"Japanese Home Cooking" For a Year of Cooking at Home

Our good friend Joanna Fox has a timely rundown of great cookbooks from this past year in today’s Montreal Gazette, as contributed by a number of local Montreal chefs, food writers, and other tastemakers. Of course, this was a year when home cooking took on increased importance for so many people. Luckily, there were quite a number of new cookbooks that were released in 2020 to help inspire us, in addition to all the newspaper and magazines, the YouTube tutorials, the TikTok videos, the Instagram posts, and all the rest of our contemporary multi-platform culinary universe.

Joanna’s contributors include such luminaries as Meredith Erickson (Alpine Cooking: Recipes and Stories from Europe's Grand Mountaintops, Friuli Food and Wine: Frasca Cooking from Northern Italy's Mountains, the Joe Beef cookbooks, and others), Janice Tiefenbach (Elena), and Jonathan Cheung (Appetite for Books), as well as our very own Michelle (!).

If you’ve had any contact with Michelle over the last 8-9 months, her choice should come as no surprise. She first picked this book up from our local library late in the winter of 2020, and when the pandemic hit and the library was closed for weeks on end, the book was stuck with us for an indefinite length of time. We all got to know each other pretty well! And when the library reopened again, and they asked for all their books back, Michelle promptly made a point of returning this book to the library (what did you think?) and picking up her very own copy. Since then, she’s continued to cook from it with passion and abandon, and she’s talked about it at length with anyone who’ll listen, including Joanna, apparently. That book, of course, is Sonoko Sakai’s Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.

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Here’s what Michelle had to say about the book in her own words:

This is hands-down the book I have used the most in the past year. It hits the right tone of home cooking without shying away from more technical projects for those looking for a challenge. Every single thing I have made from this book has turned out perfectly. When I suddenly had reams of time, but no ability to focus, I threw myself into hand-making soba noodles. Her method and recipe are spot-on — all you need is practice to get the thickness and cutting right. (Check out her soba noodle-making webinars.) Bonus: the book features a recipe for rustic buckwheat dumplings (sobagaki), which are much easier to make than soba noodles and give you the same great taste when you use fresh sobakoh flour.

And here are some shots of Michelle making Sakai’s soba noodles for the first time, back in late March:

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If you’re curious about the method, here it is in Michelle’s own words:


I had ordered specially milled buckwheat flour to make soba noodles before the madness began. My cutting leaves a lot to be desired but believe me when I say that this flour has a texture and flavour absolutely unparalleled by anything I have ever had. In case your self-isolation needs soba noodles, here is the recipe:

200g soba flour
50g all-purpose flour
120g water, more or less
Sift the flours together in a large bowl, add water and mix until dough starts to come together. Add a bit of water if necessary and knead until smooth. Lightly flour your work surface with tapioca starch and roll dough out to 1/8” thick. Sprinkle with more starch, fold, and cut into thin noodles. Not as easy as it sounds!

Boil in salted water about 1-2 minutes and rinse noodles with cold water. Serve.

[The soba flour in question came from Soba Canada, Inc. If you live in the United States, another phenomenal option is the “ni-hachi sobakoh” from Anson Mills.]

So, has Sonoko Sakai largely been responsible for eight or ninth months of particularly inspired Japanese home cooking? You tell me.

Long live the cookbook! Long live home cooking, Japanese and otherwise! Thank you for a great year, Sonoko!

And it should go without saying, but, if at all possible, please support your local bookstores in this period of economic crisis, stores like Appetite for Books, Drawn & Quarterly, and others.

aj

In Praise of Clay Pot Cooking 1: the Donabe

 
fig. a: dinner with donabe (far right)

fig. a: dinner with donabe (far right)

Michelle has been on a Japanese kick for at least a couple of years now. Japanese pickles. Japanese country cooking. Hand-dyeing her own shibori tablecloths (pictured above). You know, that kind of thing. And she’d also started to acquire some Japanese ceramic ware in order to up her game. She was pretty happy (very happy, actually) with the savoury stews that resulted from her experiments with using commercial Japanese clay pots, but she still wasn’t fully satisfied. What she really wanted was a ceramic pot—a donabe—that was suited for cooking rice. She’d read that once you cooked high-grade Japanese short-grain properly in a rice donabe there was no going back. Especially if you took the trouble to seek out an artisanal model from Japan’s Iga region, which is famous for the quality of its clay, as well as for the centuries-old tradition of ceramics that has fashioned this clay into some of Japan’s finest cookware. So she started to drop no-so-subtle hints.

I pretended as though I wasn’t getting the message, but early this year I began to do some research well in advance of Michelle’s birthday. I had thought that I would have to order a model from Toiro in Los Angeles, the store that’s most closely associated with donabe cooking in North America because its owner, Naoko Takei Moore, literally wrote the book on the topic (Donabe: Classic and Modern Japanese Clay Pot Cooking), and was the first one to import such models to the States. Michelle has become a disciple of Takei Moore’s, so I was happy to do business with them, but I was worried about having one shipped, and getting one shipped to Canada appeared to be even more of a hassle. Then I found a stylish little store in New York City called Nalata/Nalata that also stocked the same double-lidded rice cooker donabes from Iga. Seeing as I was just about to be down in NYC for a film function at Anthology Film Archives, I decided to look up Nalata/Nalata’s precise location, and what I discovered was that they were quite literally half a block away from Anthology. What are the chances?

Anyway, when the surprise was finally revealed, and Michelle received her gift, she was overjoyed to see that her hints had actually registered with me, but she was even more overjoyed when she seasoned her new donabe and used it to cook rice the first time. The results were perfection. And they have been every time she’s put her donabe to work since then. Every grain blessed with the ideal texture. Every grain a little jewel of goodness.

fig. b: rice by donabe

fig. b: rice by donabe

There’s just something about that donabe’s thick, porous clay body, its brilliant double-lid design (complete with that slot to hold your rice paddle), and those hundreds and hundreds years of skill and know-how that went into its production.

Mostly Michelle uses the donabe to make rice, but she’s also used it to cook more elaborate dishes from time to time—like ginger-marinated chicken thighs with schmaltz rice (!), and a variety of different wintery Japanese stews.

The added bonus is that the perfect rice has inspired her to expand her Japanese repertoire to include such gems as pickled magnolia buds (!!).* Takei Moore claims that rice donabes from the Iga region produce rice that’s so good that it doesn’t even need accompaniment, “because it [is] just so delicious as itself.” And she’s right. But this rice is also so good that it elevates virtually everything that’s served with it, and it encourages you—the cook—to prepare dishes befitting it.

fig. c: pickled magnolia buds (right)

fig. c: pickled magnolia buds (right)

Takei Moore refers to the pleasures associated with Japanese clay pot cooking as “Happy Donabe Life.”

It’s only been a few months, but I think I already understand.

aj

*More on these later.