Just Hungry - Japanese recipes, healthy and fun eating, the expat food life and more.

Cool stuff from Japan: Beautiful traditional candies

maki — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 10:59:16 +0000

Traditional Japanese food is known for being beautiful and colorful. Nowhere is this more evident than with these jewel-like traditional candies from Kyoto.

The ones in the box here are ame (飴) or hard sugar candies. They mostly just taste like pure sugar, though a couple have some fruit flavor. But I find it hard to eat them anyway - they are so gorgeous.

The bumpy ones are kompeito (コンペイ糖 or 金平糖), which you may know from various anime and manga. They are simply colored candy, but rather fun to eat.

The ones with the flower designs are called kintaro ame (金太郎飴). You see versions of this type of candy in many other countries, known by various names. Glass and polymer clay beads are made with this ‘cane’ method too. These candies are so dainty and pretty, aren’t they?.

I don’t know what these ball shaped ones are called, but they are so cute. They look like little embroidered balls that girls used to play with called temari (手鞠).

Kyoto has a long tradition of find handcrafts, but Tokyo is not to be outdone either. These way too cute to eat things are hard sugar coated chocolate dragées in the shape of hina dolls, or hina ningyo, the dolls that are brought out to celebrate hina matsuri (see about hina matsuri here).

Layered Cabbage Casserole - Kyabetsu no Kasaneni (an everyday favorite)

maki — Tue, 02 Feb 2010 09:00:42 +0000

(From the archives. A perfect leave-to-cook, warming dish for a cold evening! Originally published December 2008.)

Some dishes dazzle you with their prettiness. Others may look plain, but are just plainly delicious. This simple, filling yet healthy winter dish belongs to the latter group.

Stuffed cabbage rolls are a staple of Japanese home cooking, believe it or not. I’ve loved it ever since I was little, but I would beg my mother to make it for me. It’s a perfect winter dish, but it can be just a bit fiddly to make.

This stovetop casserole type dish is called キャベツの重ね煮 (kyabetsu no kasaneni) or stewed layered cabbage. It’s basically a deconstructed cabbage roll, made into a round dome and served sliced into wedges. I’ve called it Layered Cabbage Casserole, because ‘stewed cabbage’ in English brings back memories of the greyish limp stuff served in a pool of water that I occasionally had for school lunch in England. (I usually ate lunch at home, since we lived next door to my school, but sometimes when my mother had to go out she’d pay for me to have school lunch. The only things I remember from those school lunches were terrific sausages, and that grey cabbage goo.)

Layered Cabbage doesn’t look very pretty on its own, though it does make an impressive lump. Sliced into wedges though and served with the cooking liquid, it almost looks like a cake, doesn’t it? The cabbage becomes meltingly soft and infused with the flavors of the stuffing and the poaching liquid, which also becomes the sauce.

Here is the big lump (which looks like a rather flat cabbage), with a wedge cut out of it.

It’s a perfect main dish for a cold winter’s night. It’s also very well suited for the slow cooker.

Recipe: Layered Cabbage Casserole (kyabetsu no kasaneni)

This makes a big ‘cake’, enough for at least 8 servings. This is sort of intentional, because leftovers taste even better the next day. You’ll notice that it combines both Western and Japanese flavors, so it belongs in the yohshoku (imported and adapted Western food) category of Japanese cooking.

1 medium to large cabbage

For the stuffing:

1 medium onion, finely chopped
1 small carrot, finely chopped
1 lb (450g) ground beef, or mixed ground pork and beef (In Japan all pork is used, but in this case I prefer the flavor of beef or a mix)
1 small firm tofu (about 300g / 10.5 oz), crumbled
1 egg
1/2 cup breadcrumbs (or use about 1 cup cooked rice)
1 tsp. salt
Pepper
1/2 tsp. ground nutmeg

For the sauce/cooking liquid:

About 4 cups Chicken stock (canned or homemade or even stock cubes will do)
3 Tbs. tomato paste
3 Tbs soy sauce
2 Tbs. sake or sweet sherry (you can leave this out if you can’t use alcohol)
1 Tbs. white wine or rice vinegar
1 bay leaf
1 tsp. dried thyme, or a sprig of thyme
Pepper, and additional salt to taste

Equipment: One of the following:

A slow cooker/crockpot
A heavy enamelled cast iron casserole pot such as a Le Creuset
Any heavy-bottomed pot

Plus, a pot lid or heatproof plate that is a bit smaller than the circumference of your pot.

Peel off the cabbage leaves, in as large pieces as possible. Don’t worry if some get torn up though, you can still use them. For presentation purposes, you may want to have at least one or two big, intact leaves to place on the top. You will want to have about 20 leaves worth or more. If the stalk part is very thick, shave them down a bit with a knife or vegetable peeler.

Reserve some of the torn-up cabbage leaves. Blanch the rest of the cabbage leaves for a few minutes in plenty of boiling water. Drain and cool.

While the cabbage leaves cool, make your stuffing by combining all of the stuffing ingredients well.

In the bottom of your pot, put down the uncooked cabbage leaves in a layer. This uncooked cabbage layer will prevent the bottom of your stack of cabbage from burning (if the protective layer burns, you can just throw it out). On top of the uncooked layer, put a layer of cooked cabbage, then a layer of stuffing, and repeat until the pot is almost full. The top layer should be a below the top of the pot, with space enough for that small pot lid or plate to sit on top. For aesthetic purposes, try to make the shape of your stack round like a cabbage, and finish up with a large, intact leaf.

Combine the sauce/liquid ingredients, and pour around the cabbage. The liquid should just barely cover the top of the cabbage cake - add some water if it doesn’t. Add the bay leaf, thyme, pepper and salt if needed. Bring to a boil, then lower the heat and place the small pot lid or plate on top of the cabbage. This is to weight it down a bit and ensure that it stays intact. (This technique is used often in Japanese cooking; the small lid is called an 落としぶた　(otoshibuta), meaning ‘dropped lid’.)

Simmer gently for at least 1 hour, or longer. (If using a slow cooker, you can set everything and let it cook all day.)

Taste the sauce/liquid again before serving and adjust the seasoning.

Slice into wedges and serve in a shallow bowl or soup plate with some of the sauce, with plain rice (the Japanese way), or bread.

Notes

The tofu in the stuffing mixture lightens it up. You can omit it and use a bit more meat or vegetable instead.

I have not tried it, but you could probably cook this in a heavy casserole dish in the oven too. Just make sure the surface doesn’t dry out.

Try putting a little bit of miso in the liquid (about a tablespoon) to make it richer.

Cool stuff from Japan: Plastic food models used for nutrition education

maki — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:25:27 +0000

You’re probably already familiar with the sometimes disturbingly lifelike, plastic or silicone models of food that are used as window displays in many Japanese restaurants, both in Japan and around the world. They are great visual aids for ordering unfamiliar food. Here’s a typical display of such models at a ramen shop:

And here’s one at a famous curry and yoshoku restaurant in Shinjuku called Nakamuraya, showing their East-West fusion type desserts:

And here is…well, do you see something different? Instead of prices, the tags show nutritional information.

That’s because this display is not in front of a restaurant. It’s in the Nutrition Counseling Room at the hospital my mother is in at the moment. The very nice and sweet dietician told us that the models are made by a famous maker of such food models, under the strict supervision of the hospital to ensure accuracy, and are as realistic in terms of portion size and so on as possible.

Here’s another view of the nutrition counseling room. In the foreground you see a set of plastic drawers that are labeled by the type of food model they hold. They have single-serving versions of various food. In the background, where the lady in the white lab coat is (that’s the dietician who counseled my mother) is a glass display case that holds various commonly eaten dishes.

I guess listening to someone explaining the nutritional value of a food is best if you’re looking at the actual food, but these realistic models are the next best thing — plus, they can be stored and reused and taken out again and again without worrying about spoilage.

Here’s the dietician holding up a bowl of miso soup. The lighting in these photos is not the best (it was after all, hospital lighting) but in person, except for the fact that the surface wasn’t moving, it looked just like a bowl of miso soup!

Here’s one of the meal displays in the glass case, in this case a plate of spaghetti with meat sauce. The numbers indicate how many units of a certain type of nutrition it has on a typical food chart used mainly for diabetics, since it seems they are the ones that need the most guidance (1 unit is 80 calories). The bottom row shows the total calories (605) and sodium (2.5g). And that’s for a smallish Japanese-restaurant portion.

The bottom shelf of the display case had various snack foods and fast foods, which had the actual nutritional breakdown rather than units on their labels. For instance, here in the middle is a “large” sized portion of fast food french fries (called fried potatoes in Japan). It has 4.1g of protein, 34g of carbohydrates, 20.5g of fat, 2g salt, and…338 calories! The apple pie on the right is worse - 380 calories, most of it carbs and fat. Pies will have to be occasional treats from now on for me… ;_;

Here is an 80 calorie pat of butter, on a standard tablespoon-sized (15ml) measuring spoon. Seeing it like this, and holding it in your hand, really has impact. Incidentally, food units in Japan are based on 80 calories, because that happens to be the approximate calorie count of a lot of foods - 1/2 a standard bowl of cooked white rice, 1 egg, 1/2 slice of bread, etc.

When it comes to sweet things, you really see how sparingly you should be eating them if you’re watching your weight. This tiny sliver (about 2 inches / 5cm long and maybe 1/2 inch / less than 1cm thick at the widest point) of strawberries and cream filled spongecake, called ‘strawberry shortcake’ erroneously in Japan (it’s the most popular kind of cake here by the way) is 80 calories. So a standard slice of cake is more than 400 calories. With buttercream icing, it would be way higher. I knew this kind of thing before but as I’ve said, seeing a three-dimensional representation leaves a much bigger impression than reading it in some calorie chart, or even seeing pictures.

Beware how you cook your fish!

My favorite set of food models was one that showed how various cooking methods affect the calorie count. Here’s a model of a piece of uncooked fish (mackerel or something) - I think it was 70 grams, or about 2 ounces. It’s 80 calories.

Dry grilled or panfried with just salt, it’s the same amount of calories with a bit of added salt of course. (And for oily fish, plain grilling is one of the best cooking methods anyway.) So here’s the grilled fish model. Looked actually appetizing!

But once you cook the fish with fat and other things, the calorie count shoots up. This tray shows three different ways of cooking the fish, together with the amount of oil or butter, flour, egg, breadcrumbs etc. that are added to a typical piece of fish. From right to left, you have a meuniere (coated in flour and panfried with a bit of butter and oil) at 134 calories; karaage (coated in flour and deep fried in oil) at 145 calories; and finally _furai) (coated in flour and egg, dipped in bread crumbs, and deep fried) at a whopping 181 calories! For one tiny bit of fish!

I think using these food models is a fantastic way of driving home the point about portion sizes and cooking methods. Wouldn’t it be great if they were used all around the world, especially in schools to teach kids? One drawback is that these very realistic and accurate models are expensive, since the originals from which the casts are made are handcrafted. Still, I do wish that use of these models could someday become universal in nutrition education everywhere.

I’ve posted some more photos of the nutritional food models in my flickr stream. And by the way, great news: Not only is my mother getting discharged from the hospital later today, she was told by the dietician that she can basically eat anything she wants, as long as it’s healthy and balanced. After years of having to watch what she ate all the time, she’s absolutely ecstatic.

Menu For Hope winner, please get in touch!

maki — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 23:46:52 +0000

Just a quick note here: If you are the Kristina Johnson who won the Just Hungry Menu For Hope prize EU25 (check the winners' list) please get in touch via the contact form :)

Cool stuff from Japan: Mammoth Meat?! Snack

maki — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 01:25:01 +0000

If there’s one thing I don’t like about Japan, it’s that everywhere you go, there are constant reminders to do this, don’t do this, go here, go there, and so on. When you’re going up or down an escalator, a high pitched polite (usually female) voice tells you to watch your step, hold your kid’s hand, stay within the lines, don’t put pointy things like umbrellas between the steps, and whatever you do, don’t get your long hair caught somewhere (!). On a bus, not only does that high-pitched female voice (probably not the same voice, but they sound alike) tell you what the next stop and the next next stop are, but the bus driver usually repeats that information right after it’s been announced. The female voice also tells you to not stand up until the bus comes to a full halt, don’t smoke at the bus stop, give up your seat to the elderly…blah, blah blah, every 3 minutes. And as for the trains… it’s enough to drive one batty. You just have to tune it out, if you can. I’m sort of trained to listen to and obey public transportation announcements (since they actually mean something in Switzerland) so I’m having a hard time.

Which somehow brings us to today’s Cool (or in this case, wacky) item: Mammoth meat snack!

This is a snack made by Tohato called マンモスの肉！？　(Mammoth Meat!?) - the !? are part of the name. (The subtitle is “A Prehistoric Period Experience Snack”.) It’s available at any konbini. As you can see, the front of the packet shows a cartoon piece of meat, as seen in caveman anime and manga. (Some one even recreated this cartoon meat in um, meat form.)

The snacks themselves are small round (a bit less than 2 inches / 5m in diameter) wheat based crunchy crackers with artificial coloring, flavors and something called “pork paste”. They are meant to look like slices cut from that round of mammoth meat. They rather resemble flattened, dessicated coils of sausage. They do not taste that spectacular, though they are not totally disgusting either. There is a much more thorough review of the actual taste of this thing on the always entertaining Japanese Snack Reviews blog.

But you know, with some food, taste is really just an afterthought. This thing is all about the joke. This little disclaimer on the corner of the packet really cracks me up:

It says, “(This is a) snack food that is inspired by mammoth meat, and does not include real mammoth meat.”

Umm yes, right, especially since mammoth have been extinct for a few million years!

Maybe it’s aimed at innocent kids who might think it’s real mammoth meat - but I prefer to think it’s tongue in cheek, almost a parody of all the warnings and stuff you get all around you in Japanese society.

Given the obvious World of Warcraft connotation and the sheer fun factor, I am quite surprised that this has not shown up on the J-List snack section yet (Peter, are you listening?). Have you seen it at your local (not-in-Japan) Japanese grocery store? I mean, just imagine the WoW parties you could have with this.

Mammoth Meat?! comes in four flavors: Wood Smoked (bright pink bag), Onion (negi) Salt (light green bag), Siberian Salt (yellow bag), and Yakiniku Sauce (red bag). Frankly I could not taste much of a difference between them. Product page in Japanese.

Cool stuff from Japan: Soy milk that's an instant tofu 'kit'

maki — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 01:47:37 +0000

During my stay in Japan, I thought I’d feature some cool stuff (or things that you all may find cool) that I’ve seen. Here is a bottle of soy milk or tounyuu (豆乳) that I got at a shop in the local Tokyuu line train station (or in other words, it’s not like a special brand or anything).

It’s just plain soy milk, but it’s sold with a little packet of nigari (magnesium chloride), a tofu coagulant, and instructions for making tofu in the microwave. Freshly made tofu is soft and delicious, and this little kit makes it so easy to do. Compare this to making soy milk from scratch, which is a long and messy process.

Here’s a closeup of the nigari packet. There’s enough to make two batches of tofu:

I wish they’d do that with soy milk sold elsewhere!

In Japan!

maki — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 19:32:21 +0000

I’m in Japan! I’ll be here for the next three months. I am here primarily for two reasons: My mother is in hospital; and the bento cookbook photoshoot will commence next month. But of course I’ll be filing plenty of reports on what I’ve done, not to mention eaten, here! I’ll be taking and uploading photos every day, which you can follow here on flickr.

The photo above is of dinner last night with family - a seafood nabe and a sashimi assortment. Delicious and so simple, and not at all easy (or inexpensive) to recreate properly outside of Japan!

Book review: The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite

maki — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 17:54:50 +0000

Long time readers of this blog may know that I have an obsessive interest in certain foods. Near the top of the list of these is Marmite, the viscous, salty, dark brown yeast spread from Britain. Heck, I even have a category for it.

My main Marmite post so far in the 6 year history of this blog is when I tasted and compared three yeast spreads - Marmite, Vegemite and Cenovis (the last one is a not-so-well known Swiss brand of yeast spread). This study is summarized on pages 169-170 of the book The Mish-Mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A-Z of Tar-in-a-jar by Maggie Hall. “Who better to turn to for an unbiased opinion [about Marmite vs. Vegemite] than someone from Japan” she says. I’m not sure how unbiased I am (since I did spend some years of my youth in England, where I first learned to love Marmite), but I’m quite flattered to be included in this fun little book.

As the title says, the book is filled with amusing and often fascinating facts and anecdotes about this loved/hated product. For instance, did you know that some people claim that Marmite is an mosquito repellent (page 116)? Or that it may help you catch more fish, if you soak your bait in it (page 64)? And some mothers put Marmite on their nipples to try to wean their babies faster (WHAT??) — not a good idea if the baby has a yeast allergy (page 14)? From history to science to Odes to Marmite, there’s a little bit of everything here.

I only have two little quibbles with it. One is that there are no recipes — it would have been great to have a few. Also, I have to say that I hate the front cover. I guess the objective was to make a scary Marmite on toast image, but just doesn’t work for me. Something along the lines of the back cover image, which lists some of the topics in the book in the format of a Marmite jar label, would have been better in my opinion. The Marmite jar design is so iconic and so well done, why not take advantage of it?

In any case, it’s a great casual read as well as being quite absorbing — a great gift for any Marmite fan. Even The Guy, who is emphatically not a Marmite fan, enjoyed it a lot.

The Mish-mash Dictionary of Marmite: An Anecdotal A-Z of Tar-in-a-jar
Buy from Amazon.com or Amazon UK
Author: Maggie Hall
Published by Revel Barker Publishing
Paperback
Companion website

Nanakusagayu: Seven greens rice porridge to rest the feast-weary belly

maki — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:11:41 +0000

The more I study old Japanese customs, the more I am impressed by the logical thinking behind many of them, even when examined with modern eyes. One of these the custom of partaking of a bowl of nanakusagayu on the seventh day of the New Year, which supposedly started in the Heian Period (around the 12th century), in the refined court of Kyoto. Nanakusa means seven greens, and kayu (or to use the honorific term, okayu (お粥)), is rice porridge. The Imperial Court, now in Tokyo, still has a nanakusagayu ceremony on the morning of January 7th.

Okayu is the traditional thing to eat when you’re sick; it’s the Japanese equivalent of chicken soup in Jewish families. (At the time nanakusagayu was introduced, white rice was also a luxury food only available to the upper classes.) The nanakusa or seven greens are supposed to be medicinal, to help digestive system that is stuffed and exhausted after days of feasting to recover, as well as being harbingers of spring. Health and longevity in a bowl, in other words. Even if you examine this with modern eyes it still makes sense; white rice porridge is very easy to digest, and the dark greens add vitamins. Only salt is used to season the dish - no oils or other ingredients that may be too stimulating or heavy on the tired belly.

In Japan you can buy the seven traditional greens conveniently packaged together at any supermarket. The seven traditional greens are seri, nazuna, gogyou, hakobe, hotokenoza, suzuna, suzushiro. We had to memorize these in school as I recall - and I guess I still remember them! I’m sure they were used originally just because they grew in the Kyoto area in January. It’s a bit difficult to obtain all of these greens outside of Japan though. The last two may be not too bad, since suzuna is turnip greens (kabu no ha in modern standard Japanese) and suzushiro (daikon no ha) is daikon radish leaves. But you can really use any dark leafy greens that you can obtain locally. You don’t even have to have seven, though you may want to if you believe in lucky numbers. The combination that I have used here is:

Flat leaf parsley leaves
Baby spinach leaves
Mache or lamb’s lettuce (Nüsslisalat in Swiss-German)
Arugula (rucola/rocket) leaves
Daikon radish sprouts
Swiss chard leaves
Dark green kale

All easy to get for me at the local markets or supermarkets here in Switzerland in early January.

You could use other greens such as:

Turnip greens
Collard greens
Beet greens (the red parts add a bit of color)
Dark green cabbage
Komatsuna
Sprouting broccoli leaves
Dandelion leaves

Ideally you would eat this for breakfast on January 7th, but you could eat it on any cold winter day when you want to feel virtuous and warm inside and out.

Recipe: Nanakusagayu using local greens

Makes 4 servings

Since this is such a simple dish, make sure to use the best quality ingredients you can. The quality of the rice in particular is important, as is the rinsing and drying process. Use fresh greens and a salt that really tastes good.

1 cup white medium grain or Japanese style rice (see Looking at Rice).
Mixed dark leafy greens
8 cups water
Sea salt, to taste

Rinse the rice with several changes of water (see How to wash rice) until the water runs clear. Drain the rice into a colander, and leave for at least 30 minutes to dry.

Wash the greens. If you are using any slightly bitter or tough greens like kale, collard greens, daikon radish leaves (not sprouts), turnip greens, puntarelle or cabbage, blanch them briefly in boiling water, drain and refresh under cold running water. Tender greens can be used as-is. Chop up all the greens. You should end up with about 1/4 cup of cooked greens or 1 cups of raw greens, or a mix of both.

Put the rice and the water in a heavy bottomed pan (traditionally you might use a donabe or earthenware pot, but I just use a cast iron enameled pot). Bring up to a boil, then lower the heat to a gentle simmer.

Cook, while stir up the rice from the bottom of the pan occasionally as it cooks, so that it doesn’t burn or stick, for about 40 minutes, until the rice porridge is creamy, like a loose risotto. Add 1 tsp. salt and stir. Just before serving, add the prepped greens and stir in well. Serve piping hot, with additional salt on the side that people can add to taste to their bowls.

Ahead-of-time note

If you just don’t have the time to be stirring a pot of rice porridge in the morning, you can prepare it the night before, but it won’t be nearly as good — it will become a bit gluey. Heat up with a little additional water, and add the greens to the hot porridge.

Your rice cooker may have a rice porridge or okayu setting; if so, follow their instructions. Add the greens to the hot porridge and stir in, and shut the rice cooker lid for a minute or two before serving.

Tales of okayu

As I mentioned, okayu, made with plain white rice, is still the go-to ‘when you’re sick’ meal for Japanese people. I still go for okayu myself when I am not feeling well. It comes in different rice to water ratios. Once, when I was 11 years old and home with a bad cold, I rebelled against the okayu my mother had made, and demanded she make me ‘butter rice’ - basically fried rice made with butter, a favorite dish of mine at the time. She made it for me, shaking her head, sure that I wouldn’t be able to eat it. Sure enough, as soon as I inhaled the smell of fried butter, I got sick and threw up. I haven’t really been able to eat ‘butter rice’ since.

When my little sister Meg was 5, she caught a summer cold that turned into a serious case of dehydration, and she ended up in the hospital for a month. For a while she was on an IV drip, and then they gradually introduced bland, easy to digest food, which all tasted awful. Horrible hospital food is a universal thing it seems. At the center of her meals was gosai no gobugayu, a standard hospital term for “five-part kayu (1 part rice to 5 parts water) for five year olds”. This rather gluey, faintly grey substance, which always arrived lukewarm, had no salt in it at all, and she hated it, though she made and effort to eat it since she was so hungry.

The little girl in the bed next to hers was there because of something non-digestive system related (a broken leg if I remember correctly), so she could eat anything she liked, including such fragrant meals such as curry rice and katsudon, that her mother would bring in from outside. How my sister would stare at her meals piteously, with tears in her eyes!

Meg became obsessed with food, and going to the bathroom. She couldn’t get the former, and had a terrible time with the latter because of a lack of fiber in her bland diet. She made everyone who visited her draw her pictures of her favorite foods. She also made us draw pictures of poo. It was rather funny to see the big sheets of paper around her bed, covered with little drawings of chocolate parfaits, ice cream boats, chicken legs and sushi rolls, juxtaposed with little curly mounds of poo, even a ‘poo necklace’ that my father had drawn for her.

(Later in life Meg trained to be a chef, and was a pastry chef at Toraya for a while. She’s now gone onto a different field entirely, but she, like the rest of our family, is still obsessed with food. And she’ll probably hate me for writing about her gosai no gobugayu summer on my blog!)

Kenchinjiru, Japanese Zen Buddhist vegetable soup

maki — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:01:09 +0000

It’s been a cold and snowy winter so far around these parts, which usually means soups and stews for dinner. This classic Japanese soup is hearty yet low in calories, full of fiber, and just all around good for you. It helps to counteract all the cookies and sweets you might be indulging in at this time of year.

The name kenchinjiru (けんちん汁）derives from the Zen Buddhist temple where it was first made (or so it’s claimed), Kencho-ji （建長寺）in the historical feudal town of Kamakura. Since kenchinjiru is a shojin ryouri or temple cuisine dish, the basic version given here is vegan. It’s still very filling because of all the high fiber vegetables used. You could make a very satisfying vegan meal just from this soup and some brown rice.

While you could vary the root vegetables, one vegetable that is key to this soup is burdock root or gobo. Without its earthy flavor, the soup just isn’t kenchinjiru to me. Burdock root is sold at most Asian supermarkets. Here’s a photo of how they look, packaged:

I got the ones in the photo some time ago from Nara Foods in Port Washington, NY, but I spotted three huge roots sold at H Mart for a mere 3 dollars (it may be called “u-eong”, which is its name in Korean). Burdock root is supposed to make your body warm according to macrobiotic principles. I am not sure about the science of that, but who knows - it may account for why this low-calorie soup is as warming to me on a cold winter’s day as a hearty beef bourgignon.

Recipe: Kenchinjiru

6 to 8 hearty servings

8 cups (2l) vegan dashi stock, or 8 cups of water with vegan (konbu seaweed based) dashi granules
3 medium carrots
12 inch/ 30 cm length of burdock root or gobo
8 inch / 25 cm piece of daikon radish
6 to 8 raw shiitake mushrooms
3 large or 4 medium taro root (satoimo) or 3 medium potatoes
1 block (10 oz / 250g) firm tofu
1 small block konnyaku (optional)
1 tbs. dark sesame oil
2 tsp. sea salt
2 tbs. soy sauce
sansho or black pepper

Put the dashi stock in a large pot and heat it up as you prep the vegetables and so on.

Peel the burdock root (a peeler is the most handy thing for this) and slice on the diagonal as thinly as you can manage. Put into a bowl of cold water to get rid of any bitterness, and to stop it from turning black.

Peel the carrots and daikon radish, and cut lengthwise into half. Slice fairly thinly (thicker than the burdock, around 1/8 inch / 1/4 cm thickness).

Cut the stems off the shiitake mushrooms, and slice the caps into halves or quarters. Alternatively, leave them whole and make a crisscross decorative cut on the top of the caps, as shown in the photo.

Take the konnyaku out of the packaging and drain off the smelly water, Cut in half lengthwise, then slice thinly. Blanch in boiling water for a few minutes, then drain into a colander.

Peel the taro root or potatoes, and cut into chunks. Note that taro root is slimy, so leave this task until you’ve cut everything else up, since your cutting board will have to be washed afterwards anyway!

Drain the tofu well in a colander, then put it in the middle of a clean kitchen towel or a few layers of paper towel. Gather the towel around the tofu, and squeeze gently to get rid of excess water. Open up the towel, and crumble the tofu up with your hands, so that it looks like scrambled egg.

Heat up a large frying pan or wok with the sesame oil over high heat. Add the drained burdock root and stir fry for 2-3 minutes, then add the other vegetables, konnyaku and tofu. Stir fry for 4-5 minutes, put it all in the pot with the heated dashi stock. Add 1 tsp. salt, and lower the heat so that the soup is just very gently bubbling. simmer for 15 to 20 minutes until the vegetables are tender. Periodically skim off any scum that forms on top of the soup as it cooks. Top up with more dashi or water if there seems to be too little.

Add the soy sauce, and taste; it may or may not need more salt or soy sauce. Add some if you think it needs it.

Serve in large soup bowls rather than small Japanese miso soup bowls. My mother used to have a set of extra-large bowls just for kenchinjiru. Optionally sprinkle on a little sansho or black pepper.

Variations

Miso soup variation

As you can see, this is a clear soup, not a miso soup (not all Japanese soups have miso!) You can add miso if you like. Add about 3/4 cup of miso to start, and add more if you think it’s needed. Omit the salt and reduce the soy sauce to 2 tablespoons.

Pork version

If you add about 3 oz / 100 g of thinly sliced pork, cut into 1/2 inch / 1 cm pieces, to this dish instead of the tofu, it becomes tonjiru or butajiru （豚汁), which literally means ‘pork soup’. Tonjiru is usually a miso soup, (follow the miso variation above) but it can be clear too. Add the white part of a leek, sliced, to the vegetable mix.

Fish paste products

Many people like to add sliced chikuwa or other fish paste products. See my oden post for more about these fish paste products, called nerimono. If you do use chikuwa or similar fish product, use a traditional bonito flakes based dashi stock instead of the vegan dashi.

Other things you could add or substitute

You can use turnips instead of the daikon radish, and sweet potatoes instead of the potato or taro root. Sliced onions can be a sweet addition, or use finely chopped green onions as a garnish.
Add ground or chopped up chicken instead of or in addition to the tofu.

Another way to cut the burdock root

The traditional way of cutting burdock root for this dish is to shave it into thin slivers, rather as you would sharpen a pencil (this is called sasagaki; burdock cut like this is called sasagaki gobo). This can be a bit tricky to do unless you have a very sharp knife, so I just slice it thinly instead.

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