Kansai & Osaka · Main
Kizami Udon
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, aromatics blooming from the first bite, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 20 g kombu
- 15 g dried shiitake
- 1.2 L water
- 60 g abura-age (2 sheets)
- 65 ml usukuchi soy sauce
- 65 ml mirin
- 3 g fine salt
- 400 g fresh udon
- 60 g thin green onion
- 15 g ginger, grated
- shichimi togarashi
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Pour boiling water over both sides of the abura-age, press it flat between your palms, and cut it into 5 mm strips.
- Heat the kombu and dried shiitake in the water to 65C (150F), hold 45 minutes, lift the kombu out before the pot reaches 80C (175F), then strain. 45 min
- Simmer the mirin 30 seconds, add the usukuchi and salt, stir into the dashi and hold at 80C (175F).
- Boil the udon in unsalted water until the white core has just gone, then rinse under cold water until the strands stop feeling slippery and dunk them back in hot water for 10 seconds.
- Bowl the udon, pour the broth down the side, and pile on the abura-age, green onion and ginger.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique 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.
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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