Kyoto & Kaiseki · Side
Manganji Togarashi to Oage-san no Taitan
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with toasted, nutty warmth throughout, savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, trailing gentle sweetness.
Ingredients
- 300g Manganji togarashi, or long thick-walled sweet green peppers
- 60g abura-age, 2 sheets
- 400ml kombu dashi
- 30ml usukuchi shoyu
- 20ml mirin
- 15ml sake
- 8g sugar
- 15ml sesame oil
- 5g toasted sesame seeds
The skills inside
DashiSteaming: basket, leaf and lid
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
- Pour a kettle of boiling water over both sides of the abura-age and press it between your palms until it stops dripping, then cut it into 1cm strips.
- Pierce each pepper once behind the stem so steam has a way out and it cannot burst; leave them whole.
- Blister the peppers in the sesame oil over a high heat until the skin bubbles and goes khaki in patches, two to three minutes.
- Add the dashi, sake, mirin and sugar, then the shoyu, lay a drop lid on and simmer until the peppers slump and the abura-age is heavy with broth, eight to ten minutes.
- Take the pan off the heat and leave it until it is no warmer than the room, then scatter the sesame and serve.
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.
Steaming: basket, leaf and lid 130 recipes
- Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
- Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
- The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
- Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
- Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.
Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.
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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