Just Hungry - Japanese food! Authentic, mostly healthy Japanese recipes for everyone

Monday photos: New York cravings

maki — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 00:29:13 +0000

I am in New York, for family reasons. Not the best of circumstances, and I wasn't even sure I'd make it given my lousy health these days, but with the kind help of airport staff, I did.

So, what does an ex-New Yorker after many years spent living elsewhere? A sparkling meal at one of the city's finest restaurants? Not for me. I started here:

And, moved on to these (any expat American starts to crave stuff like this after a while. We can get salsa and chips in France...but it's just not the same.)

And while I can't say that I regularly crave black and whites, I had to pick up one of these blue-and-white variations over the weekend:

Congratulations to the New York Giants! (I hear it was a pretty good game. I'm afraid I slept right through it after the coin toss, due to a combination of fatigue, jet lag and not much interest in the game. ^_^; Besides, when I did live in New York and follow the local teams, I was a strictly Mets/Jets/Islanders kind of girl.)

Other things I am contemplating fulfilling my cravings for while here are, unfortunately, as carb-heavy as the ones already fulfilled: real New York pizza, takeout-Chinese roast pork lo mein, more bagels, dim sum in Flushing, a hot dog and papaya juice combo at Papaya King. I'll try to balance those cravings with some halfway healthy eating too.

Setsubun and beans article in the Japan Times and food superstitions

maki — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:08:15 +0000

This month’s Japan Times article is about the traditions and superstitions surrounding Setsubun or Risshun, the first day of spring, which is coming up on February 3rd. The focus of the article is on the tradition of mamemaki, or the throwing of roasted beans to drive away oni, the fierce evil spirits that embody bad luck. I’ve always wondered myself why beans are thrown - and now, through my research, I know. It’s really fascinating to find out about all the rituals and traditions of yore, and I get to explore them at depth through writing about them.

While I did know about the bean-throwing tradition, and I have previously written about the ehoumaki tradition of eating a fat, uncut sushi roll which has become popularized all over Japan in recent times, I didn’t know about the tradition of hanging grilled sardines (iwashi), until I talked to my mother about it. I’d never heard how she and her siblings used to hang sardine heads under the porch when she was growing up. I love the idea of the neighbohood cats coming to feast on the anti-evil fish heads in the middle of the night, probably thumbing their paws at the silly superstitions of humans.

Here is a lucky setsubun meal with grilled sardines, stewed beans, and mame gohan (soy beans cooked with rice), something they ate in my mom’s small hometown in Saitama.

The recipe for the beans and rice is in the article. By the way if you live in Japan or nearby a well stocked Japanese grocery store, you can buy canned cooked soy beans. These will cut down your cooking time considerably.

And speaking of beans - aren’t these gorgeous? Can you believe that three of them are variations of soy beans? The ones on the upper left are regular white-beige ones, the ones on the upper right are green soy beans, and the ones on the bottom are red soy beans. (The beans to the left and right are azuki and kuromame or black beans). They are big, round and absolutely delicious. They were sent via my mom by Kamo Dofu Kinki in Kyoto, who makes spectacular soy milk and tofu from them. (Read more about Kamo Dofu Kinki and their tofu-centered restaurant, Sosoan.) Ah, I’m missing Japan so much right now.

The main memory of setsubun that I have as a kid is going to the local Shinto shrine and trying to catch the bags of roasted beans the priests threw while chanting oni wa soto, fuku wa uchi. I would always get an upset tummy from eating too many of those roasted beans, but they were so good.

And finally: remember my stepfather dressing up as Santa for Christmas? It looks like he has more plans for dressing up…

Food superstitions - how about yours?

Japanese traditional culture is chock full of food related rituals, superstitions and beliefs. How about your culture? What kind of food related traditions does it have, and what are their meanings? One that comes to mind for me in Western/European culture is the one about spilling salt being unlucky, and throwing a little pinch of it over your shoulder to counteract that bad luck. What are some others? The more regional and obscure, the better!

Read related…

Monday photos: This little pig is not a guinea pig

maki — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:11:22 +0000

It’s a bit late to be posting these photos, but here they are. In Europe, the pig is considered a lucky symbol of the New Year; in Switzerland for instance people give each other little peppermint pigs. Here in our little town in Provence, these were for sale for New Year’s Eve celebrations.

It’s a paté in the shape of a cochon (pig). But to me…it reminded me of that Peruvian delicacy, the cuy - a roasted guinea pig. (I won’t post a photo because it’s going to give me the shivers, but, if you want to know, go here.) I wouldn’t have bought it myself, but The Guy was in charge of New Year’s Eve festivities chez M and M, and he thought it looked cute.

Is it cute? Or…is it scary? Look at that face. Aww/eww? (The eyes are black peppercorns.)

It’s really funny how squeamish we can get about food with well, faces, even if it’s just molded. I dont have a problem with fish heads, but a lot of people can’t stand them either.

Once le petit cochon was sliced up, it was fine - a standard homemade type pork and chicken paté, quite delicious. Still, I couldn’t get the image of that little face staring at me out of my head. I’m not sure if we’ll be getting another one next year. I’m inclined to think we’ll go for a plain square version instead.

What do you think? Would you have eaten the pig-paté? How do you feel about food with faces? ^_^

A super-efficient Japanese kitchen

maki — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:02:47 +0000

Following up on my previous post, here’s more about kitchens - this time about their layout and how they should function. The more time you have to spend in a kitchen, the more important this is. (Have you noticed that people with big, gorgeous, expensive kitchens tend not to actually cook a lot?)

It is rare to have the opportunity to start out with a totally blank slate. My dream of dreams is probably to have some big, open loft space to lay out a big, open kitchen precisely the way I want. However, the house we bought is an old stone one, part of it built in the mid 19th century, part of it probably even older, and there are load bearing walls everywhere that cannot be moved or taken down without a whole lot of work. So my kitchen space will not be big, open and wide, but be in one small room with rather odd angles (which will probably be the pantry) and part of the living-dining area. I don’t mind it per se - we did go for this old house over a bland, square modern build because of its quirks after all.

So, I’ve been contemplating compact, efficient kitchen design. Japanese houses are mostly quite small (the average home of a family of 4 is 75 square meters, or about 810 square feet) so the kitchens are usually quite compact. I found the following video depicting one woman’s use of a very efficient galley style kitchen to be fascinating. It’s from a professional home organizing/interior design company, and I think she works for them. But the house and kitchen are her own, not demo models.

She has a typical galley style kitchen (equipment and cabinets along two facing walls, with a narrow space in between), though the smallness is relieved by the fact that it’s open to the dining/living area. She has everything arranged for maximum efficiency, and only have the equipment she really uses. While it might be impossible to be as efficient as her for most people, including me, there are a lot of great pointers, especially for people with tiny kitchens. Here’s what she shows in the video:

She uses eco-friendly cleaning products to keep the sink and countertop clean, put in attractive jars right in front of the sink; baking soda (bicarbonate of soda) in one, and vinegar with some dried herbs in it to make it smell nicer in another. She also puts her dishwashing detergent in attractive dispensers so they can be left out without being eyesores. (Well she says they are attractive. Personally I would use another dispenser, but that’s personal taste ^_^)
Kitchen towels and sponges are hung up from a rail suspended above. She uses hand towels as kitchen towels rather than ‘fukin’ (small cloth kitchen wipes that are typical in Japanese homes), and every night before going to bed she wipes down her countertops with the towel and dumps it in the wash. She uses clips with hooks for the sponges. This way, she says, the sponges dry out very well, don’t get smelly, and last longer - and also keep the sink area looking tidy. (The clips are from Muji (Mujirushi) she says. I have to find them!)
In the storage area under her cooktop she only stores her frying pans (the square ones are tamagoyaki pans, but she calls them frying pans too), plus pot lids, all easy to take out in one movement. She uses the frying pans the most so they are there. (Note she has no oven under there - this is typical for Japanese kitchens; usually people have combination microwave-convection ovens.)
In the drawer next to the cooktop she has a drawer for oil and ingredient (soy sauce, mirin, sake, etc.) she uses all the time while cooking. The front half has just the essential bottles she uses all the time, and the back part is used to store backup supplies of the same bottles that are in the front. She says she has pared down her bottle selection to just the ones she really uses, but it’s still quite a lot!
Salt, sugar, and other flavoring ingredients are store in the cabinet on the opposite side, and cooking implements like spatulas and ladles are in the top drawer on the cooktop side. She can cook while everything is left open, so she can reach anything she needs instantly. She always puts ingredients that come in bags, like salt, sugar and flour, into glass jars so they are easy to take out and put back. (And also don’t make a mess by tipping over and spilling!)
In the second drawer, she has table setting things, like coasters and chopstick rests. She also uses individual trays to put the things needed for every person’s table setting. (This sounds like a good idea to me - individual trays for each person, to just carry as-is to the table.) She has all the dishes and bowls and things positioned so she can take anything out with one hand.
Around the 4:05 mark she shows she has some basic toiletry supplies there too. This is because they have a 3-storey house, and she doesn’t want to have to run up (or down - she doesn’t say) to the bathroom to face her face and things before making breakfast. (Personally I have a hard time conteplating brushing my teeth in the kitchen…but to each his/her own. For her I’m sure it makes her life more efficient.) She also has medications there, plus a aromatherapy stuff and a sewing kit.
She only uses two stainless steel bento boxes for her kid’s bentos, plus silicone cups that are reusable, and can be used directly in a frying pan to cook in. This eliminates the need to buy and store disposable aluminum or paper cups.
Everything has its place; for instance she has a section for beverages (I can’t see exactly what’s there, but I guess things like tea bags, drink mixes etc.) The kitchen is arranged so that her child(ren) can use it easily and put things back properly too.
She has all of her dishes and things coordinated so they all go together. When she’s serving friends (or her daughter is serving her friends) for instance, she’ll put the all the courses on the coordinating plates, stacking each subsequent plate on the other one. When the meal is over the stacked plates can brought back to the kitchen easily.
She only has the bare minimum of eating utensils. Under the sink, she has her stock of pots and pans and bowls. She has her old conventional cleaning detergent bottles and things in the back, which she hasn’t used since switching to cleaning with baking soda and vinegar, so she is probably going to get rid of the old cleaning stuff soon. She loves her stainless steel bowls, which all have matching covers so she can use them for storing leftovers or pre-made items in the fridge without bothering with plastic wrap and so on. (She loves her bowls, and the colander. The set she shows after the lidded bowl set is from a famous designer called Sori Yanagi. I covet that bowl set myself…)
Her fridge and freezer are also very organized. Note that she has a separate freezer next to her fullsize refrigerator despite the tight space of her kitchen, because she works full time and she finds that being able to make things in advance and have an ample freezer stock to be invaluable. (She stuck some masking tape on her fridge to camouflage the colored parts that didn’t coordinate with the freezer.) In her fridge, she stores everything in glass jars or ziplock bags, prepared or cut up and ready to go, not just dumped in there. She has things like bread stocked in the freezer.
In her appliance chest, all the appliances plugged into the switched power strip have tags on the cords so she can identify them easily. She always switches off the power to appliances not in use to conserve energy.
Since she always marks the contents of her ziplock bags in magic marker, there’s a marker stored in the drawer next to the freezer.

And in part 2, you can see her in action in her super-efficient kitchen. I won’t go through all the details, but note how she unpacks her groceries right away and gets rid of all the extraneous packing material - that really explains why her refrigerator looks so empty and neat! She cuts up a whole cabbage and stores the parts she doesn’t need for dinner in a ziplock bag, and puts the kimchi in a glass jar instead of just leaving it in the plastic container it came in. She uses just part of the pork belly and wraps up the rest for the freezer.

(I like that you can tell the video really is filmed at her house, because you can hear around the 6:40 when her child comes home and calls out “I’m home (tadaima), I’m going to the library to return a book” and she says back “Ok, but come right back!”

I really enjoy watching these kinds of organizing videos. I hope you did too, and if you know of any others let me know!

What's in your kitchen? What is your kitchen?

maki — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 14:03:49 +0000

The subject of ‘kitchens’ has been front and foremost my mind, again. The renovations on the house that I talked about a few months ago haven’t really progressed much beyond what you see there. We temporarily ran out of funds, then I got sick and lost interest for a while, and on and on. But now…I want a kitchen! I have been pinning kitchen ideas almost daily on Pinterest while I wait for the necessary funds to come in. Imagine being a professional food writer, ostensibly, and not even having a kitchen. It’s not easy, folks. I would normally flee to Japan to take advantage of my mom’s kitchen there, but my current physical condition doesn’t allow me to do that. Bummer. In the meantime we are still making do with two portable burners, a tiny refrigerator…and we have to do the dishes in the bathroom sink. My patience is wearing a bit thin to say the least.

Anyway, this post is actually inspired by something else - a review left for the Just Bento Cookbook on Amazon.com. It’s not a bad review really - 4 stars is not bad after all - but the reviewer complained that the book is “not really good for American kitchens’. This got me thinking about about, what exactly is an American kitchen these days? Doesn’t a kitchen, and the ingredients it stocks, evolve over time? For instance, something like sriracha sauce was unheard of in most American kitchens just a few years ago, and now I suspect quite a few have it in their pantries along with the ketchup and the A-1 Steak Sauce. Maybe instead of those traditional, “All-American” sauces.

And so, here is an it’s-Friday-let’s-have-fun type of little questionnaire for you!

Question 1: The Amazon reviewer seems to see her kitchen as an “American kitchen”. If you had to describe yours in one short phrase, what would it be?

Question 2: What are your all-time, standby favorite pantry staples? (Up to 3)

Question 3: What new ingredient (s) have you discovered recently (say within the last couple of years) that is now part of your regular rotation?

Here are my answers!

Q1: - Japanese-French-American-offbeat (evidence of the offbeat part: Marmite…need I say more?)

Q2: - Soy sauce, Tabasco, and katsuobushi (bonito flakes)

Q3: - Almond butter. I use this now over peanut butter, because I can get unsweetened, additive-free almond butter at our local ‘bio’ (health food) store but it’s almost impossible to get decent peanut butter in France. Also, thick buttery crème fraîche from Brittany - so unlike the much thinner stuff I was used to before.

How about you? ^_^

(ETA: By no means am I saying that the Amazon reviewer was somehow wrong. It is her opinion, how can she (or he) be wrong? But I think from now on I will refrain from commenting publicly on any Amazon reviews of my work, negatively or positively. It seems there is an unwritten rule there that authors are not allowed to do that. ^_^;)

Totally off topic: About your small business site or blog, and getting it noticed - what not to do

maki — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 12:56:49 +0000

This has nothing at all to do with Japan, or food, or anything else that I normally write about here. But I am putting it on this site in the off chance that it will be read by regular folk. That is, people who just happened to land here, looking for a recipe perhaps. It’s not for web designers or developers or people who built stuff for the web. And it’s certainly not for so-called “SEO experts”.

But I just couldn’t take it anymore.

(What is SEO, you ask? It’s an acronym for Search Engine Optimization. We’ll get to that later.)

Why can I tell you about these things?

I am not an ‘SEO expert’, and I am no longer a web designer. So why listen to me?

I run two fairly successful blogs. They are both ‘niche’ blogs as they say in the website-creating world - they each concentrate on a fairly narrow topic. The one you are reading now, Just Hungry, mainly focuses on Japanese home cooking, though I do allow myself to stray from that topic a bit. It’s about 80% Japanese food and Japan-related stuff, 20% other things, mostly of a personal nature. My other blog, JustBento has an even narrower focus: compact portable meals, aka bento boxes. I suppose neither topic is going to gather a huge audience, but I am very happy with the number of visitors I get on both.

Both have great positions on Google searches, for the terms that people are likely to use when looking for what’s on them. If you search for ‘bento recipes’ for example, JustBento is at or near the top. If you search for ‘Japanese home cooking’ or ‘Japanese recipes’, the same applies for this site.

What’s more, I built both of the sites myself. I am my own web designer, developer and SEO person. While I do get a wee bit of help from my husband (aka The Guy) he’s not really a web person (he develops programs for other platforms, not browsers) so I do 99% of the brunt work. What’s more, in my previous life, before I became a full time writer, I was a web designer. Heck, my Amazon Author Profile page may be the only one that lists a cookbook and a CSS/Javascript book! (Those are website-building-techie things, just in case.) At heart, I’m still a web geek. So I think I have a pretty good idea of what to do and what not to do.

Comment spam, aka inserting your site links into comments

I’m here to tell you, such links do not work. They do not work. If you hired a web designer or other ‘expert’ who told you they do work, they are lying to you, or they have no clue. There are no widely recognized, certified credentials needed to call onesself a ‘web designer’ or an ‘SEO expert’. If you are getting charged for dodgy practices that are supposed to raise your site’s visibility in the eyes of Google and other search engines, you may be getting ripped off.

Why don’t comment links work? For one thing, sites such as mine that hold all comments in a moderation queue will not even publish them. So no one will get to see them.

“But”, you may be saying, “there are plenty of other sites that do publish these comments”. Well, if a site’s comment section is neglected enough to allow all such links to pass through, your site link is probably mixed in with the ones for [insert popular medication name here] or fake [insert Swiss watch maker name here] watches and Hot [insert your favorite nationality/ethnicity/age here] Girls. It’s like moving your storefront into the seediest part of town. Would you want your lovely custom staircase company next to a peep show parlor?

But some sites do a half-hearted job of screening the most obvious links, mainly with automated screening solutions, so the medical/x-rated stuff gets dumped. So then, you might think your link will get noticed by the search engines. Wrong! All modern blogging and content management systems (most blogs and many other sites are built using one of these) have a system where links in comments are automatically tagged like so:

rel="nofollow"

What that little tag means to search engines is that the link in question should not be ‘voted up’, so to speak. Google rankings are largely based on how many incoming links there are to a site for a particular search term, so ‘link juice’ as its called, legitimate links from other sites to your, are very valuable. But if all your comment-links get tagged with that nofollow, it’s useless.

Morever, savvy internet users are absolutely sick and tired of internet spam, whether it’s in their email, their Twitter streams, or on the websites they read. So if they see your site linked to in such a manner, they are both very likely to even click on it, and to think much the worse of you.

I know that it’s very hard to get attention on the web, and how anxious you might be to get noticed. But there’s a wrong way and a right way. Don’t waste your time and money doing it the wrong way.

A couple of more don’ts besides comment spamming

Do not write to an established blog (or other site) asking for a ‘linkback’ or ‘link exchange’. I hate those and most other blog owners do too. If we really like your site organically, we may link to you, but if you push it we will ignore you. (This may sound arrogant, but it’s the truth.)
A recent tactic is asking if you can write a guest post for a site, in which you will include links to your site. You should check first to see if the site you’re writing to even accepts guest posts. (Mine do not, unless I put out a specific call for them - and the last time I did that was on JustBento about 3 years ago. Just Hungry has never had a guest post.) Morever, if your site’s subject matter is totally unrelated to the site you’re writing to, forget it. (A warning for new blog owners: be very wary of accepting such ‘guest post’ requests. The requester is only in it for the link juice.)

A very short list of the right ways to do it

In closing, here’s just a very short list of the right ways to get more attention:

Make sure your site is clear about what it is selling/what the subject matter is. This information should be in text, and displayed prominently on your site.
The most important page on your site is the home or front page. If you have a flashy Flash ‘entry page’ that has not been appropriately text-optimized, you are making your site harder to find. If your web designer proposes a Flash- or graphic-only entry page, fire them. (I’m talking to you, restaurant site owners!)
A site that is frequently updated has a better chance to get search engine attention. If you have the time, incorporating a blog on your site, that you update regularly, can be a way to fairly painlessly keep your site fresh.
Making comments on other blogs can work - but make sure you are making relevant comments not just there to plug your site/blog. Then, casually include a link to your site. If it looks like you know what you are talking about, and the subject matter of your site is somehow related the site where you’re commenting, chances are you will get more eyeballs on your site from that.
Read Search Engine Watch and educate yourself.

So, that’s it for this special announcement. Now back to your regular programming in the next post!

Addendum: For food bloggers (or any blogger), especially if you are just starting out

Food Blog Alliance is a site by and for food bloggers, about the ins and outs of running a food theme blog. The articles are written by experienced food bloggers, some who have have had successful, even profitable, food blogs for years. There are plenty of tips there that pertain to general blogging too, so it’s well worth checking out. (I have a couple of articles there: Startup costs for a food blog is a bit outdated but still viable, and Welcome visitors to your blog with an About page is still pertinent.)

(A bit of history: Back when I was a working web designers, I used to use Just Hungry to test out various search engine theories and such. Some worked, some definitely did not. It was very educational to see how things worked in on a real, live site. But now that Just Hungry is an important part of my writing business, it’s no longer an SEO guinea pig.)

Monday photos: Winter in Provence

maki — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 18:47:10 +0000

For the past couple of years I’ve been spending most of the winter months in Japan, or somewhere else. Last year I spent most of January in New York and Seattle promoting the Just Bento Cookbook, and the year before I was in Japan, doing the photoshoot for the book! And the year before that I was in Zürich. So, even though we bought this old broken down stone house about 2 years ago, this is the first January I’ve been here.

There isn’t too much going on in this sleepy corner of France in the winter months. The tourists will start arriving in the spring, and the fields are quiet. But it’s still so beautiful. I’ve been indoors most of the time for weeks, waiting for my surgery wound to heal. It’s finally started healing up a bit so I can go out (at least, it’s not leaking copiously anymore). It feels so good to feel some fresh air on my face again.

Olive trees keep their shimmery silver leaves throughout the winter. We don’t get much snow here in Provence, except on the top of Mont Ventoux, here in the background.

Besides olives and vines, many kinds of fruit trees are grown here. Here in the Baronnies, in an area just to the north of Provence proper called the Drôme Provençale (administratively part of the Rhône-Alpes, but in spirit and landscape all Provence) the land is very hilly, so the orchards are terraced. I think they are apricot trees there.

And of course, there are vineyards, many many vineyards. These terraced vineyards are about 10 minutes away from the house, nestled in a magical little valley. Everywhere you go in this northern section of Provence, wherever there is a little patch of sunny land, it is planted with vines or olive trees or fruit trees. (The Dentelles de Montmirail, which you can see in the far right, are nearby many famous AOC wine producing villages such as Gigondas, Vacqueyras and Beaumes de Venise.)

Still some ways to go for these old vines…

It’s hard to believe this dead looking branch will be, in just a few weeks, bursting with life. But it will. It’s just taking a long nap.

More than the plants are taking a winter break. We stopped by one of my favorite brocante (junk/antiques shop) a few days ago, only to discover it’s closed…until February 29th! Someone had impatiently scribbled underneath the store sign, “[2 months is] VERY long!!”

By the end of February, my surgery wound will hopefully have finally healed and I’ll be able to move around freely. My father’s memorial service will be done. In March my radiation therapy will begin, but I feel confident that it will go well. And maybe we can resume work on the old house again, finally install a kitchen, finish the floors, install a staircase to the upstairs. Ah, so many things. Still, when I see how much beauty we are surrounded by here, I feel so very lucky.

In the meantime, on February 29th I’ll be there at that store to see if they’ve gotten in anything new. I can’t wait.

Mochi and New Year's article in the Japan Times, plus a very rich buttery mochi dish

maki — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 17:01:37 +0000

I am a few days late posting this, but this month’s Japan Times article is about the traditions surrounding mochi or omochi, the sticky pounded rice cake. Mochi is both eaten and displayed in the display alcove of Japanese homes through the New Year’s holiday period (which usually lasts until the 3rd). The main display piece is a kagamimochi, or “mirror mochi” (read the article for the origins of that name). I didn’t get to include a photos of a kagamimochi in the article, but here’s a nice photo of a typical modern version by David Z. from flickr:

As you can see, the satsuma or clementine on top is plastic, and the mochi itself is sealed in a plastic container, which keeps it fresh for eating later. In the olden days the mochi stack was exposed for days, developing cracks along the surface. Some people interpreted the cracks to mean the year would be good or bad. The modern plastic-clad version is not as picturesque, but it probably is a lot more hygenic.

Ready-to-grill dried mochi cakes are easy of course, but if you want to make mochi from scratch and you don’t have a mochi making machine, here is my method for making mochi with a heavy-duty mixer, such as a KitchenAid. I’ve tried this many times and it always comes out pretty well! Although I do have to watch my mochi intake..they are basically compressed and condensed white rice - pure carbs. Ouch.

Speaking of caloric…did you know that the bland taste of mochi is a perfect foil for very Western ingredients such as cheese and butter? When I was a kid, my sister and I used to love making ‘mochi pizza’ - pre-grilled mochi spread with ketchup (we didn’t have pizza sauce in Japan back then), topped with shredded cheese and a bit of Italian seasoning.

I saw the original version of this buttery mochi dish on a Japanese TV show about a small nori maker. I’ve since tweaked it quite a bit, using brown butter (or in other words, letting the butter cook a bit more until it’s browned) which I think improves it quite a bit. The nori maker’s wife said it was her favorite way to enjoy mochi. No wonder - it s is absolutely delicious…and so very bad for you. Not the best thing to start off a new year filled with good intentions maybe…so perhaps save it for a special occasion, like surviving the first day back at work/school.

Recipe: Mochi in brown butter with nori and green onions

Serves 1 to 5.

5 square mochi cakes (available at a Japanese grocery store in the dried foods section)
1 stick or 4 oz / 120g unsalted butter (see recipe)
1 Tbs. soy sauce
1/2 cup (approximate) chopped green onion
2 sheets of nori seaweed, crumbled

Pre-grill the mochi cakes on a mochi grill, or in a toaster oven or regular oven. If using a toaster oven, cook the mochi cakes for about 5-7 minutes or until they puff up, and are blistered and slightly browning on the surface. (The puffing will deflate once you take them out.) If using a regular oven, preheat it to 400°F / 200°C , put the mochi cakes on a baking sheet lined with kitchen parchment paper or silicone baking sheets to prevent sticking, and bake for 5-10 minutes until puffy and blistered. If using a mochi grill, put the grill on a burner set to medium-low, plop the rice cakes on and watch then puff up. Flip over once.

Melt the butter in a hot frying pan over medium heat until it starts to brown a bit (for a more detailed description of how to make brown butter, see Elise’s method). Drizzle in the soy sauce - be careful, it may spit a bit.

Put the grilled mochi cakes in the pan in a single layer and cook until the mochi starts to just brown a bit and the whole thing smells caramel-y and marvelous. Flip over and cook for another minute. Be careful not to let the butter burn.

Transfer to a plate, pouring any residual butter over the mochi. Sprinkle the crumbled nori (your hands are the best tool for crumbling) and green onions on top. Serve while piping hot, making sure each mochi bite is well covered in that butter. Tell yourself you’ll go on a diet the next day.

Notes

If you use salted butter, reduce the soy sauce to 1/2 or simply omit it. You can season with a little salt instead of soy sauce.

If you don’t like nori, the green onions alone are pretty good. Or try…crispy bacon and green onion. Really.

Japan Times mochi article

Basics: Japanese soy sauce - all you need to know (and then some)

maki — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 23:54:08 +0000

I’ve written so many articles here on Just Hungry over the eight years of its existence that I’ve forgotten half of them. But one thing I have not really done so far is delve into the subject of one of the most important ingredients in Japanese cooking, shoyu (醤油）or soy sauce. I have written about soy sauce briefly in years past, but I feel now is the time to go deeper.

So, let’s dive in.

How is soy sauce made?

Like miso, soy sauce is a fermented and aged product. The kanji characters for soy sauce or shoyu are 醤油, which literally means ‘fermented food oil’ - so in Japanese and Chinese there’s no ‘soy’ at all in the ‘soy sauce’ name. In the olden days, many foods were salted and fermented for longer shelf life and flavor. For instance the ancient Romans liked a thing called garum, a strongly flavored condiment or sauce made from fermented fish. The fish sauces that are essential for south east Asian cooking are salted-and-fermented-food products too. (Did you know there are several Japanese fermented fish sauces too? The most well known one is called shottsuru (しょっつる）and is made in Akita prefecture, in the Tohoku region.)

Generally soy sauce is made from a mixture of soy beans, wheat, salt and yeast. Some types of soy sauce also include fermented rice (kome koji) or amazake to give sweetness to the flavor. Mass produced soy sauce is made from defatted soy residue (soy from which the oil has been extracted), which makes the soy sauce ferment a lot faster than using the whole bean. Purists argue that this also leads to a loss of flavor and body. The wheat and/or rice is necessary to feed the yeast as the mixture ferments, and to develop a sweet flavor in the soy sauce.

Here’s how they make soy sauce at a traditional soy sauce maker (shoyu-ya) in Chiba prefecture:

Here’s a nice big vat fermenting away…

Of course this is not how it’s done at say, Kikkoman factories around the world. But the process is fundamentally the same.

Soy sauce is typically aged at least 6 months before it is bottled, though some are aged longer. While ‘standard’ soy sauce (see koikuchi below) usually does not have any additives, in some cases things are added (usually alcohol) to prolong the shelf life of soy sauce, or sweeteners to give it a sweeter flavor. By Japanese law, all such additives must be clearly indicated on the label. So if you’re looking for a soy sauce that’s as natural as possible, look for one with no additives.

(Note: I am talking here only about Japanese soy sauce. Soy sauce is made by other Asian cultures of course, where processes and ingredients may differ. I’m sticking to what I’m familiar with here as usual.)

Types of soy sauce

There are 5 main traditional types of shoyu or soy sauce. The type of soy sauce used in largely influenced by what part of the country you live in, or where the cook of the family grew up. (I know a lot of people outside of Japan tend to think it’s all the same and homogenous, but at least when it comes to food that’s certainly not the case.) Typical Japanese households stock just 1 or 2 types of soy sauce, unless they are really into cooking.

The most widely used type by far is koikuchi (濃い口）soy sauce. Koikuchi literally means ‘dark mouth’. This is the quintessential soy sauce that you see for sale from brands like Kikkoman and Yamasa in Japanese grocery stores around the world, and since it is the ‘starndard’ soy sauce for many people it is not always labeled as koikuchi. Koikuchi soy sauce sales account for more than 80% of the market in Japan according to the Soy Sauce Information Center (SOYIC - Japanese only website). It’s the soy sauce of choice in the Tokyo/Kanto area and the north. Koikuchi soy sauce is usually made with equal parts of soy and wheat, plus salt and yeast.

This is the soy sauce I use in all of my recipes here on Just Hungry as well as on JustBento unless specified otherwise. Why? Well for one thing I’m from Tokyo, and my mom and her mom and my father’s mom were all from the Kanto region. So we are koikuchi folks. Also, koikuchi soy sauce is the ‘standard’ as noted above, and much easier to get a hold of than other types.

The second most popular type of soy sauce is usukuchi　（淡口; kanji scholars may notice that the kanji 淡い is used rather than 薄い). This is a lighter colored, used primarily in western Japan, namely the Kansai region (Kyoto/Osaka), and has about 15% of the soy sauce market share. In traditional Kyo-ryori (Kyoto cuisine), which has its origins in refined imperial court cooking, dark colored koikuchi soy sauce is considered declassé and ruins the flavor and appearance of food. However, don’t think that because it’s lighter in color that it’s less salty. On the contrary, usukuchi soy sauce is saltier than koikuchi soy sauce - 18-19% of its volume is salt, compared to around 16% for koikuchi. In recipes that call for usukuchi soy sauce this is taken into account. Usukuchi soy sauce is also made with soy and wheat, and is often rounded out with the addition of fermented rice (kome koji), wheat gluten or amazake.

Another type of soy sauce that became popularized in the west is tamari (溜まり）- which means ‘pooled residue’. It is a thick, almost viscous soy sauce, which originated in the Chuubu region (central Japan; the main city in the area is Nagoya). It’s used mainly as a dipping sauce for sashimi, and to finish off certain dishes to give a burnished reddish- brown color and shine, e.g. to teriyaki dishes. Tamari became popularized in the west because it got the reputation that it was made without wheat. This is not necessarily the case - especially if it’s a tamari made the traditional way. If you must stay away from any kind of wheat please check the label. (Tamari made with 100% soy does exist.)

(*A note about gluten intolerance and soy sauce. Much of the wheat gluten is broken down and basically consumed by the yeast during the long fermentation process. I’ve looked at the blogs of many Japanese celiacs, and they all say they don’t worry about consuming small amounts of soy sauce. But of course, Your Body May Vary. Kikkoman does make a gluten-free soy sauce, but I’m not sure if it’s for the overseas market only.)

Finally we come to two very regional soy sauces. Saishikomi (再仕込み）soy sauce originates south-western Japan, especially Yamaguchi prefecture. It’s unique in that it is re-brewed (that’s what ‘saishikomi’ means) from a previous batch ofmade soy sauce. This means the color is very intensely dark red-brown, and the flavor is less salty and sweeter more rounded than other soy sauces. And then there is shiro (白) or white shoyu that originates in Aichi prefecture. It’s even lighter in color than usukuchi shoyu - it’s about the color of dashi stock made with lots of katsuobushi (bonito flakes), and has become rather trendy to use amongst some chefs in Japan who want to add some soy sauce flavor to dishes but not color. (Outside of Japan, certain trend-conscious chefs have started specifying usukuchi soy sauce. They need to catch up. ^_^)

Reduced salt soy sauce

Reduced　or low-sodium salt soy sauce, called genen (減塩）or teien (低塩) is koikuchi soy sauce that has had its salt content reduced mechanically so to speak.The salt content of reduced sodium soy sauce ranges from 9 to 13%. (Don’t confuse reduced salt soy sauce with usukuchi (light) soy sauce, as noted above.)

Grades of soy sauce

Soy sauce is graded both by the Japaneese Ministry of Agriculture, Fishing and Forestry (JAS) and an industry group called the Japanese Soy Sauce Association. The official government grades are Special Grade (特級, tokkyuu), First Grade (１級, ikkyuu) and Standard Grade (標準, hyoujun). Grading is based on measuring the chemical composition soy sauce, mainly for its amino acid and alcohol content. The Japanese Soy Sauce Association adds two more grades that are higher than Special Grade: Extra Select (特選, tokusen) and Ultra-Extra Select (超特選, choutokusen).

Soy sauce is also graded by experts based on color, aroma, roundedness and other such more subjective criteria.

As with most Japanese things, you tend to get what you pay for when it comes to soy sauce.

Other things to look for on a label might be “yuuki” which means grown without chemical fertilizers or pesticides (almost organic), and “marudaizu” which means the soy sauce is made from the whole soy bean rather than defatted dregs.

Generally speaking, people tend to use expensive, special soy sauces and very assertively flavored ones straight up, for dipping and other uses where it is not diluted by other ingredients.

So now my head is spinning. What soy sauce do you recommend?

If you can only afford one soy sauce type (budget or space-wise) in your kitchen, get the best koikuchi (or regular) soy sauce you can afford. It’s really the best all-rounder. I usually buy Yamasa Marudaizu or regular Yamasa. I just prefer Yamasa over Kikkoman, but that’s just a personal preference. (And by the way, I do stick to Japanese brands; I just find they taste better to me. I tried an ‘organic’ soy sauce made in the UK once and it was just..lacking.) I do have a couple of extra-special, artisanal soy sauces around purchased in Japan, but they are not really necessary and I actually rarely use them, except for dipping.

If you dislike the dark color soy sauce gives to dishes, or have gotten into Kyoto style cooking, you’ll want to use usukuchi soy sauce, but it does tend to be more expensive than koikuchi. Your local Japanese grocery store will stock both koikuchi and usukuchi soy sauces, as well as tamari and maybe other types. Your local general-Asian grocery store will probably only have koikuchi (plus soy sauces from other nations).

Nowadays you have a wide selection of soy sauces to choose from in the U.S. as long as you’re willing to mailorder - go nuts if you want! In France/Europe, be sure to look up Workshop Issé if you want to go high-end with your soy sauce.

I hope I’ve covered all of your soy sauce questions! If not, let me know in the comments as always.