shiitake across the fillet. Place one or two slices of sudachi on the top of the shiitake. Sprinkle a little more salt and drizzle just a little bit of olive oil over it all. Fold the foil over the contents so that it is securely wrapped.
Place wrapped bundles on a baking sheet and bake in a preheated 180 C (350 F) degree oven for 20 to 30 minutes (depends on thickness of fillets). Place the wrapped bundles on plates, and unwrap only when you’re ready to eat. When you unwrap it, you’ll be greeted with an awesome fragrance!
Filed under: Mushrooms, Seafood | Leave a Comment
Tags: fish, foil-baked, salmon, shiitake, sudachi
Sushi fans will probably be familiar with shime-saba (pickled raw mackerel). Traditionally, saba is marinated in a sweetened-vinegar mixture before serving raw as sashimi or sushi topping. I have never seen saba served raw unless it has been marinated first. Years ago, I was taught how to salt, and then marinate, a fresh-caught mackerel, but it was a time-consuming process and if not done properly, liable to cause digestive distress. With shime-saba so readily available in frozen form all year round these days, and at a reasonable cost, I couldn’t think of a good reason to keep doing it myself.
We like to eat shime-saba sliced and mixed with umeboshi (pickled plums), green shiso (perilla leaf), and myoga (ginger flower bud). I use this seasoning combination all the time with sardines and saury as well. Refer to my Sardines with Myoga post if you’d like to try the seasonings with cooked fish, rather than raw.
We always eat shime-saba with rice, so today I felt like doing something different with it. I placed the shime-saba mixture on top of a “raft” of baked puff pastry, making it look sort of European… (no? well, I thought so anyway)
Ingredients for two servings:
- Shime-saba (pickled mackerel), frozen. Use two fillets if they come two halves to a pack like they usually do, unless the fillet is very large, like the one I used for this recipe.
- soft, low-salt umeboshi (pickled plums), four large
- fresh green shiso (perilla), 10 leaves
- fresh myoga (ginger flower bud), one
- frozen puff pastry, two rectangular sheets about 6″ x 3″ (Oh, it doesn’t matter. Cut circles out of the sheet if you want, or triangles or squares…)
Brush the the frozen puff pastry with egg wash and bake in a preheated 200 C (400 F) degree oven until puffed and golden brown. Remove from oven, and let cool to room temp. (Oh that’s right, I cut some slits into the puff pastry before baking it.)
The frozen fish should be thawed ahead of time in your refrigerator, but you can slice it as soon as it is less than rock hard (it may take up to one hour in the fridge). Slice the fish with a sharp knife into 1/4″~1/2″ cross sections. The slices will be different lengths because of the tapering of the fish from head to tail. If the fish is unusually wide, trim the thinner edge off and cut it separately to match the other slices as much as possible.
Remove the pits from the umeboshi and chop the fruit until it’s like a paste. Roll up the ten leaves of shiso together and chop them finely. Slice the myoga into long thin slices, and then chop it finely too.
Using clean fingers, mix the umeboshi, shiso, and myoga by rubbing them all together to make a gooey mass. Then add the shime-saba and toss it till it’s coated evenly with the seasonings. Arrange half of the fish mixture on top of one of the puff pastry “rafts.” Do the same with the remaining fish mixture and puff pastry. Serve immediately.
Something different.
Filed under: Appetizers, Seafood | Leave a Comment
Tags: myoga, pickled mackerel, pickled plums, puff pastry, saba, shiso, umeboshi
Cold-Smoked Herring Bouzushi
Sushi is a great hot-weather food. The vinegar in the rice helps lift a sagging appetite and aids the digestion. Depending on the kind of ingredients you use, you can get away with using minimal heat in the kitchen (and if you cook the rice in a rice cooker, it hardly counts as using heat).
Contrary to the common image in the West, sushi does not require raw fish to be sushi. Actually, it doesn’t require fish at all. One of my absoluuuutely favorite sushi is nigiri topped with fried eggplant garnished with a bit of miso and chopped shiso leaf. And sushi comes in lots more forms than the finger-pressed nigiri. Besides the well-known nigiri-zushi, there’s maki-zushi, temaki-zushi, oshi-zushi, hako-zushi, chirashi-zushi, chimaki-zushi, and today’s topic: bou-zushi. (note: as a suffix, sushi becomes zushi.)
Bouzushi (literally “rod sushi”) starts out as a roughly tube-shaped length of pressed rice without filling and without a seaweed wrapper. I lay the seasoned rice out in the center of a piece of plastic wrap about a foot long, and alternately juggle and press gently down on the wrap till I get about a ten-inch rod of rice of even thickness, pressed just enough to make it keep its shape. Cookbooks may show you how to shape makizushi and bouzushi with a bamboo rolling mat, but I don’t usually bother. Plastic wrap is fine with me. Bouzushi doesn’t have to be round like maki-zushi, or as firm as box-packed hako-zushi, so you needn’t roll it too tight.
Basic ingredients:
cold-smoked sashimi-grade herring, 2 halves filleted
rice, seasoned for sushi (recipe follows)
green shiso leaves, 10~12
sushi rice:
Short-grained rice, 2 cups raw, cooked with a little less water than directions call for.
Commercially available sushi vinegar, starting with 2 Tablespoons and increasing as necessary (if sushi vinegar is not sold near you, simmer 3 &1/2 Tablespoons rice vinegar, 1 Tablespoon sugar, and 1&1/2 teaspoon salt together in small saucepan, then cool to room temp). If making your own sushi vinegar, it’s a good idea to cook your rice with a segment of dried kelp for added flavor.
Turn the cooked rice out into a large clean bowl. (Unvarnished wood is best, but glass or stainless steel is ok. Not anything that reacts to vinegar, though.) While lifting & turning the rice with a rice paddle or spatula, drizzle some of the vinegar mixture in a little at a time. Don’t use all the vinegar mixture. The lifting&turning motion of the spatula helps excess liquid to evaporate. Taste-test as you go, so you add only enough vinegar mixture to suit your taste. When the rice has cooled to room temp, construct the bouzushi. The longer the rice sits, the more clumpy it will become. If you must let it sit for a while, cover the bowl with a damp cloth.
If the herring fillets are very large or very thick, you may want to slice them lengthwise (at an angle) to make two even pieces out of one fillet. I had to do this with one of my two fillets, and ended up with three long pieces of fish. So I laid 1/3 of the rice down the center of a large piece of plastic wrap and juggled and pressed it till the “rod” of rice was firm enough to keep its shape. Then I laid 1/3 of my shiso leaves across the top of the “rod” of rice. Over the shiso leaves I laid one of the herring fillets. Then I wrapped it all firmly in the plastic wrap. I repeated this with the remaining ingredients.
I let the wrapped bouzushi sit for a while until it was settled and firm enough to slice into bite-sized segments with a sharp knife. If the room is warm, you may want to put the bouzushi in the refrigerator for up to an hour. This will make it easier to slice.
Filed under: Appetizers, Rice, Seafood | Leave a Comment
Tags: herring, Rice, smoked fish, sushi
Yuzu Cheesecake
Ingredients:
cream cheese, 200 grams (about 7 oz )
plain yogurt, 160 cc (about 5.5 oz)
fresh eggs, 2
granulated white sugar, 2/3 cup
flour, 3 Tablespoons
sugared yuzu peel, 100 grams (about 3.5 oz)
orange liqueur, 1 teaspoon
pie crust
whipped cream for garnish (optional)
freeze-dried yuzu zest for garnish (optional)
The photo below shows the two commercial yuzu products I used this time. The silver package on the left contains the freeze-dried bits of yuzu peel. The clear package on the right used to contain the sugared sticks of yuzu peel, but I used them up for the recipe before I took the photo. There are probably other yuzu products that will serve as substitutes.
Put the first 7 ingredients (everything except the pie crust and garnishes) into a blender and whirl for about two minutes. Pour mixture into a blind-baked pastry crust or a cookie crust. Bake in a preheated 170 C (325 F) degree oven for 50 minutes. I usually place the cheesecake pan over (not in) a different pan of hot water. This seems to help protect the delicate flavor of the cheesecake. When the cheesecake is done, remove it from the oven and let it sit until it cools to room temp. Then cover it and put in the refrigerator for a few hours or overnight. If you like, spread it with whipped cream before slicing and sprinkle each slice with a pinch of yuzu zest.
It is incredibly fragrant and flavorful!
Filed under: Dessert, Fruit | Leave a Comment
Tags: cheesecake, citrus, heavy cream, Pie, yogurt, yuzu
Cooking with Myoga
The photo above shows a myoga flower in bloom. Like the cherry blossom, it is a harbinger of spring. Although myoga (Zingiber mioga) is related to the ginger plant, it’s not the tuberous root, but rather the flower bud, and sometimes the stem, that we eat. The photo below shows what myoga looks like when we buy it at the grocery store.
Myoga is *not* hot like ginger root. It has a lovely fragrance, a pretty pink color, and a refreshing crunchiness with an herb-y taste that clears the palate. It is often used as a garnish– say with grilled fish– but its culinary use is practically boundless. It can be mixed with rice, added to miso soup, rolled in an egg roll wrapper and deep-fried, pickled, used as a vegetarian sushi topping, coated with tempura batter and fried, used as a filling for pork rolls, sprinkled on udon noodles, tossed with cooked veggies and sauce, mixed into tabbouli (I do this a lot) or green salad, coated with pickled plum sauce, and so on and so on.
My own contribution to the myoga recipe repertoire is fresh sardines stuffed with myoga, shiso, and black sesame seed. The main ingredients are 4 ~6 fresh sardines (slit along the belly and cleaned out, bones removed, spread flat like a triangle with the tail left intact), a package of ten fresh green shiso leaves, two or three whole fresh myoga, and about 2 tablespoons of black sesame seeds.
Rinse the cleaned sardines with sake and pat dry with paper towels. Chop the myoga and shiso leaves finely, put them in a mixing bowl with the sesame seeds and toss till everything is thoroughly and evenly mixed together. Sprinkle the sardines with a little salt and dust both sides with potato starch or corn starch. Spread the fish out, skin side down, and pile the myoga-shiso-sesame mixture evenly onto each fish. Then fold each sardine over so that the long sides meet. If filling spills out, try to press it back in, but we will used whatever won’t fit in later, so don’t worry about it.
Heat a little oil in a large frying pan. Lay the sardines in the pan without letting them overplap. If any filling is left over, sprinkle it over the fish. Press the sardines gently so that they stay folded over. Lay waxed paper over the fish, and then over that, place a pot lid or a plate that is smaller than the circumference of the frying pan. This is to hold down the sardines and keep them from unfolding while they cook. Turn the sardines over after a couple minutes, let them cook for another couple minutes and they should be done. (time depends on the size of the fish)
Filed under: Pan-fry, Seafood | 1 Comment
Tags: myoga buds, Pan-fry, sardines, sesame, shiso
Umeboshi Cheesecake
I am absolutely nuts about cheesecake. I invent a new cheesecake recipe at the rate of about once each season of the year. One of my family’s favorites is the Persimmon Cheesecake that I make every fall. Earlier this spring I invented a cherry blossom-scented Sakura Cheesecake. Recently my eye wandered to my stock of dark pink umeboshi (Japanese pickled plums). Part of me said NO WAY. And the other part of me said IS THAT A DARE? But before you can understand what a weird idea Umeboshi Cheesecake is, you have to know what umeboshi is, and something about its traditional role in Japanese cuisine.
Umeboshi, (literally “dried ume“) are pickled ume fruits, and though ume is traditionally translated “plum,” it is actually more closely related to the apricot. Umeboshi is a kind of tsukemono (pickled food), and saying it is popular in Japan doesn’t come close to explaining its significance to the Japanese mind and stomach. People swear by its health benefits, and many a Japanese would never consider traveling overseas without a secret stash of umeboshi to last out his/her travels.
Umeboshi are very salty, and extreeeemely sour due to high citric acid content. It isn’t a taste that is easy to appreciate. I myself didn’t like umeboshi as a child growing up in Japan. But my husband liked it from the first day he stepped off the plane, and it was under his influence that I learned to like it too. It helps that there’s a lot more variety available nowadays. You can get low-salt umeboshi, and even umeboshi that has been marinated in honey to temper the acidity. Some are small and hard, some are large and gooey. Umeboshi is a standard filling for rice balls, and is a popular condiment for some kinds of fish. I’ve blogged several fish recipes using umeboshi, such as this one for pan-fried pacific saury.
While sweetened green plums are used to flavor some traditional Japanese sweets, salty/sour red-dyed umeboshi is not a common ingredient in desserts. As shown below, a few candy companies have come out with items like umeboshi-flavored gum, umeboshi-flavored hard candy, and what appears to be an umeboshi-flavored chewy candy (which I’ve never tried). I even found a photo of a cheese-tart type dessert with a whole umeboshi on top that is meant to accompany the drinking of sake. But I was not surprised to see my Japanese neighbor’s jaw drop when I invited her to share tea and a slice of homemade Umeboshi Cheesecake with me. Incidentally, she loved it. The best thing about it, is that it’s so easy to make.
Ingredients:
Cream cheese, softened, 250 grams (8 oz)
Fresh eggs, 3 large
Flour, 3 Tablespoons
Sugar, 100 grams (2/3 cup)
Heavy cream or evaporated milk, 200 cc (3/4 cup)
Umeboshi, 6 large & soft & low-salt, pits discarded
1 pie crust
whipped cream (optional)
Toss all ingredients into an electric blender, and blend at high for about two minutes. Pour batter into a pie crust (I used a chocolate cookie-crumb shell this time, but blind-bake for fifteen minutes if using pastry crust). Bake cheesecake in 170 C (325 F) oven for 50 minutes. I usually place the rack over a second pan containing 1/2 inch or so of hot water to provide some steam.
After the cheesecake has baked, let it cool down completely before placing it in the refrigerator to chill further. Just before serving, cover the top with whipped cream and garnish each wedge with a mint leaf, or a pinch of freeze-dried yuzu peel, or (as I did) a pinch of dried red shiso (perilla) leaf. Red Shiso is used in the pickling process and is what makes umeboshi red, so I think it is particularly suitable as a garnish for the cheesecake. If you want to emphasize the pink of the umeboshi, add just a pinch of red food coloring to the batter.
Filed under: Dessert, Fruit, Pie | Leave a Comment
Tags: cheesecake, heavy cream, pickled plums, Pie, umeboshi
Pacific Saury Tartlets
In an earlier Pacific Saury post, I introduced a family favorite that uses Japanese ingredients and has a more-or-less traditional combination of flavors. A few months ago, I was experimenting with saury and came up with a more European-style dish that exceeded all my expectations.
Ingredients:
4 Pacific Saury, fileted into eight strips
1 cup home-made or store-bought white sauce
1 cup home-made or store-bought tomato sauce (seasoned as for pasta sauce)
enough pie crust dough for two 9-inch crusts
1/2 cup shredded mozzarella cheese
Roll out the pie crust dough and cut out 8 circles big enough to cover the bottom and sides of a medium-sized muffin mold. Cut four evenly spaced slits in each circle and place each circle of dough in a muffin mold, making the slitted flaps overlap to fit snugly in each mold. Blind bake the crust at 200 C (400 F) for 20 minutes. Remove from the oven and cool before removing the beans or whatever you used to keep the crust pressed flat while baking. (I inserted paper muffin cups into the molded pie dough and filled the cups with small beans.)
When the crust has cooled, spread a tablespoon of white sauce on the bottom of each crust. Roll each saury filet into a spiral (Starting with the narrow tail end and ending up with the wider end seems to make the most stable spiral.) Place one saury spiral in each crust, pushing it into the white sauce at the bottom. Spoon tomato sauce over each spiral so that it fills the gaps in the spiral as well as between the fish and the crust. Sprinkle the tops with some shredded cheese. Bake in a preheated 180 C (350 F) degree oven for 30 minutes.
Filed under: Appetizers, Seafood | Leave a Comment
Tags: pacific saury, pie crust, tomato sauce
Pacific saury– called sanma in Japanese, and sometimes marketed as “mackerel pike” — is my absolute favorite fish of all, especially if it’s in season (autumn). Saury is one of those fish, like fresh sardines (iwashi), that lose their freshness very quickly, and if it has to be shipped any distance at all, it’s basically ruined for sashimi or sushi. Fortunately, freezing technology has improved to such an extent that saury can now be eaten year-round, even as sashimi.
But the most common way the Japanese eat sanma is sprinkled with salt and grilled, then served with grated daikon radish or ponzu (soysauce mixed with citrus juice), and accompanied by a bowl of steaming rice. This is what we call “comfort food” where I live. Pacific saury is rich in EPA and DHA, the “good fats” that aid in the prevention of heart disease.
Here is one of the ways I cook saury for my family, and it’s always a hit.
Pan-fried Pacific Saury with ume-boshi and shiso:
4 saury, fileted to make eight strips
8 soft ume-boshi (red pickled plums), minced
8 green shiso leaves, cut in half lengthwise
some katakuriko (potato starch) or cornstarch
Dust the filets with starch, then cover each filet with two halves of shiso leaf. Spread 1 minced ume-boshi (or 1/8 of all the minced ume-boshi) on the right half of each filet (on top of one of the half-leaves of shiso). Then fold the left half of the filet over the right half, and fry all of the folded filets in a heated, lightly oiled pan. DO NOT try to move or flip the filets over until they move freely in the pan when you shake it. Then turn each filet over and cook until that side also moves freely in the pan when you shake it. It shouldn’t take more than a couple minutes on each side. Remove the fish from the pan and drain on a rack or paper towel.
Filed under: Seafood | 2 Comments
Tags: pacific saury, pickled plums, shiso, umeboshi
Recent Entries
- Quick Marinated Burdock Root Salad
- Quick & Refreshing Turnip Lemon Pickles
- Foil-Baked Salmon and Barley
- Pickled Mackerel on Puff Pastry Rafts
- Cold-Smoked Herring Bouzushi
- Yuzu Cheesecake
- Cooking with Myoga
- Umeboshi Cheesecake
- Pacific Saury Tartlets
- Pan-fried Pacific Saury with Shiso and Pickled Plums
- Pork and Shiitake Lasagna
