January 2004

The term "teriyaki" is used a lot these days. Usually it indicates that a sweet-savory soy-sauce based sauce called teriyaki sauce has been used. However, teriyaki is actually the word for a cooking method - and it's very easy to do.

Filed under:  basics japanese chicken

Soy sauce is a basic ingredient in Japanese as well as many other Asian cuisines.

In Japan, there are basically four types of soy sauce: regular dark, light or usukuchi, reduced sodium or genen, and tamari, which are the rather syrupy dregs of soy sauce at the bottom of the barrel. The first two are the ones most commonly used for cooking. Reduced sodium is of course used by people with high blood pressure concerns. Tamari is never used for cooking - it's usually used as a dipping sauce, for sashimi and such.

Filed under:  japanese ingredients

ochazuke
ochazuke is rice, tea and a lot of very Japanese stuff.

Ochazuke combines two quintessentially Japanese ingredients, plain white rice and green tea. Ochazuke is commonly served at the very end of an elaborate Japanese full course meal. It's also favored as a midnight snack, a hangover cure, or just when you want something hot and filling. It's commonly made with leftover rice, though ideally the rice should be heated up if it's cold.

Filed under:  japanese rice favorites tea

oranges, lemons, limes

[Update:] A few people found this recipe to be not sweet enough. If you like your lemon bars to be a bit sweeter, try this recipe instead.

It's winter now and not much is in season fruit-wise. Of course we can get any kind of fruit and vegetables year-round now, but a winter strawberry is pretty tasteless. Fortunately, we have citrus fruits, shipped from warmer climates.

Filed under:  dessert snack cookies sweet lemon

There is a great article in the New York Times about bagels, the quintissential New York bread. It made me feel quite nostalgic.

Filed under:  bread baking

tonkatsu, Japanese deep fried pork cutlet
tonkatsu, breaded deep fried pork cutlets

Tonkatsu is a typical Japanglish word - ton is pig or pork, and katsu derives from the word cutlet. Tonkatsu is one of the western-style Japanese dishes that can be classified as yohshoku. However, tonkatsu is so popular in Japan that there are even restaurants that only serve tonkatsu and similar items such as kushikatsu (bite-sized fried bits of pork and other things on a skewer).

One of the key ingredients for tonkatsu, or any breaded deep-fried item in Japanese cooking, is panko. In recent years panko has been adopted by the trendy world of cuisine, but it's not anything special - it's just dried bread crumbs. The thing that makes panko unique is that the flakes are bigger and crunchier than the kind sold by non-Japanese food manufacturers.

You can buy panko ready-made at Japanese food stores, or make your own. To make your own, take off the crusts of day-old good white bread. Flake the white part of the bread by hand, not the food processor, which would turn the bread into powder. Spread out the bread crumbs on baking sheets and dry in the oven at a very low temperature until the crumbs are thoroughly try - not colored, just crunchy. You can store this in tightly sealed plastic bags or containers for quite a long time.

Filed under:  japanese yohshoku pork

So far I have been writing about Japanese foods that are quite traditional. The flavors are based on the SaShiSuSeSo of sugar, salt, rice vinegar, soy sauce and miso, plus the all-important dashi soup stock. In Japan, this kind of food is called washoku, or quite literally "Japanese food".

Filed under:  basics japanese yohshoku

Happy new year!

Last night, we had two favorites for our little New Year's Eve party - blini with caviar and smoked salmon, with a local speciality called Blauacher Chlöpfmoscht.

Filed under:  party food swiss new year pastry

Pages