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Have you set any resolutions for the new year? I’m trying not to expect too much of myself right now — these are increasingly unpredictable and unusual times. I’m grateful for my health, and the health of my family and close friends, and am starting to grow cautiously hopeful for a brighter 2022.
One thing on my list for the new year? Learn more about Japanese cuisine. I have a few good friends in Japan, and I’ve loved all the Japanese food I’ve eaten, but it’s not a style of cooking I know enough about. To change that, I’ve started reading Sonoko Sakai’s “Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.”
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“There are five keys to Japanese cooking: freshness, seasonality, simplicity, beauty and economy,” Sakai writes. “At its most fundamental level, Japanese cooking, or washoku, is about respecting your ingredients and letting their natural flavor come through.”
In the introduction, Sakai outlines the structure of a Japanese meal and the ingredients commonly found in a Japanese pantry. There aren’t many, but they are needed to compose basic recipes — broth, rice and other grains, noodles, bread, beans, pickles and other fermented foods — which are actually building blocks for individual dishes.
Once you’ve assembled the key components, a full home-cooked meal — a grain (usually rice), soup (with or without protein), three okazu (dishes of raw or cooked vegetables and protein) and a small serving of pickles — is mere minutes away. If this sounds like a lot of work, it isn’t, because so many components are incredibly simple: Dashi, for instance, is the simplest of broths and can become the base for hundreds of dishes. Other common components include steamed rice, quick pickles and tofu.
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And there are exceptions to this rule of three okazu, one soup, one grain and pickles: All-in-one dishes, such as noodle soups and grain bowls. My favorite version of this so far? Ochazuke.
Translated as “soaked in tea,” at its most basic, ochazuke is a dish of leftover rice warmed in hot green tea. “Ochazuke was always the last part of the meals we ate with our grandmother; my obachama didn’t like seeing any grains go to waste,” Sakai writes.
Fragrant white rice in nutty green tea is simple and comforting, but Sakai notes that it can be expanded to “make ochazuke a meal in itself.” Make extra rice, and top it with quick-cooking salted or smoked salmon. Then, replace the tea with dashi, another type of broth, or miso soup (as I’ve done in the recipe below). Finally, crown the whole thing in a confetti-like shower of crunchy nori flakes, sesame seeds and scallions.
The first time I made this, I savored a bowl all by myself. I marveled at the flavors and textures, and made plans for how I’d tweak it again and again, using new ingredients I picked up or techniques I’d learned. It’s a recipe I’ll use to build upon my knowledge of the fundamentals of Japanese cooking well into the new year.
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