It’s been more than 5 years that I bake weekly or more and since the beginning I was tempted by preparing my own sourdough starter, but the traveling back and forth between Tokyo and Isumi and our almost monthly business trips abroad stopped me from doing it… yet I never fully abandoned the idea, and recently I got a bit disappointed with dry yeast. Even using respectus panis proportions, I felt I couldn’t control the yeast. One day it bubbles in 30min like crazy, the next, even after 2h I barely see a difference… Then, I had long discussions with my best friend M. about sourdough and bread making, saw how sourdough breads look much nicer, with darker crust and soft and moist crumble on IG, and to finish convincing me I should try, I read Robin Sloane’s Sordough and not that the novel convinced me to have my own sourdough, rather it made me more intrigued with this strange life-of-its-own thing. Since we probably won’t be traveling at all this year, and we have 4 days in Isumi, so I just decided it was time to try.
So here is Lois, my sourdough starter in the making… just freshly mixed: 50g of whole wheat flour and 50g of water… well… now, see you in 3 days hopefully with some bubbling…
Whether on weekdays, when we have little time to have lunch or on the weekends when we are busy with surfing/bodyboarding, playing tennis or gardening, having a good lunch easily ready is important. Moreover, if that can be prepared in advance it is even better! Fresh pasta have been quite a good candidate as they can be accommodated easily, be eaten warm or cold… and since it it is the end of the summer we want to continue enjoying the summer vegetables a little longer, in particular, enjoy the last edamame of the season. I know that we will have eggplants and tomatoes for quite a few weeks or even months but they add a real summer touch to a dish. So I came up with a recipe of edamame pasta with eggplant that is all creamy and divine and I couldn’t wait sharing that recipe with you, as if you want to try you’ll have to hurry!
Edamame, fava beans, and similar are a good match with eggplants and are traditionally used together in Japanese cuisine. I revisited this classic combination in a more western style.
Edamame and eggplant creamy pasta (2 servings)
a handful of edamame
2 eggplants
fresh pasta
olive oil
salt and pepper
grated Parmigiano (optional)
Boil the edamame, grill the eggplants to be able to peel them. Once the edamame have cooled down peel them completely and in a mortar puree them. Add a bit of olive oil, salt and pepper. Peel the eggplant and add to the mix and pure roughly. Boil the fresh pasta, once drained add the mix, stir well ad serve. Add grated Parmigiano if you like.
Yes! that’s it! Isn’t that simple? And you’ll see it is truly delicious!
In the summer it is nice to enjoy refreshing pickled vegetables. After many attempts of different methods to make pickles there are a few that I find particularly not adapted to our life style, and some others that require too much equipment. But there are two that I really like and that are very simple, can be done everywhere, require little ingredients or equipment and work in a few hours. Today I want to introduce the simplest and most efficient way, that works with many of the green summer vegetables such as cucumber, uri, or togan, but also with radishes and daikon. It is called shiozuke 塩漬け in Japanese, and as the name suggested it is a method of pickling vegetables in salt. As a matter of fact it is the same method as making umeboshi or pickled Chinese cabbage… expect that with summer vegetables it takes only a few hours instead of several days or weeks! Today I present the recipe with uri 瓜 a kind of melon/cucumber that is very popular in summer in Japan and that just made its entry in the glossary.
Shiozuke summer vegetables
1/2 uri or 1 Japanese cucumber
1/2 tsp of salt
a little piece of konbu (optional)
Wash and cut the vegetable. It is not really necessary to peel them. Slice them thinly. Cut the konbu in thin pieces. in a bowl large enough, add the sliced uri, the konbu, sprinkle the salt on top. Use a piece of wrap to top and set a weight the size of the inside of the bowl (I used a honey pot filled with water) on top to press the mix. Wait for a few hours before enjoying, and keep in the fridge in the liquid for a few days.
Beware that the liquid when pressing may overflow the bowl, so set the bowl in in a tray or the sink, or use a rather large bowl compared to the amount of vegetable that can receive all the liquid. Another option is to make them in a sealed plastic bag (ziploc…), but I don’t use such plastic bags…
Ohoh! Exploring new possibilities with edamame will last the whole season!!! This recipe of fougasse came naturally to my mind as I love to bale fougasse for summer evenings drinks or summer lunches when I need something quick.
In Japanese bread shops you can sometimes find edamame and gouda breads, and I like them very much, but the idea of a simpler version (without the gouda for A.) and with olive oil and salt tempted me a lot, that the last batch of edamame I had was used to that purpose.
The result is really nice but my recipe needs a little improvements to emphasize more the edamame. So I am sharing with you the improved version but not tested yet… but I am sure it will be delicious.
Edamame fougasse (makes 1 bread)
200g of flour
3g of yeast
7g of salt
Water
Olive oil
A handful of boiled, shelled and peeled edamame
I only use fresh edamame, so the recipe starts by boiling the pods in salted water. Once boiled and cool, shell and peel them. Add a bit of salt.
Prepare the dough of the fougasse: mix the flour, 5g of salt, the yeast, add 2tbs of olive oil, and water to obtain a soft, silky and smooth dough. Add the edamame and knead a bit. Let rest for it to rise. Once is has started to rise you can work it in the shape of the fougasse, and let rest about 30-60min depending on your room temperature.
Bake at 230deg until golden. When out of the oven spread a thin layer of olive oil and sprinkle a bit of salt. That’s it!!!
I am always amazed by all you can do with just flour and water… and recently I’m getting addicted to flat breads… Remember when I first tried here? Well… the same person that makes the dried chickpeas that triggered my wish for flat bread to eat with falafels, well, also makes chickpeas flour… I use a lot chickpeas flour for socca, but I wanted a change so I decided to explore possibilities with flat breads.
First, I made a trial by replacing 3/4 of the flour by chickpeas flour and that worked perfectly… served with zucchini and basil.
Then, another possibility I thought of was to replace half of the flour by whole wheat flour… and that’s all the same delicious.
Finally, I decided to add seeds to the dough. Caraway or cumin seeds are perfect.
As for cooking I tried two options. One is in the dry thick frypan. To obtain a soft bread, flexible and light. The other way, I added vegetal oil in the pan and fried them. It gives a crispy golden bread. Both were equally delicious but I have a preference for the dry soft ones, in particular when used to eat vegetables such as eggplants or zucchinis…
One thing is sure is that making flat breads is super simple, fast and requires no complex ingredients. They are delicious and fit super well summer vegetables or curry. They will be on our table often!!
I never thought I would… until we moved to our new apartment where the kitchen doesn’t have an oven yet and we are still not sure about the renovations we want to do and given the circumstances we prefer to wait a bit… I don’t see myself stopping telework, I’ve always loved it… and always hated train commute. Nor spending the whole week in the country, it would be too tempting to go surfing and work in the garden instead during the day… and I would start working at night…
So, no oven… I’ve tried to bake bigger breads on Sunday but they are so good that they barely last until Wednesday morning in the best of the best scenario… the rest of the week, I make pancakes… but I get board of plain pancakes, and nothing is better than bread (but croissants and pains au chocolat… but honestly they are just air and they feed us enough to not starve 2h later… and lunch is usually more 4 or 5h later…
Bread is the only option and I remember seeing recipe of breads in crockpot, in cocotte… so I was tempted to try. In Tokyo I have neither crockpot nor cocotte. I have a pan with a more less fitting cover… more less because my pan once felt and since then it is more an ovaloid than a perfect circle!!!!
The bread making and kneading is just the same as usual. The rest time also for the first rise. For the second I read that it can be done while the pot is heating, and I tested the first time, but for me it didn’t work, so I just shaped my bread as a ball, laid it on kitchen paper in the pan and waited 1h. Then turn on the gaz rather high and covered and cooked until the bottom was golden. Then I flipped the bread and cooked on the other side. It avoids the thick crusty bottom and the risk of heart of bread not well cooked, and that’s what made my second pan bread perfect.
Cooking bread in a pot may not seems straightforward but it works very well… and I was surprised about it!!!
This shrub looks like nothing particular in the garden, yet it bears fragrant leaves and fruits. It is sansho -山椒 or Japanese pepper.
I planted the tree the very first spring we started our kitchen garden, and without failure it has produced the fragrant leaves we often eat during early spring with bamboo shoots, and later in June the little tiny fruits that are so recognizable in Japanese cuisine. The shrub grows steadily and the fruits are very fertile meaning you have sansho in the garden and don’t harvest the fruits, they will quickly sprout everywhere! So I devoutly harvest them for our own usage and to give away.
I particularly love one recipe of sansho that comes from shojin cuisine. It just blends the typical Japanese flavors or soya sauce, sake and konbu with sansho. It is very simple to prepare and can keep forever in the fridge. Which means you can harvest your sansho, prepare this recipe and eat sansho all year round until the next harvest. So here is the recipe. I love it with plain white Japanese rice and dry chirimen.
Sansho preserve
1/2 cup of fresh sansho seeds
1/4 cup of soya sauce
1/4 cup of sake
8 pieces of konbu of 1.5×1.5cm
Wash the sansho and remove the stems. Put all the ingredients in a small pan and cook at low heat under cover until the liquid is just enough to keep everything moist. Let cool down. Put in a clean jar and keep refrigerated. Use whenever you want. Isn’t that sinple!
When I thought I had tried most berries that exist in Japan, our friends challenged me with a new sort!! The other day Y.-san arrived with a cup full of small dark red berries that looked a lot like dark red currant… so when he said in Japanese “we just harvested june berries, so here are some for you” I took a brain short cut and assumed that june berries in Japanese was the name for red currant. And since my oven was turned on to bake some bread and a quiche, I decided to make a tart with the berries. I prepared a thin crust with olive oil and rye flour, rolled it in a small pie dish, added a spoon of sugar (red currant would be sour…), and wash the berries and while admiring their dark red color, I was telling to myself how dark they are for red currant… well I baked until perfectly done and we ate the tart while still warm. You cannot imagine my surprise when we tasted it. Expecting the tart taste of the currants, slightly blurred by the heat and the sugar, I had in mouth a new flavor… sweet as the sweetest cherry but more floral and berry-like. It was the most delicate surprise!!!
So if you are as stupid as me and didn’t know about june berries, ジューンベリー, here is what a quick search told me about them. Apparently they seem to have been widely popular in the middle age in Europe, but they probably come to a disgrace, as I’ve never seen or heard about amelanchier (the proper name) until a few days ago. Too bad because not only the fruit is delicious, the flowers seem to be very pretty. They also seem to be rather popular in north America, and introduced to Japan for quite some time now. I’ve never seems them on market stalls of any kind, so I’m guessing that those who grow them keep them for themselves. And it is so delicious that I don’t blame them! Now I dream of an amelanchier for our garden! And if you know anything about the june berries I’ll be happy to hear more about them. What to do with them expect pies and jam… and thanks S. And Y.-san!!!
Now is the season and it’s always a feast for me!!! Well… it wasn’t always like that, it took me time to enjoy fava beans but now I love them and I was thinking of doing a fava beans week like I did in the past for many of my favorite ingredients: 5-7 days, 5-7 recipes, but by the time I got to actually seat and write a post I realize I published so many pictures of recipes with fava beans on IG that in the end it wasn’t making sense anymore. So once again the fava bean week has been postponed… I decided to go with a summary of my favorite recipes, may in one or two posts.
One thing that took me some time to understand was how delicious fava beans or sora-mame in Japanese そら豆 are when simply blanched and pealed. I use to eat them whole (don’t get me wrong not whole whole right! Just the beans inside the pod!!!)… but after preparing some Shojin cuisine recipes some years ago, I understood the difference between pealed and not pealed fava beans, and I would never not peal anymore.
One of my favorite fava beans combination is with tomatoes. For some reason Isumi produces beautiful and delicious tomatoes. Very large and ripe ones, I love to cook them slowly with olive oil and reduced into a thick tomato sauce. They are sweet and tasty. Add a new onion to the preparation, soften by the long and slow cooking at low heat, and this is perfection!! If you have made tomato sauce last summer, my preparation is probably close to that, even thicker, so if you still cannot find proper tomatoes just use tomato sauce. I just then add blanched and pealed fava beans and use it for accommodating Japanese rice white and brown, or pasta, long and short or just a slice of made bread.
Tomato and fava beans topping brown rice
One other recipe is to use the fava beans as a base for pasta sauce. Instead of just blanching the fava beans I cook them a little longer so that they become creamy when pealed. Then mash them with olive oil, salt and pepper and add to pasta. Here I added a bit of smoked snapper.
Fava beans pasta sauce with smoked snapper
Finally, one of my favorite way of eating quinoa is to start as a soup, but let the liquid evaporate almost entirely and add plenty of vegetables from the start. I usually do this recipe in winter but spring is also good with all the spring vegetables, here a large tomato for the sweetness, a new carrot, and pealed fava beans and green peas. That’s it!
