Recipes By Hannah Kirshner
7 recipes found
Omurice (Japanese Rice Omelet)
Omurice, a beloved staple of Japanese home cooking, is a linguistic and literal mash-up of omelet and rice. A plain omelet cloaks ketchup-flavored fried rice, often called “chicken rice” even when it's made with ham or bacon, or no meat at all. It belongs to the category of so-called Western food known as yoshoku. This one takes cues from omurice served at countless kissaten, Japanese diners, but it most closely resembles a recipe from the London architect Go Sugimoto, who grew up between Washington, D.C., and Tokyo. “It was the first thing I learned to cook, and now I make it for my son,” he said, confessing that his is fancier than his mom’s, with butter instead of oil or margarine, vegetables in the rice, and a splash of dashi to flavor the omelet.
Niku Jyaga (Japanese Beef and Potato Stew)
There’s nothing extraordinary about meat and potatoes stewed in a sweet soy broth, and yet it’s easy to find yourself taking just one more taste until half the pot is gone. Patience pays off though: niku jyaga tastes better the second day, when the potatoes are saturated with sauce. Every household makes it a little differently in Japan, and so the flavor is affectionately called “mother’s taste.” Saori Kurioka, a private chef in Brooklyn, cooks hers the same minimalist way her mother and grandmother did in Kobe, with just beef, potatoes, onion and carrot. She uses a wooden otoshibuta, a drop-lid that fits inside the pot, so the vegetables simmer and steam evenly as the broth slowly concentrates, but the same thing can be achieved with parchment paper. Beveling the edges of the potatoes with a peeler keeps them from crumbling as the jostle around the simmering pot, but skip it if you’re rushed or impatient.
Karaage (Japanese Fried Chicken)
At Kunyan, a ramen shop in a mountain hot-spring town near the Sea of Japan, fried chicken is served until 2 a.m., or whenever the last customer leaves. The flesh is firm and flavorful with sweetened soy and garlic, coated in a fox-colored crust of potato starch that stays crisp on the table through a second round of highballs. Kunyan’s “mama,” who presides over pan-frying gyoza and pouring frothy Super Dry beer, would never give up her recipe, but the flavors in this version are awfully similar. To approximate the best Japanese chicken — meatier, fattier, and more flavorful than American supermarket meat — buy your chicken from a farmers' market, and debone it yourself or ask a butcher. Don’t feel pressure to do it perfectly: The pieces will be encrusted in a crisp coating, and the leftover bones make great stock.
Oyakodon (Japanese Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl)
Oyakodon, a soupy rice bowl with bite-size chicken and softly cooked egg, is often overshadowed by its more glamorous cousins — katsudon, crowned with a golden breaded pork cutlet, and kaisendon, jeweled with sashimi. But to describe oyakodon's layered textures and sweet-salty sauce of onions melting in soy, sake and mirin, the word magical comes up again and again. This recipe, more subtly seasoned than you might find in a Tokyo cafeteria, comes from the photographer Mika Horie, who grew up cooking it with her mother in Kyoto. It calls for cooking the eggs and chicken in two batches. You can cook all of it at once in a larger skillet, but the results won’t be as pretty.
Ozoni (Mochi Soup)
People in Japan and the Japanese diaspora hold mochi-making parties in late December, taking turns swinging an enormous mallet, pounding sticky rice in a hollowed-out stump until smooth and stretchy, then shaping it into balls or disks. Some of the mochi is eaten fresh with sweet or savory toppings, and some is offered plain to the spirits. (Stores sell it for anyone too busy to make it.) On New Year’s Day, hardened mochi pieces are reheated and used in ozoni soup. In Kyoto, round vegetables and mochi bob around in a pale miso soup; in Tokyo, rectangular mochi is served in shoyu broth; in Kanazawa, people add multicolored mochi and sweet shrimp to clear dashi; and in Fukui, it’s red miso soup with mochi and nothing else. This recipe, from Corinne Nakagawa Gooden, originates in Hiroshima, and came to Seattle with her grandmother Hisaye Sasaki in the early 1900s.
Sekihan (Red Bean Sticky Rice)
Steamed sticky rice tinted red with adzuki beans is essential Japanese celebration food, for graduations, festivals, milestone birthdays and even first periods (to the extreme embarrassment of teenage girls). Sekihan is usually one of many dishes on the table, and more than pairing with any particular flavor, it conveys a sense of ceremony. In Japan, it’s not essential to osechi ryori, New Year’s cooking, but for some Japanese and many Japanese-Americans, sekihan is part of welcoming the New Year. This recipe was adapted from Gaye Sasaki Chinn, whose family has been celebrating the Japanese New Year in Seattle for more than a century. The internet is rife with shortcut-recipes for making sekihan in a rice cooker, but if you’re going to make it only for special occasions, it’s worth taking the time to steam the rice, as the Sasakis do.
Nishime (Dashi-Braised Vegetables With Chicken)
Often cooked for the New Year in Japan, nishime is an elegant kind of nimono, a Japanese term that literally means things — vegetables, fish or meat — simmered in seasoned dashi. Dashi can be any broth, but here it’s flavored simply with kombu (kelp). This version is from the chef Sydne Gooden, who has brightened the color of her great-grandmother’s nimono recipe by adding kabocha and purple sweet potato to what is usually a very brown dish. While she skips cutting the carrots and lotus roots into fussy flower shapes, she insists on cooking each vegetable consecutively in the same dashi (rather than throwing them all in together, like everyday nimono), so that each one keeps its distinct shape and color. By the end, the dashi has concentrated and taken on the flavors of all the ingredients. It’s spooned over chicken thighs and the perfectly cooked vegetables.