Okinawa · Starter
Jīmāmi Dōfu
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 150g raw skinless peanuts, soaked overnight
- 700ml water
- 60g sweet potato starch
- 3g salt
- 60ml kombu dashi, kombu only
- 30ml soy sauce
- 20g sugar
- 10g ginger, finely grated
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
DashiSoaking dried goods back to life
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · nuts · peanuts · soy
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
- Drain the peanuts, rub off any clinging skins, and blend with the water in two batches until the liquid is chalk white and no grit rolls between your fingers.
- Wring the puree through a doubled cloth, hard, until the pulp left in your hand is dry and crumbly. You want about 550ml of milk.
- Whisk the sweet potato starch and salt into the cold milk until nothing settles out, then set the pan over low heat and stir with a spatula, corners included, without stopping.
- It thickens all at once around 70C (158F) into a pale paste. Keep it moving a full 15 minutes past that, until it turns from matt to glossy, gathers away from the sides in one mass, and drags heavily on the spatula. 15 min
- Scrape into a wetted mould, tap out the air, cover the surface and set at room temperature for an hour. Turn out, cut, and spoon over the kombu dashi simmered with the soy, sugar and ginger.
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.
Soaking dried goods back to life 69 recipes
- Fully submerged with room to swell: the level is well above everything at the start and still above it at the end.
- Given the full time, and judged by what is in the bowl rather than by the hours on the clock.
- Tested at the CENTRE of the largest piece, cut or pressed. Anything with a hard dry core will still have one after cooking, because the outside softens first and stops the water getting further in.
- The soaking water was dealt with on purpose: kept because it holds flavour, or thrown away because it holds what should not be eaten, but never simply left undecided.
- Drained before it is used, so the dish does not silently gain all the water that came with it.
Where it goes wrong Too little water, or too little time. The pieces swell until they are packed tight against each other and the ones in the middle never fully take up water; they will not soften later in the dish either, so the finished plate has hard pieces scattered through it.
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.
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