Kansai & Osaka · Soup
Kasujiru, Nada Style
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, ferment tang with real depth behind it.
Ingredients
- 120 g sake kasu (sake lees)
- 800 ml kombu and katsuobushi dashi
- 200 g daikon
- 80 g carrot
- 60 g burdock (gobo)
- 150 g salted salmon fillet
- 60 g abura-age
- 60 g Kansai white miso
- 15 ml usukuchi soy sauce
- 40 g spring onion
- shichimi togarashi
The skills inside
DashiThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
The words inside
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
- Tear the sake lees into a bowl, ladle over 200 ml of the hot dashi, and leave until it mashes smooth against the side with no grains left.
- Cut the daikon and carrot into 3 mm quarter rounds and shave the burdock straight into water so it does not brown.
- Simmer the roots in the remaining dashi until the daikon edge goes translucent and a skewer meets no resistance.
- Add the salted salmon in 3 cm pieces and the abura-age in strips, and cook until the fish flakes at a nudge.
- Whisk the lees slurry and the white miso in through a ladle, add the usukuchi, and hold at 80C to 85C (175F to 185F) for 5 minutes; the surface should shiver, never bubble. 5 min
- Finish 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
- Pinot Noir (Willamette or Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chilled Gamay (cru Beaujolais)
- From the Taps
- Saison
- Zero-Proof
- Hibiscus iced tea
The fatty fish that cross the red line: silk-textured, low-tannin reds meet their oils without a metallic clash.
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