Tag: Japanese food

Rakkyō

If you have ever eaten curry-rice in a restaurant you surely have eaten the little white pickle served with it and then you have eaten pickled rakkyō 薤. A little vegetable that looks like a shallot a bit and is often called Chinese onion. I love the crisp and fresh taste it has and it’s hard to stop eating! A little like French cornichon, but less sour and salty!!!

The season for fresh rakkyō harvest is right now and it is fairly easy to find in coop and farmers markets. Pickling them is rather simple though washing and pealing is a bit tedious and you have recipe several options.

The easiest one is to use a prepared ready to use “rakkyō su” which is a mix of vinegar, sugar, dashi that is chiefly used for pickling rakkyō but can also be used for other preparations such as curry onion pickles. Though I am not necessarily a fan of ready to use products, they are a good way to start when you are unsure of the result and what you do and want to maximize success.

Other methods are to prepare your own brine for pickling the rakkyō. One recipe I have in an old Japanese cookbook is quite lengthy and probably the most genuine one, yet I couldn’t find a similar one anywhere, so I tempted to share it with you. My rakkyō are still in their first week of picking so I don’t yet the result… we’ll see!!!

So first the recipe for a quick sure outcome, and then the lengthy one. Choose the one you prefer!

Easy-peasy pickled rakkyō

  • 1kg of fresh rakkyō
  • 1 bottle of rakkyō su らっきょ酢

Start by washing the rakkyō and removing the first layer of skin to obtain a smooth and shiny surface. Remove the hard base and top too. Bring a large pan filled with water to a boil and throw the rakkyō in for one minute. Drain and pat dry the rakkyō.

In a sterilized bin put the dry rakkyō and cover with the rakkyō su. Close the bin with a lid. Leave to rest for 14 days. Shake the bin 2 times per day on the first 3 days. After 14 days enjoy!

Classic recipe of pickled rakkyō

Brine for pickling (used 14 days later)

  • 2 cups of rice vinegar or other white mild vinegar
  • 300g of sugar
  • 1 cup of white umezu (brine of the umeboshi unflavored with shiso), can be replaced by 1 cup of vinegar + 1tsp of salt
  • 1/2 cup of mirin or konbu dashi
  • 5 dried red pepper (optional)

Pickling step 1

  • 1kg of fresh rakkyō
  • 30g of salt
  • 4tbs of vinegar
  • 1l of water

Start by washing the rakkyō and removing the first layer of skin to obtain a smooth and shiny surface. Remove the base and top too.

In a pan, set the water, salt and vinegar and the prepared rakkyō. Bring to a boil and stop right away. Drain and pat dry and put in a bin or a pickle-pot. Cover with the brine you made or of commercial brine. If you can set a heavy lid, otherwise everyday shake the bin. Wait for two weeks.

Pickling step 2

After two weeks drain the rakkyō and set them in salted water for 3-4h. Renew 2-3 time the water. Then set to dry in the air for half a day. Ideally in the sun, but any well ventilated place will do.

Finally prepare the brine by mixing all the brine ingredients together (but the red pepper) and bring to a boil. In a sterilized bin put the rakkyō and cover with the brine. Add the red pepper if you plan to use some.

Now it’s ready. Rakkyō in brine should keep a year or so., so enjoy!

Fireflies season

The end of May in Ohara is a beautiful season. The greens on the hills change from fresh greens to rich ones and the paddies from the typical yellow green if very young rice plants to a beautiful shamrock green. It is also the beginning of the rainy season, of hydrangeas blooming and warmer days. At bight it is possible for a few weeks to see fireflies.

Japanese have something for fireflies 蛍 hotaru. I didn’t recall seeing fireflies often as a child, a rare few times in Lozere, but not much. And since we moved to Japan and went to see fireflies at Chizanso in Tokyo with our friend I. who always had the best info about things to do, I kind of understand the sweet magic and the kind of nostalgia they bring. Seeing fireflies at Chizanso was great, but it is an orchestrated event when they release fireflies in the garden. While the magic is there, the artificiality of it is hard to neglect. It’s like seeing lions in a zoo…

In Ohara we are blessed with rather clean streams of water and great nature (I can’t say it is everywhere when I see the palettes of glyphosate at the garden center…) and we can see fireflies in their ecosystem. We first saw some in our garden one Sunday night, and since then every year we go for a walk when the season comes. And for sure with a bit of patience and the habituation to darkness you can spot a little green light blinking. If we want to be lazy, we walk to the nearest stream in the paddies, and there we can see plenty.

A firefly in our garden

The fireflies season is the perfect transition between the end of spring and the beginning of the summer. It brings many greens in the plate broad beans and zucchini. Tomatoes from the green house that are ripe, sweet and juicy. It inspired me for the recipe of the simple plate on the top picture: soba, fava beans and zucchini in soya sauce and a peeled tomato, also with soya sauce. I love when the juice of the tomato mix in the soya sauce, eaten together with the cold soba it is divine.

Henon – 淡竹

Probably the very last of the wild spring vegetables, undeniably not the easiest to find in a shop, and a very fun one to go and pick in the forest. We discovered henon 淡竹 (hachiku) when our friends in Tsunan invited us to go and pick them in late May 2010, and I remember it at as a lot of fun foraging them. Unfortunately after that, rare were the times we had a chance to eat some. And I longed for eating some, but didn’t venture in unknown forest to try to search for some. So you can easily imagine how happy I was when I found some at one of the local farmers cooperatives we shop in Chiba. Henon is a sort of bamboo shoot. But contrarily to takenoko the are thin and even more tender. And they don’t have such tartness. They are much more refined.

With more than 10 years since I last helped K. preparing them, I was a bit unsure about how to proceed and how to dress them, but I decided to do it my way: simple and rapid.

So, as for other bamboo shoots, I peeled them carefully, blanched them until tender, which takes only about 10min.

Then cut and dressed them. As I was roasting a piece of pork filet I decided to use the jus and deglazed the henon in the jus, where I added 2tbs of soya sauce. The result was exactly what I wanted. I know I could have made a more Japanese-cuisine like preparation, but the pork juice and the soya sauce are a sublime mix for pretty much any vegetable, and the magic worked again this time.

Unfortunately there might not be too often henon recipes here, unless we find a spot to harvest some, but if you happen to find some I more than recommend you try cooking them!!

Double tap ashitaba gnocchi

For those who know me, it is no secret we love ashitaba 明日葉 since we visited Hachijojima a long time ago. Actually ashitaba is a native plant of Japan and more particularly Izu islands (Hachijojima…), Miura peninsula and Boso peninsula (where ouf country house is). So imagine how happy I am every year when the season comes!!! One of my all-time favorite is my recipe of ashitaba is ashitaba gnocchi, that in my opinion I don’t make often enough. And this time I decided to go for a double ashitaba gnocchi+ashitaba pesto.

Its taking the flavor to an extra level of green and refreshment. The recipe is simple as always and not very different than the previous ones. But just in case you would need one…

Ashitaba gnocchi & pesto (2 servings)

  • 2 potatoes
  • A bouquet of ashitaba
  • Salt and pepper
  • Olive oil
  • Flour

Boil the whole potatoes until tender. Peel and mash. Blanch the ashitaba. Blend without water until smooth. Filter half of the blended mixture through a tea net, jeep both the juice and the leaf puree.

Mix the leaf puree with the potatoes. Add flour to obtain a slightly sticky dough. Shape the gnocchi. Add a but more flour if needed while shaping them.

Pour back the juice in the blender, add olive oil, salt and pepper. Then move all to a pan and heat at medium heat while stirring once in a while.

Boil a large amount of water, and poach the gnocchi. When they float move them to the pan and roll them in the sauce to coat them. Serve and enjoy right away.

Pickling

I don’t know if it’s because of the sunny and warmer days, the abundance of vegetables that I love, or seeing the rapid growing of the plums on the trees that are the prospect of a new harvesting season and making plum fermented syrup 梅シーロップ, and salt fermented plums uneboshi 梅干し, but I’ve recently been in a mood for pickling. I think it is also because I realized I need to clear space for the new bins that will populate the shelf and the fridge soon, so it means emptying all almost finished jars and bottles. Rather than just tossing the precious ume zu in the drain, or the beautiful red shiso (parilla) leaves after they have served for the plum and their conservation I thought of a recipe I was taught by our Hakuba’s favorite restaurant owner and cook which consists of pickling cucumber in ume zu. I then extended it to red shiso leaves too. So my pickling repertoire is rather simple. Nothing about nuka, that stinks and is sometimes a bit difficult to control. As I said, I use the simplest pickling methods: salt pickling 塩漬け shiozuke, ume zu 梅酢 pickling called shibazuke 柴漬けand red shiso ume zu pickling. It is really quick to make if you do asa zuke 浅漬け which a rapid and “shallow” pickling and the result is always a nice add-on to a Japanese meal. I pickle only a small amount at a time and to make the process faster I usually cut the vegetables (otherwise the pickling time is longer and I forget that I had pickled something!!!). So simple and delicious that I’m not sure why I don’t pickle much! Anyway… here are a few very simple recipes to make your own Japanese pickles. You can adjust the amount of salt to you liking.

Salt “shallow” pickles 浅漬け

  • 1 Japanese cucumber
  • 1/2tsp of salt

Wash and pat dry the cucumber. Slice thinly. In a bowl, put the cucumber slices, sprinkle the salt on top. Put a weight on the cucumber slices to slightly squeeze them. What I would usually do is cut a piece of cooking wrap or similar and put a tinier heavy bowl on top. Keep for 2-4h at room temperature depending on the season and the pickling level. Beware, the amount of liquid in the bowl may increase quite dramatically, so either use a large enough bowl, or put in a tray to avoid overflow catastrophe! After 4h the pickles will be ready to eat. The longer the softer. Keep in the fridge after 12h and eat rapidly because it is already sliced.

You can use the same recipe with other vegetables that contain less water, in that case you may want to do a 5% salt brine with 5g of salt and 100g of water, and use the brine to just cover the vegetables. You can also pickle for longer, or not cut the vegetables and pickle the whole vegetables (pickling time would be 8-12h). In that case the weight to apply on the preparation is about twice the weight of the pickled vegetables and once pickled they apparently keep for a few days in the fridge, in a airtight container without the brine. Honestly I pickle just the quantity I want us to it, so never keep them!

Ume zu pickles shibazuke 柴漬け

  • Cucumber, turnip, daikon…
  • 2tbs of ume zu

While this recipe requires ume zu, the salty juice produced by the plum when pickling them, it is a very delicious and simple recipe. Ume zu can be bought in local farmers markets in Japan or at cooperative. I use the one I kept from my plum pickling.

For rapid pickling I wash and cut the vegetables, pour the ume zu and then put a weight on top.

Red shiso ume zu pickling

  • White vegetables of your choice: daikon, turnip…
  • Red shiso leaves that have already served to pickle plum

Same as above, this recipe uses a by-product of plum pickling: the red shiso leaves that are added to plum to add flavor and color. This may not be easy to find of the shelf. But next time you pickle plums think about reusing it!

Same here, wash and cut the vegetables. Set them in a container top with the shiso leaves. Apply a weight on it for a few hours and enjoy!

Eagle fern x bamboo shoot

Well well, the two main protagonists of these past two weeks in the kitchen, are not only delicious alone, but also prepared together. A classic Japanese recipe would be to simmer them individually and then combine them with a bit of red pepper 🌶 and soya sauce. I personally usually pass on the red pepper but this recipe is simple and delicious. Here with brown rice, scrambled eggs and salad.

But really from the start I had something in mind using both combined… something that I love making with whatever is in season: steamed dumplings, of course!!!!

With the beginning of the new fiscal year, school term and the abundance of work in the garden, the surf season… I’ve been pretty busy! But dumplings don’t require that much time to make and they are always a feast. My idea was to combine chopped warabi and takenoko, with coarse ground pork filet, soya sauce and fill some sourdough dough with it, and steam. So that’s exactly what I did and it was soooo delicious I regretted it was our last takenoko!!! So if you still have a chance to get fresh takenoko and warabi I can only but recommend you try! I need mote practice to fold my dumplings beautifully but the taste is here!!!

Eagle fern – わらび – 蕨

When we go with our friends in Tsunan to forage spring wild vegetables, we would for sure also pick some eagle fern – warabi – わらび 蕨. But because it takes a bit of time to prepare (I’ll come to it later) and we have so many other things to eat, we would usually leave without eating them. So, despite the fact that I knew how to prepare them, I couldn’t recall having eaten any fresh ones… and while we were picking bamboo shoots I was looking at fern and picked a few kogomi – こごみ as these are among my favorite sansai – 山菜… but then I grew uncomfortable with the idea of eating them as I have never picked any in Boso before and there are so many varieties… I was worried one may be poisonous… I realized I need to study (a bit) more. I know that it is impossible almost to find kogomi at the farmers market, so either none are locally good or found in tiny amounts that people keep them for themselves. On the other hand warabi can be found at the farmers market!! So I decided to try cooking some in place of kogomi.

As it was my first cooking them I browsed a few cookbooks, and reminded myself of K. in the kitchen parboiling them while stirring them vigorously with chopsticks and then leaving them to rest overnight by the window. A quick reading on kogomi made me understand why this process was so important. It isn’t to remove the bitterness of warabi, it is to remove a toxin from it that is carcinogenic. So don’t try to eat warabi raw or simply cooked. The parboiling, the stirring and the overnight wait are paramount to removing the toxic component. That said and done, eating warabi is totally safe! As a first try I decided to go by the book. I simply prepared them in soya sauce. So here is my recipe, nothing fancy but deliciously simple as I live a recipe to be.

Warabi

  • A handful of warabi –
  • A tsp of baking soda
  • A tbs of soya sauce

Remove the bottom of the warabi, and wash them. In a pan boil sufficient water. Add the warabi and stir energetically. At this stage you can add a tsp of baking soda. Then keep at room temperature for the night. You can prepare them now.

The simplest is to drain the amount desired, cut in 3-4cm pieces, heat in a pan and add at the very end the soya sauce. It can be eaten as it or at room temperature. Enjoy!!

Bamboo shoot pizza

I know that may seems strange… but there are some associations that work perfectly and need to be more explored. The one I totally love is bamboo shoot/tomatoes that I discovered last year by chance. The other thing that I love is grilled bamboo shoots. It reminds me of the grilled thin bamboo shoots we had first harvested with our friends in Tsunan ages ago now… something like 2008… So thinking about how both tomatoes and grilled bamboo shoots could be combined, obviously pizza was going to be a great combo. It just needed to be made. So the night before I prepared the pizza dough with my sourdough. Classic bread dough recipe in which you add a tablespoon of sugar and a generous drizzle of olive oil. You leave it to work gently. And once we get back from surfing in the morning I rolled the dough a bit thick for maximum softness, sliced two tomatoes, a new onion, the takenoko and a local piece of cheese, all in the oven for about 20min at 220deg. Once cheese was golden and crust too, I took it out of the oven, cut and served with a drizzle of olive oil and a bit of ground black pepper. As simple as it is I like my pizza with just 2-3 ingredients in addition to tomato and cheese and I like mixing seasonal vegetables. Many of the Japanese local vegetables actually work well on a pizza. I had already tested burdock, now I know that takenoko is great too!

Picking bamboo shoots

Here we are, spring is here, cherry trees are finishing blooming in a snap. Last week it was pink all over, now it’s new green 新緑 shinryoku everywhere. Everything is so early this year that it feels like it took me by surprise. And spring means not only flowers everywhere in the garden, the jonquils, the snowdrops, the peach trees, and all the others, it means also the spring vegetables and with them the incomparable bamboo shoots or takenoko 筍.

Cooking them is fun and I love creating new recipe with bamboo shoots. I have already posted many recipes in the past and love rediscovering them or testing some others. But beware, the season is short so it’s not like you can take all the time you want. They’re here and in a snap they are way too high and big and no longer good to eat.

What is fun with bamboo shoots is to go and pick them. Bamboos grow pretty much anywhere and in abundance so picking bamboo shoots is rather easy. The point is that you want fresh and soft ones that have pointed out so it looks like a little green/brownish plant so eyes need to get used to spot them, but them accommodate really quickly. Once spotted with pickaxe and a shovel you need to clean around to uncover the hidden part until the very first red spots on the root. And then cut with a firm and clean cut. Return the soil in place and search for the next one.

  • Find the bamboo shoot
  • Cleaning around
  • More cleaning around
  • Ready to pick
  • Yes!!! Got one!!!

Of course said that way it’s rather simple, but you compete in finding bamboo shoots with wild boars and they are really greedy! So they only leave those hard to find, under monticules of earth and fallen leaves, on the steep sides etc… Then the bamboo shoots are often entangled with other roots that you don’t want to damage making it really a puzzle to find where to dig and cut. But that’s part of the fun!

Once you have a nice bamboo shoot to prepare in the kitchen, the first thing to do is to remove the many layers of the soft and furry skin that wrap delicately the shoot. It’s a bit tedious but still important. Then boil your shoot in ample water added with rice first wash water or nuka. Boil at low heat until soft… it can take up to 2 or 3 hours. Pick with a tooth pick to test. And then only you have a bamboo shoot you can prepare for the many recipes. I am working on a few new and a few classic recipes right now, so hopefully in the coming days you should discover some!!!

Peeled bamboo shoot ready for the first boil

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