Kansai & Osaka · Starter

Doteyaki

Intermediate
30 min
roughly 3 of 4 for cost

umami-deep · tangy-ferment · sweet-edged · aromatic Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, ferment tang with real depth behind it, opening aromatic and staying there.

Ingredients

800 g beef sinew (suji) or shin with tendon
20 g ginger, sliced
200 ml sake
600 ml kombu and katsuobushi dashi
120 g Kansai white miso
40 g red miso
60 ml mirin
30 g sugar
200 g konnyaku
40 g spring onion
shichimi togarashi

The skills inside

Dashi The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake

The words inside

Shichimi Tōgarashi

Allergen screen

Found: gluten · fish · soy · alcohol

Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.

Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.

Method

Cover the sinew with cold water, bring to the boil and drain the moment grey scum rises, then rinse each piece; that first water carries the smell that would otherwise settle into the miso.
Return it with the ginger, sake and dashi and hold at a bare tremble around 90C (195F) for two to three hours, until a skewer slides through and the tendon has gone glassy.
Tear the konnyaku into rough lumps rather than cutting it, so the sauce grips the torn faces, and simmer 15 minutes. 15 min
Slacken both misos with a ladle of the hot liquid, stir them back in with the mirin and sugar, and cook at a whisper until the sauce clings to the meat.
Rest off the heat to thicken, then serve with spring onion and shichimi.

How to tell it is going right

This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.

Dashi 29 recipes

It is clear enough to read the bottom of the pan through it. Cloudiness means it boiled, or the kombu stayed in past the first small bubbles, and neither can be strained out afterwards.
Pale gold rather than brown, nearer the colour of weak tea. A brown dashi has been cooked too hard or too long and will taste of the pan rather than of the sea.
The kombu came out before the water reached a simmer, and it is supple rather than slimy. A slippery surface on the sheet means alginates have started to leach, and the broth will feel viscous on the tongue.
Strained without pressing. Squeezing the flakes or the kelp forces out bitterness and fine particles, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
Tasted alone it is savoury and faintly sweet with no fishiness and no bitter edge. Fishy means the katsuobushi steeped rather than settling; bitter means heat.

Where it goes wrong Heat, or time, or both. Kombu boiled gives up alginates and turns the broth slippery and faintly bitter; katsuobushi left to steep turns it sour and fishy. Almost every dashi failure is an excess of one of the two things the cook controls, and neither is recoverable once it has happened.

The wobble & the skewer: testing a bake 135 recipes

Tested at the true centre and the thickest point, not at the convenient edge: the edge is done long before the answer is.
The skewer comes out as the recipe describes, clean and dry or carrying the stated moist crumb, and it does the same on a second test in a different spot.
The wobble is read in motion: nudged, the centre moves as one set mass with a faint tremble, rather than a liquid ripple travelling across the surface.
The other signs agree with the test: risen and just shrinking from the sides, the top set and dry to a light touch with no wet gloss on it.
Pressed lightly at the middle it springs back and leaves no lasting dent.

Where it goes wrong It was judged on the clock and on how the edges looked, so a centre still liquid went to the rack and sank as it cooled, a dense wet seam under a perfectly browned top.

At the Table

The Pour: Junmai or Ginjo sake
Also Right: Dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner
From the Taps: Japanese rice lager
Zero-Proof: Cold green tea (sencha)

Umami bridges best with umami: sake’s amino depth shakes hands with dashi and soy where tannic wine would argue.

Family notes

Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.

Film school

This dish, cooked on camera Search films of Doteyaki Technique: DashiThe skill inside this recipe The cuisine, deeper Technique films from the Kansai & Osaka kitchen