By Kenji Miura

Shiokara is a fantastic savory condiment to your favorite glass of shochu. This particular shiokara is made with surume ika (Japanese Common Squid or Pacific Flying Squid).

INGREDIENTS
5 fresh squid
2 tbsp salt

METHOD

1. Clean the squid. (Here’s how via Kyoto Foodie)

2. Cut the legs and ears (the triangular portion of the squid) off of the main portion of the squid. Peel the skin off.

3. You may set aside the main body portion for sashimi.

4. The legs and ears will be added to the shiokara mixture. Cut these into 1-1.5 inch long pieces. Clean off any slimy film that you may encounter.

5. Mix salt and the brown innards (liver/digestive gland) of the squid together for the shiokara mixture, into a pasty consistency. I sometimes replace the salt with anchovies, which is a good alternative.

6. Add the squid leg and ear pieces to the mixture.

7. Keep in air tight container for 24 hours in the refrigerator.

Eat within 36 hours after coming out of the fridge.

To enjoy shiokara, add shichimi spice or yama wasabi (mountain wasabi, shown in the photo). I am a Hokkaido native, so I am especially fond of yama wasabi, which is used for seasonings and marinades. Yama wasabi is also a great condiment to roast beef, similar to horseradish.

Black olives are also a nice pairing to shiokara.

*Kenji Miura is a professional photographer based in Tokyo.

**Article translated from Japanese to English by Yoko Kumano.

Photo by Kelly Ishikawa, a San Francisco-based photographer and the co-owner of The Perish Trust. 

Back in Cupertino, Kuni (my pops) had a huge bag of fuguhire (dried blowfish tails) from Tsukiji market, which he is grills to make fuguhire zake. These tails are from the blowfish variety tora-fugu or “tiger fugu”. Fuguhire zake is a common way to drink hot sake in Japan during the cold winters, at least amongst my father’s generation (ojisan aka old men).

Kuni says that it is becoming harder to find these tails in Japan, and they are generally not for sale here in the States. The tora-fugu variety is of the highest quality.

Also, Kuni has his license to slice blowfish, did you know?

Anyhow, here’s how he makes fuguhire zake for his restaurant, Sushi Kuni in Cupertino.

INGREDIENTS
A couple blowfish tails, and some cheap sake. Kuni emphasizes that you can use run-of-the-mill, non-premium sake here since you are going to warm it up.

1. Pour about a cup of sake into a kettle.

2. Heat sake on stove over medium heat. When steam begins to rise, turn it off.

3. Take fugu tail with wooden chopsticks and slowly sear it over an open fire. If you have a small grill, that is ideal. You could also put them in the toaster.

4. Let it char a bit, but try not to let it burn to a crisp.

5. Grill about four or five of the tails, and drop them into the kettle full of sake.

6. While you are waiting about five minutes for the fugu tails to infuse the sake, make some accompanying side dishes. Like octopus sashimi and morokyu (cucumbers with miso).

Octoporn

The sake is warm and dashi-like, with smoky notes and a hint of the sea. Not fishy at all.

Enjoy!

A great follow-up to the sashimi is nabe (hotpot). A staple meal in every Japanese home during winter.

Add rice at the very end for a hearty shime (ending).

Happy winter! It’s cold and dreary here in Oakland. I hope you’re all hanging in there, I think it’s gonna be a colddddd winter.

Yoko and I have been invited to give a presentation at the world-renowned Pecha Kucha forum next Tuesday 1/24 in San Francisco. The theme is “chaos”, and we will be speaking about our experiences in Japan last year in regards to food and radiation. In the typical Pecha Kucha style, it will be a rapid-fire presentation of 20 slides with 20 seconds per slide to talk. Whew!

DETAILS
Date: Tuesday 1/24
Time: 6pm
Location: SPUR – San Francisco Planning + Urban Research
654 Mission Street (Between Annie + 3rd St)
Tix: $20/ $10 member

Other presenters on the roster for the night include Harley Dubois (Burning Man, Founder), Nicholas deMonchaux (Urban Designer, Professor, UC Berkeley), Jeffrey Tumlin (transportation planner), James Tracy (author of Hillbilly Nationalists, Urban Race Rebels, and Black Power: Community Organizing in Radical Times) and Tal Klement (public defender, SF criminal justice system).

Wait, there’s more! Yoko is in the midst of finishing a documentary on food and radiation in Japan, which she is submitting to the Uranium Film Festival in Rio Di Janeiro, Brasil. Please check out the Facebook page, LIKE it, and stay tuned to all the nuclear happs.

*Photo by Yoko Kumano 

Chicken + waffles at Lois the Pie Queen in Oakland.

I was fortunate enough to peek into the Peko Peko kitchen this last weekend, while they were preparing all 40 boxes of their highly coveted annual osechi bentos. What a crew! Sylvan had about five people working the kitchen — peeling, dicing, de-shelling 40 Dungeness crabs… wow.

Sylvan and his right-hand chef Yuko took me through one of the dishes in the bento, tataki gobo. Tataku means “to strike” in Japanese, and that is exactly what we did to the very tough gobo (burdock root). Then, we simmered it and dressed it in a sesame-vinegar sauce.

Gobo is eaten on New Year’s Day, to symbolize deep roots, hence, stability, long life and perseverance. With gobo popping up on many menus in the Bay Area these days, I thought this would be a great recipe to have on Umamimart.

INGREDIENTS
1 gobo root
5 cups dashi
6 tbsp mirin
6 tbsp soy sauce

Dressing
2/3 cup white toasted sesame
3 tbsp sugar
2 tbsp usukuchi shoyu (light soy sauce)
3 tbsp rice vinegar

METHOD

1. Peel gobo and soak in water. This is to keep it from discoloring.

2. Strike the gobo with a heavy object.

3. Make dashi.

 ”
In Sylvan’s kitchen, we use freshly shaven bonito.

Briefly boil bonito in water

Strain

Make your own dashi using Yoko’s definitive Japanify guide.

4. Meanwhile, put gobo in water and vinegar for 3-4 minutes to get rid of the aku (scum) and keep it from discoloring

5. Add soy sauce to the dashi

6. Strain gobo from the vinegar, and put into the dashi mixture, and add mirin

Put the gobo on low heat for about 30 minutes. If you can, use a wide pan so it sucks up much of the liquid. You can even use a drop-lid or make one with foil. Turn off the heat after 30 minutes and let the gobo cool down.

7. For the dressing, use a suribachi if you have one, to grind the sesame (if not, just grind sesame separately).

8. Add sugar.

9. Grind together

10. Add the soy sauce and vinegar. Mix together.

Should be wet and sticky

10. Add the gobo, once it has cooled. The gobo should have a nice crisp to it.

11. Mix lightly with a paddle

Make sure the dressing covers the gobo liberally

12. Plate!

Gobo is full of fiber, and this is a fantastic, simple way to prepare the tough root vegetable. I love the tartness from the vinegar married with the sweetness.

But the gobo dish was only one of the many dishes that the Peko Peko crew prepared for the osechi bento.

The bentos would be stacked in three tiers, in cedar boxes hand-made by Sylvan

Sylvan’s master plan


Clockwise from top left: grilled pork in orange marmalade, kurkinton (chestnut + sweet potato mash), homemade kamaboko (fishcake) with fresh wasabi, kuromame (black beans)

Sylvan somehow wrangled up some perfect, fresh wasabi roots from Oregon. Each bento got one, as garnish for the kamaboko.

WOWWWWWWWW!!!


Clockwise from top left: dashimaki tamago (egg omelette), tatuskuri (candied toasted anchovies), steelhead roe in a yuzu cup and kazunoko (herring roe), tataki gobo, gindara no kasuzuke (black cod marinated in sake lees), kombumaki (kombu roll).

And the main event…

Photo by Yuko Sato

All the crab meat had been pre-picked, then mixed with namasu (daikon, carrot, persimmon vinegar salad). It was very impressive.

A nice, abundant surprise under the crabface. 

Gorgeous! Photo by Yuko Sato

Photo by Yuko Sato

Happy 2012 to all!

By Johnny Lopes

Being in Paris for the first time, I wanted to see the city life — the real hustle and bustle. So what better place to witness this chaos than Les Halles? It was jammed with bars for your aperitifs and tabacs for your nicotine fix. But aside from this typical parisian fare, I noticed a recurring food theme. A food theme which caught me off-guard, quite frankly.

Apparently, the French have a mighty appetite for baguette sandwiches. The baguette itself wasn’t the strange part to me so much as what they called it: a panini. Being raised in the States, I’ve grown accustom to the standard “panini” you’d find at a cafe — pressed and oily. This is not the case in Paris where you’d get a variety of buns (ranging from doughy, to flakey awesomeness) stuffed with some damn fine ingredients (meats galore and gourmet cheeses). You could tell there was a difference in quality from each vendor depending where you were in the city.

When you do shell out your hard-earned euros for one of these prizes, they do something unorthodox: they stick the paninis into the microwave for 40 seconds to reheat it. I suppose you can’t expect some new-fangled reheating method when you’re chowing down on street food.

Duck panini! Aside from the bread, it was pretty damn good 

Parisian weiner + cheese

*Johnny Lopes is a professional cyclist critic (aka biking curmudgeon) living in San Francisco. He commutes to Oakland to see his girlfriend via the ferry, never the BART.

To celebrate the new year, I hosted a last-minute dinner last night with a few close friends. What was on the menu? Okonomiyaki! It was a mellow evening of cocktails and sour beers to accompany the famous Japanese savory pancake.

It was the first time I would be making okonomiyaki, but I figured it would be easy enough. I borrowed a rad table-side hot plate from the parents (which I do not plan on returning, suckas!), and went on a quick trip to the local Korean supermarket (a awesomely cheaper alternative to the Japanese market) to get all the necessary ingredients and toppings.

Prep was minimal — the biggest pain in the ass was slicing all the cabbage. But nothing was too time-consuming or labor intensive.

Two types of pork belly: American, and “skinless black pork” from Denmark. (For Anders)

Vanesa demonstrating the wonders of nagaimo (mountain potato, not to be pronounced “na-gay-mo”, haha)

The batter itself is not unlike pancake batter. It consists of about 1 cup flour, 2 eggs, and 300ml water. Add a bot of nagaimo here. I cheated and also used some pre-made okonomiyaki mix, which you can buy at the Japanese market.

Mix all your desired ingredients into about a cup of batter. We had shrimp, squid, OYSTERS, enoki mushrooms, tempura flakes and of course, cabbage.

Stir so all the ingredients are coated in batter.

Lay the batter onto a hot, well-oiled pan.

Flaten out evenly. You want the pancake to not be so big you can’t flip it, nor too thick that it won’t cook through.

Add pork belly.

Flipping the pancake can be difficult. I ended up having to cut the pancake into several pieces to be able to flip, which is fine, but not ideal.

When done, slather on some kewpie mayo, Japanese “sosu” (okonoiyaki sauce tonkatsu sauce is fine) or and sprinkle some beni-shoga (pickled ginger) and aonori (green seaweed).

Yoko brought yakisoba, a necessary accompaniment to okonomiyaki.

Eat!

Happy new year everyone! Let’s make 2012 the year of Okonomiyaki!

*Photos by Johnny Lopes and Yoko Kumano

As 2011 draws to a close, I am not thinking about the Mayans. Rather, I am trying to decide what I will be eating over the weekend. PRIORITIES, people!

I’ll be working on Saturday evening (apocalypse be damned!), but I’ll have all the accouterments ready to ring in the new year with Johnny and a bowl of toshikoshi soba as soon as I get home. With a bottle of bubbly of course!

Toshikoshi soba is always eaten on New Year’s Eve in Japan. Toshikoshi roughly means, “to kill off the year”, and so you can start the new year with a clean slate. “Why soba?”, I asked my mother. Hideko thinks the soba represents living hosoku, nagaku (slenderly, long). She hung up on me before I could ask any more questions regarding this matter of living “slenderly”.

I bought this fancy shin soba (new soba) in Nagano prefecture, when I was there in November. Nagano is well known for their soba. The notion of “new soba” is interesting — essentially, it is soba made of newly harvested buckwheat. Shin soba is quite a specialty in Japan, as the Japanese love anything “new”.

I figure December 31 will be a good time to break open the seal (erm, before it expires).

Yes, the strands of soba are slender and long.

It is a treat to have fresh soba, as I usually eat the hard stuff throughout the year. I’ll be making Yoko’s soba tsuyu (dipping sauce), and eating the soba cold. Traditionally, toshikoshi soba should be served warm, but I prefer mine cold. That’s how Hideko usually served it, anyhow. Although zaru soba (cold soba) in the winter time is pretty blasphemous.

Photo by Yoko Kumano

Happy new year, Martians!  Thanks for all your support in this last year. Umamimart will turn 5yo in 2012. Wow! I look forward to sharing more food adventures with you in the new year.

*Top photo by Yoko Kumano 

Danran, a little sushi spot in the Sakurajosui station in Tokyo, is no stranger to Umamimart. Yoko introduced us to the place in 2008, and Tmonkey reported on it again later that year. Yoko took me to Danran for the first time several years ago, and I very much looked forward to visiting again on my last trip in October.

The place had not changed a bit — the master, his wife, and her brother, all greeted us with warm smiles as we happily retreated from the autumn rain. The small space was brightly-lit, and the wood interior gave off a cozy glow.

Naoko, Yoko and I sat at the counter of Danran, laughing, chatting and catching up, over wonderful food and drinks made to order by our hosts. We never looked at the time, and when it was time for us to say farewell, there was no one left in the restaurant. It was midnight. We had been there for something like six hours.

The photo above was one of the first dishes presented to us by the Master. It is stewed fish eggs, probably tai (snapper) or hirame (fluke). The lightness of flavor, with the bounciness of each fish egg, is just delightful.

This was one of my most memorable meals of 2011. Please take a look at the rest of our meal.