Japanese Recipes
207 recipes found

Tsukune Miso Nabe (Chicken-Meatball Hot Pot in Miso Broth)
Naoko Takei Moore makes this comforting hot pot of ginger-spiked meatballs, mushrooms and tofu in a donabe, or Japanese clay pot. She sells them at Toiro, her Japanese cookware shop in Los Angeles, and has written a book on the topic, “Donabe: Classic and Modern Japanese Clay Pot Cooking” (Ten Speed Press, 2015). The traditional cookware can be used to cook rice, steam foods and even set up to work like a small grill. It’s a wonderful, versatile piece of equipment, though if you don’t have one, you can use another heavy-bottomed pot with a lid, and still turn out a beautiful meal. Have this hot pot on its own, or with a side of warm rice.

Sushi Rice
Back in 2002, Matt and Ted Lee reported on how home cooks had started making sushi with ever-increasing frequency. Among the recipes they brought to The Times was this one, for sushi rice, short-grained rice bolstered by the flavors of vinegar sugar and salt, adapted from “The Great Sushi and Sashimi Cookbook,” by Kazu Takahashi and Masakazu Hori. Use it as a backdrop for your own home-rolled sushi, or pair it, as the article suggests, with various kinds of sliced fish and vegetables, pickled ginger and wasabi for a chirashi sushi bowl.

Sake Sunrise

Classic Okonomiyaki (Japanese Cabbage and Pork Pancakes)
Crisp on the outside and custardy in the center, okonomiyaki are pan-fried Japanese pancakes that traditionally feature a filling of cabbage and pork belly. Here, bacon can be substituted for the pork belly, replaced with shrimp or omitted entirely. You can find the more unusual toppings like hondashi, Kewpie mayonnaise, okonomi sauce and dried bonito at any Japanese market. Similar to Worcestershire sauce but sweeter and less salty, the okonomi sauce is combined with Kewpie mayonnaise and umami-rich bonito flakes for a playful topping. This adaptable recipe is a great way to use up leftovers or other vegetables, such as shredded carrots, bean sprouts or chopped snap peas.

Tamagoyaki (Japanese Rolled Omelet)
Tamagoyaki, a Japanese staple, is made by carefully rolling several thin layers of cooked egg into a rectangular omelet, which creates a soft and delicate texture. Traditionally, it’s made in a special tamagoyaki pan, but this version also works with an 8-inch nonstick skillet. There are sweet and savory variations, and this recipe falls somewhere in between the two: The soy sauce, mirin and dashi pack it with umami, while the sugar adds a subtle sweetness. The technique can be challenging at first, but do your best to keep each layer consistent in color and each fold parallel to the last. Don’t worry about little tears; they’ll be covered up with the next layer.

Japanese-Style Beef Stew
This beef stew is loaded with the warmth of soy, ginger, sweetness (best provided by mirin, the sweet Japanese cooking wine, but sugar or honey will do, too), winter squash and the peel and juice of a lemon. These simple and delicious counterpoints make a great stew.

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.

Eggplant With Miso

Miso Glazed Carrots

Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Fried Sushi Cakes
Jean-Georges Vongerichten's recipe here, for fried cakes of sushi-style rice topped with chipotle mayonnaise and raw scallop, then painted with a thin glaze of a soy-honey mixture, is just irresistible. (If I were an award committee, I’d give it “best of the year.”)

Japanese Beef and Rice Soup
When the chef Marco Canora was told to cut back on coffee, soda, wine and beer for health reasons, he found himself sipping cups of broth from the stockpots at his restaurant, Hearth, instead. Soon he had designed an entire system of healthful eating (and drinking) around the stuff. This soup, wintry but light, is a satisfying example. At Brodo, a takeout window that he opened in 2013, a to-go cup of broth can be customized in as many ways as an espresso at Starbucks — with ginger juice, mushroom tea and other aromatics and add-ons. This is easy to pull off at home, too.

Soba Noodle Soup
A bowl of soba is a beautiful, exotic and delicious centerpiece for a Japanese meal: the not-too-soft, nutty buckwheat noodles sitting in a mahogany broth — dashi — that’s as clear and glossy as beef consommé, not only salty and umami-complex but sweet as well. My favorite variety, tamago toji, is egg-topped. When it’s made right, the egg is almost foamy, soft-scrambled and tender, deliciously flavored by the dashi, a bit of which it absorbs.

Soy-Sauce-Pickled Eggs
Yusuke Shimoki runs Engawa, a tiny bar in Japan. To accompany his sakes, he occasionally serves soy-sauce-pickled egg yolks, which he cures in a mixture of mirin-sweetened soy sauce and a strip of the dried kelp known as kombu. A recipe for it appeared in The Times in 2015, after Shimoki visited the United States. You can marinate the yolks for as little as 6 hours and as long as a couple of days, but they are perhaps best after 8 or 9 hours, when the yolks become creamy, with a slightly firm skin.

Pork Katsu With Pickled Cucumbers and Shiso
Thanks to a coating of fluffy, brittle panko instead of regular bread crumbs, tonkatsu (or pork katsu) is crunchier than most pork schnitzel, and the accompanying sauce gives it a jolt of tangy flavor. Pork katsu is easy to make at home, especially if you borrow some techniques from its schnitzel sibling.

Grilled Chicken On Skewers

Chirashi (Scattered) Sushi

Craig Claiborne's Sushi Rice

Nakagawa's Eel Hand Rolls

Salmon, Arugula And Avocado Maki

Ara Yaki
What’s ara yaki? The best scraps of fish left after it has been filleted for sashimi, quickly broiled and roasted, with nothing but salt. You can get it at Seki, an unassuming izakaya in Washington, or you can make it yourself; the key is in the shopping. The beauty of the dish lies in its simplicity: These golden bits of fish are exceptionally delicious, and fun to eat with chopsticks or fingers.

Quick Pickled Ginger

Nakagawa's California Sushi

Seaweed Salad
Seaweed comes in many forms, and is used extensively in Japanese cuisine. Most of us are familiar with the pressed sheets of nori that are wrapped around sushi, and kombu, the dark green algae that is simmered to make classic dashi broth. Japanese groceries have a dizzying array of salt-packed specialty varieties, but many supermarkets and health-food stores sell packages of dried seaweed, which may be the most user-friendly. Two types that are commonly available are reddish-purple dulse and bright green wakame. Both simply need bathing in cold water for a few minutes to soften and ready them for use. Once soaked and drained, the seaweed is tossed with a simple traditional dressing of sesame oil with ginger and soy. My version makes a fine vegetarian meal, with thin slices of carrot, radish, cucumber and daikon, along with avocado, green onion, pumpkin seeds and sesame seeds.
