Kyoto & Kaiseki · Side
Kyo-yasai no Takiawase
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, acid holding everything up to the light, closing toasted and warm.
Ingredients
- 1.5 L soft water
- 20g kombu
- 400g ebi-imo, or other taro
- 1 kamo nasu, about 300g, or 2 small round aubergines
- 1 shogoin kabu, about 400g, or 2 small turnips
- 80g kinusaya mangetout
- 40ml usukuchi shoyu
- 40ml mirin
- 20ml sake
- 8g salt
- 30ml sesame oil
- 500ml rice rinsing water
- 1 yuzu, for zest
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
DashiScoringSalted water & the float testBlanching & shocking
The words inside
Sake Service & PairingYuzuTaroTurnip
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · sesame · 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
- Steep the kombu in the cold water for an hour, bring it to 60C (140F) and hold it there half an hour, then lift the kombu out before it reaches 80C (176F). Divide the dashi between three pans.
- Peel the taro into clean flat facets, salt and rinse off the slime, and parboil it in the rice rinsing water until a skewer meets slight resistance. Finish it in the first pan with mirin, sake and half the shoyu under a drop lid.
- Score the cut faces of the aubergine and fry them in the sesame oil until the skin is glossy and blackish purple, then simmer in the second pan with the rest of the shoyu, so the oil never reaches the other pots.
- Peel the turnip thickly, past the fibrous ring under the skin, and simmer it in the third pan seasoned with salt alone, so it stays white and tastes of turnip.
- Blanch the mangetout in salted water and cool them at once. Leave every element sitting in its own liquid until service.
- Set each vegetable in its own quarter of the bowl and pour a little of the palest broth around them, not over them. Grate yuzu at the table.
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.
Scoring 28 recipes
- Lift one cut open with a fingertip: it parts through the skin and stops in the fat beneath, showing a pale wall at its base. Any cut showing red or fibrous flesh has gone too deep; any that has not reached the fat has left the skin tethered, and it will tighten under heat.
- The lines run parallel at even spacing, roughly a finger's width apart, each carried the full length of the face and stopped the same margin short of the edge. Sight down them: lines that converge, wander or crowd at one end cook at different rates and read as careless on the plate.
- Each line is one clean draw of the blade held at a slant, not a sawn or doubled track, and it leaves a bevelled lip standing slightly proud rather than a vertical slot. The surface should be dry and cold, near 4C (39F), when it is cut; worked warm and slack it drags, and the blade tears where it should part.
- After cooking the cuts have opened and set, each a clear gap with firm browned walls. Lines closed back to faint scratches were cut too shallow or too straight down, and the surface has shrunk over them instead of through them.
- The piece lies flat and true when it is set down, with no cupping through the middle and no lifted, curled edge. A bowed piece means the tightening surface was never released, so it pulled the whole thing up and left the underside pale where it stood off the heat.
Where it goes wrong The blade was pushed rather than drawn, through a surface left warm and slack, so it went past the fat and into the flesh. The cuts bleed as they cook and the juices flood the surface, so it steams instead of crisping: the lines gape into wet ragged trenches, the flesh between them dries into hard ridges, and the skin stays leathery and pale where it should have blistered and set.
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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