Zawazawa Kitchen

Beerzuke

Yoshie and I have been working a lot over the past few weeks. On work days we often have a beer instead of wine (depends in part on what we are cooking) and some nights we fall asleep before we even finish our beers. Sigh. This leaves the question of what to do with the stale beer the next morning. Our dear friend Susan has come to the rescue with a simple way of making pickles, a rather Japanese style pickle, but quite delicious.

• Beer, one bottle, stale is fine
• 1 cup miso (experiment with red or white)
• 1/3 cup salt
• 1/3 cup sugar (again, try different types)
• Various vegetables, inlcuding eggplant (Japanese or Italian), carrots, cabage, daikon ...)

Mix the sugar and salt, add other ingredients, add vegetables. They are quite good after 48 hours and will improve for several days. These are surprizingly good and similar to conventional Japanese pickles. And they go well with more beer!

Melting Onions Crisping Onions

Every time I try to melt onions I think of Micheline Gill. Micheline has been one of our best friends since we have moved to Vancouver. Over the years she has given us, especially Yoshie, the kind of deep spiritual support that only an older person can provide. In part it is her love of life that has moved us and taught us. In her 80s she can stay up drinking, talking and dancing until well after midnight. And as the night ages she becomes more graceful with it.

One of our most treasured things is a piece of needle work, lace actually, half finished, still on its pencilled pattern, that Micheline inherited from her own grandmother. What is it about our aesthetic that wants things incomplete? No doubt part of it is the opening of space (ma no torikata in Japanese). And them there is the potential that something incomplete has - not final, not ended. I think of this each time I see the tattered lace on its yellowed paper, and think of things to come, even if they have been left in the past.

Micheline is one of the best cooks we know, and one of the things she does better than anyone is onions. Her onion tarts, compotes, sauces, whatever are smooth, rich and sweet and just onion. If Yoshie is the kami-sama of tomatoes then Micheline rules over onions. Not surprizing I suppose, as she is originally from Belgium and came to Vancouver with her husband Jimmy (who we still miss) after WWII. And people in Belgium know their onions.

To melt onions all one really needs is good yellow onions, some oil, some butter, some salt, a knife and time. Mostly time. Slice the onions into rings paper thin. Soak them in ice cold water, dry and sprinkle with lots of salt. In a pan melt butter and stir in olive oil under low, low heat. As low as you can get and still melt the butter. Then stir in the onions and let them cook. This will take at least an hour. The onions will soften, become transparent, then slowly turn a softer yellow white. At the end, if you like, though it is hardly necessary, bring up the heat to medium and add some white wine (I am drinking a cheap Spanish Rioja from 100% Viura grapes as I write). Use on steaks, with scallops, spread on toast ... Onions are basically good things.

Onions are such good things that it is good to have several ways to prepare them (and of course red or white onions are good sliced thin and raw into many salads). Another approach we are using a lot in Boston is to cook them over medium low heat on a dry pan. Again, slice them thin, add salt, have the pan a little hotter but still below medium, and dry them until they are almost crispy. This makes a great garnish on any meet or a more robust fish. It is good in salads too.

Onions.

The Bottom of the Pan

The crunchy pieces at the bottom of the pan are often the best bits. So one key to getting a lot of flavor is figuring out how to get these good bits (cook in ways that create a lot of stuff in the pan) and then finding ways to weave them back into the food.

Some pan techniques (getting the good bits)

• Caramelize first at a high heat, deglaze* and then cook slow. Most things taste better if they are cooked slowly at low heat (except for those things you cook fast at a high heat!).
• If things have a high moisture content, dry them as much as you can. Cook them slowly and let the water out.
• Scrape, scrape, scrape the bottom of the pan and work the flavours back into the food.
• Deglaze a several times and cook again until the pan is almost dry. Experiment with different things to deglaze with - wine of course, other alcohols, salted water when you are concentrating on the taste of what you are cooking, a vinegar (usually a simple vinegar), stock. What else can you think of? We try to avoid anything with too much sugar when we deglaze as it tends to caramelize too quickly.
• Whatever you are cooking, take a little bit and mince it. Add this at the right time (the right time depends on what you are cooking, if you want to make sure you have something a little darker add it in first, if you are searing then add the mince after).

* Deglaze, to put a liquid in a pan so that you can dissolve the tasty bits and crusts back into what you are cooking.

Sauces

Many of the best sauces are reduction sauces. After you have finished cooking deglaze the pan, add a bit more liquid and reduce at a medium low heat. Sometimes you can add a bit of butter, or if you want something more like gravy add some flour (sprinkling a bit at a time and mixing in quickly but gently). Give the reduction time to really reduce. We usually reduce the volume to 1/3 to 1/5 of what we start with. At the end, just before serving, taste and adjust the salt and pepper, squeeze in some lemon juice, add a few drops of an oil and sprinkle on some herbs. Serve just a bit on the main course.

Toppings

You can also turn the bottom bits into toppings. It is still a good idea to deglaze, but use the smallest amount of liquid that you can, and cook until the pan is almost dry and the residue crumbly. This takes practice. Check the seasoning (you have to taste things all the time while you cook, so you need to train your tongue to taste even when the food is hot). Crumble onto the food, and even add some crumbs into a salad or salad dressing.

We use these techniques with all sorts of things - meat and poultry of course, but fish and vegetables as well. I am even trying these techniques with apples in desserts.

Hunger and the Wolf, From the Arabian Ode in "L"

I push hunger on

   until it dies,

drive attention from it

   forget.

.

  I'd sooner swallow the dust

a dry mouthful,

   than take some man's

condescending favours.

.

Were I not shunning blame

   I would lack

no food, no drink,

   no ease of life,

.

  But this hard soul

gives me no rest

   when wronged

until I move on.

.

Wrapping my insides

   around an empty stomach pit,

like a weaver's threads

   spun and twisted.

-----

I part at down on meager fare

   like a wolf

led on, desert into desert,

   scrawny, grey.

.

He sets out at dawn, hungry,

   quick into the wind,

slicing down where the ravine ends

   and veering.

.

   He moves on in pursuit of food.

It eludes him.

   He howls. His mates respond,

hunger-worn.

.

Thin as the new moon

   ashen-faced, like arrow shafts

rattling around

   in the hand of a gambler,

.

   Like a queen bee,

swarm roused

   by the two poles of a cliff-hanging

honey-gatherer,

.

Wide jawed, gape mouthed,

   as if their jaws

were the sides of a split stick,

   grinning, grim.

.

   He howls in the empty spaces,

they howl,

   as if they and he were bereaved

on the high ridge, wailing.

.

His eyelids sag. He grows silent.

   They follow his lead.

They, he, forlorn,

   take heart from one another.

.

   He turns back. They turn back.

surging, hard pressed,

   keeping composure

over what they hide.

.

from The Arabian Ode in "L" by Shanfara

Pre-Islamic Arabic

Translated by Michael A. Sells in Desert Traces

.

Hunger is the complement of eating and you can't eat well without feeling hunger. You can't think well. Hunger on a long ride is the feeling of a body growing strong until it boinks, blood sugar exhausted, and you try to drag yourself home, hoping the water will carry you the rest of the way.

This poetry is brilliant and worth searching out.

Chicken Stock - Brown and White

Our approach to stocks has changed over the years, mainly under the influence of Susan, and perhaps from a better understanding of how to layer flavours and a desire for simpler, deeper tastes. The stock is like the undercoat of a painting, you don't often see it directly, but it binds the rest of the colours/flavours together.

Like making your own salad dressings, making stocks is easy and is one thing anyone can do to take their cooking to a new level. A little bit of stock added at the right point can add depth to almost any recipe. We like to add a bit to vegetables when we are braising, to a pan when we are roasting, in a pasta sauce, to the pan scrapings ... Lots of good things to do with a stock.

We try to keep two kinds of chicken stock around, brown and white. They are basically the same thing but for the brown stock the chicken parts are fried up first.

Simple rules for good stock,

• Use lots of water
• Use fresh chicken (if you wouldn't eat it don't put it into your stalk)
• Simmer the chicken by itself first, and skim, skim, skim, skim the impurities off
• Use some salt
• Do not use garlic, or oils with a lot of flavour, or pepper or herbs

In other words, keep it really simple and take your time.

• A chicken, whacked into about eight parts
• Mirepoix (sautéed for the brown stock, raw for the white stock)
• Salt

Mirepoix is one of the basics of French cooking. Our version is about half various types of onions, including leeks and shallots, one-quarter carrots and/or parsnips and one quarter celery (sometimes it is fun to add a bit of celeriac). All ingredients in the mirepoix should be minced fine.

White Stock

Put the chicken parts in the largest pot available. Fill with cold water. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer. Skim the impurities off as they come out. This can take as much as an hour. Skim every five minutes or so. This is a good time to do some reading, chat with friends and drink wine (but then almost any time is a good time to do these things). When the impurities are out add shot of salt and the mirepoix. Boil another hour or more. Let cool. Pass through a strainer then again through a cheese cloth. Let cool then put in small containers (even an ice cube tray) and freeze. Good for about three months.

Brown Stock

Heat some grapeseed oil or other neutral oil. Brown chicken turning pieces several times until they are a nice dark brown. While you are simmering the chicken and removing the impurities, sautée the mirepoix in a bit of butter with salt. Proceed as for white stock.

Use the white stock when you want a simple clean taste - good with vegetables and simple pasta sauces. Use the brown stock when you want a deeper layer of taste - in other chicken dishes or when deglazing a pan with stock (deglazing is when you put some liquid into a pan, scrape off of the good bits stuck to the pan's bottom, reduce and use as a sauce - we tend to deglaze with wine more often than stock).

Hazelnut Shitake Shallot

Yoshie and I came up with this last night (Saturday Febriary 10) while looking for a way to enliven some leftover steamed broccoli and cauliflower. We had picked up some shitake mushrooms and hazelnuts on our afternoon walk and we generally have some shallots around. The goal was to bring out the flavour and crisp up the texture of the shitake by dry roasting them (grilling might work better), then add a little oil in from the raw crushed hazelnuts, and add some contrast with the shallots.

• Shitake mushrooms
• Raw hazelnuts
• Shallots
• A little white wine or white wine vinegar
• Sea salt

Roast the shitake on a dry pan (no oil) at medium heat, sprinkle liberally with sea salt, scrape with a spatula frequently. Roast until the water has evaporated out and there is some crispiness.

Crush the raw hazelnuts (peel if you are being particular, probably a good idea) and add to pan. Mince shallots and add to pan. Cook scraping regularly for about five minutes. Add a small splash of white wine or white wine vinegar (we used a Jean Baptiste Adam 2004 Tokay Pinot Gris) and evaporate off.

Add to salads, pastas, perhaps stuffed meats or chicken (I would add some dried berries in that case).

Simple Dressing, Yoshie Style, Steven Style

It takes only a few minutes to make a salad dressing. Or a few years if you want to grow and mature your own vinegars. But a good dressing is not something you can buy in a store. Save your money, buy better oils and vinegars.

Yoshie and Steven have different approaches to this very basic recipe. Yoshie goes for a very clean taste, with the vinegar and some herbs giving most of the shape. Steven relies more on the oil and wants some weight.

In both cases we are looking for a combination of layers and contrasts that will play with whatever the dressing will be served with. On occasion, Steven will use a Yoshie style dressing and vice versa.

Yoshie Style

• A neutral oil, usually grapeseed, sometimes with a touch of a nut oil if more depth is needed from the oil
• A flavoured vinegar, often the tarragon vinegar that Micheline Gill taught her, but sometimes a rice vinegar or an apple vinegar
• Shallots
• Sea salt

Steven Style

• Olive oil or a mixure of oils that includes a nut oil
• A fruit acid, usually from lemon (with a bit of the zest) or raw 100% cranberry juice to be local (and sometimes a small splash of white vinegar if Adrien wants a bit more of a bite in the salad)
• Shallots and sometimes a white onion or a red onion or a bit of garlic
• Sea salt

Mince the shallots, onions, garlic. How fine depends on what you are going to do with the dressing and what else you will add to the salad, if the dressing is for a salad. Very fine for something that will sink in; leave larger pieces for grilled vegetables or meats. Add the oil and acid and salt. Whisk. Let stand five to ten minutes. Whisk. Taste after each step and adjust as necessary. Add pepper if you like. Add herbs. Add a bit of anchovy or fish sauce for a stronger taste.

Dressing is useful on many things other than salads. Grilled vegetables or as a marinade on meats. Dressing a simple pan fried white fish is often nice. Or pork, simmer some apples and add a bit of dressing at the end, then layer on roast pork. The traditional mint sauce used on lamb is a kind of dressing, one with no oil as the lamb fat plays that role.

Some foods go well with a creamy dressing, root vegetables that have been boiled, a richer white fish. You can get this by adding a bit of plain yogurt, some cheese, some mayonnaise, or even a bit of egg yolk.

Simple Dashi - Japanese Stock

Most cultures base their cooking on a few basic stocks, and the stocks say a lot about the people and their food. The basic Japanese stock is 'dashi' and we use it in many different ways, as the base for Miso soup and Agedashi Tofu, to simmer vegetables and fish, and as a clear both on which to base sauces or just to sip when you are tired. Like all stocks, it is worth making yourself, and in the case of dashi, you can make a good version in thirty minutes as long as you keep the ingredients on hand. And the ingredients are simple. Kelp, dried bonito flakes, water. It tastes of the ocean.

The key flavour tone in dashi is 'umami' (sometimes called savory in English, but 'umami' seems the more precise term). One of the five basic tastes, 'umami' was first identified as a taste in 1908 by Kikunae Ikeda of the Tokyo University. Apparently glutamic acid is the key compund behind this taste, which is also found in chicken stock. The other tastes are 'sweet', 'bitter', 'salty' and 'sour' and good cooking is in part playing with these different flavors to make chords and sometimes discords of flavours. We find that the umami of dashi plays best with salty or sweet. Miso is often salty, and can be sweet, and one of the best tastes is the umami of dashi with the saltiness of miso and the sweetness of yams. The umami of dashi also brings out the sweet saltiness of fresh fish, especially a white fish like sole. It also plays well with the sweeter vegetables, like carrots or even corn.

• Dried bonito (Japanese 'katsuo bushi')
• Kelp (Japanese 'konbu')

If you can find a chunk of traditional dried bonito get it and treasure it. It will last several months and has a richer flavour than the flakes, but the flakes are better than nothing. It is best to use dried dashi konbu (they say that Hokkaido produces the best, with nice thick leaves) from a Japanese store for dashi, but it is worth experimenting with other sources of dried kelp to see what kind of flavors you can get. Normally konbu is the long floating 'leaves' of the kelp and not the bulb or stock.

Put about a liter of cold water in a pot. Cut off about two pieces of dashi konbu each about five centimeters long and wipe them clean with a well wrung towel (do not wash) and put them in the water. Ideally leave these in the cold water over night, but if you don't have time you can put the konbu in the cold water and take it out just before the water comes to a boil (do not boil the konbu as this will make the dashi bitter). When the water comes to a boil put in about three largish shavings or one bag of katsuo bushi. Boil for about five minutes then strain out the katsuo bushi. In some cases we leave the katsuo bushi in for miso soup.

Like all stocks there are a lot of variations of dashi and how to use it. The soup base for some of the clear Japanese soups uses dashi and then a bit of say sauce and salt. And there are other versions of dashi based on dried shitake mushrooms, or even dried scallops. But the kelp and bonito version is the one we use most often.

Dashi does not keep well and is easy to make so we normally use it all at once. You could keep it in the fridge for two or three days, but why bother when it is so easy to make?

Rice, Kome, Gohan

Washing rice
The water settles cloudy
Washing it again

Rice. Kome, or cooked Gohan.

Our basic rice is Japanese short-grain rice. When we can we get shinmai (new harvest) from the northern prefectures (rice, white, snow) but California rice is fine. We usually use white rice as this is what Yoshie ate as she grew up. Some notes on other rices are included below.

Making rice is simple. Wash it in cold water over and over again until the water runs clear. The talc from polishing the rice is being washed off. If it is not the rice is gummy and the taste is muddy.

Winter water
To purify my hands
Burn with cold

We normally use a rice cooker, a pressure cooker works just as well, and you can do rice on a stove top, being careful to bring it off the heat once the rice is cooked.

The amount of water is important. At sea level, on Steven’s hand, for normal rice, press the hand flat on top of the rice and bring the water up to the knuckle of the index finger. A little bit less for Shinmai. Of course, everyone’s hand is different.

Yoshie was born in Ibaraki Prefecture in 1948 shortly after the Second World War. She moved to the old house in Kohoku, Adachi-ku when she was three. At that time there were still people left homeless from the war living under the Kohoku bridge. Basic Japanese ethics are that one finishes all the rice in one’s bowl, not a grain should be left. If you want more rice, leave a small clump in the bottom of your bowl as a sign (the opposite is true in Southern India, where you leave a small clump of rice on your leaf to indicate you are finished eating). When Yoshie was a little girl, her father would rap her on the head with the end of his chopsticks if she left any rice, and tell her that to do so was to disrespect the farmers.

When we first began to live together in the old Kohoku house, Steven wanted to eat brown rice as part of his post-hippie, ex-vegetarian phase. The people at the local rice store, who knew the Hattori family well, were reluctant to sell brown rice, which was basically just the rice they had not gotten around to milling.

Another cultural clash was around rice with brown sugar and butter. This is an old English dish that Jiji (Steven’s Father) loved and which was one of Steven’s favorite deserts as a child. Yoshie was aghast at the idea of polluting rice with greasy butter and sugar. We don’t eat rice with brown sugar and butter often now, but try it – use long grain rice if you can though.

Sometimes we add a little something to the rice as it cooks (not often). A little barley adds some texture and extra nutrients. In Japan this used to be done by poor people to stretch out the rice (a bowl of white rice was a great luxury for most people in Japan for most of its history). When the first bamboo shoots become available you can chop them coarsely and mix them in. If you are going to add something to rice it should take about the same length of time to cook and have a very simple taste.

Mochi

The other main kind of Japanese rice is mochigome. The grains are shorter and plumper than normal rice and have a lot more starch. We use them to make mochi with, steaming the rice (mochigome is usually steamed in bamboo baskets rather than cooked in water) and then pounding it with a heavy mallet in a hollowed stump until the grains are gone and there is a smooth sticky mass. This is usually put into trays dusted with a bit of the rice talc. Eaten while still warm with kinako powder. We usually eat mochi at New Years, grilling it until it bubbles up and is a bit charred and putting it in ozoni or wrapping it in nori.

Wild Rice

Wild rice is the seeds of the grasses that grow along lakes and rivers in Canada. It is not a true rice. It is good though, especially with autumn foods when you want to add a wild taste and a bit of texture. We normally cook it in a very diluted chicken stalk with a bit of onion. A ratio of one cup rice, one cup stock and two or three cups of water usually works, but there is a lot of variety in wild rice so you have to test it at the end of cooking. Wild rice works well in stuffings for turkey or chicken, or you can add a little to salads instead of nuts.

Arborio

This is the Italian rice used in risotto. It has a short fat grain and is almost pearly to look at. Arborio has a lot of starch which bleeds out when you cook it to make the risotto creamy.

Thai Purple Rice

Another short grain rice, the best seems to come from Thailand. It is rich purple colour and has a subtle nutty taste that goes well with seafood, especially mussels and prawns.

Basmati Rice

An Indian long-grain rice. This is a good rice for Indian curries and pilafs. We prefer it cooked in water, or sometimes with a hint of saffron or rose water. We almost never use stocks to cook rice (some people do) except for risotto.