Okinawa · Soup
Nakami Jiru
- Advanced
- 60 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, toasted, nutty warmth throughout, with a lingering ferment tang.
Ingredients
- 700g pork small intestine, split and rough cleaned
- 100g plain flour, for scrubbing
- 40g salt, for scrubbing
- 1.6 litres katsuo and kombu dashi
- 6 dried shiitake, soaked and sliced
- 150g konnyaku, torn into pieces
- 20ml awamori
- 6g salt
- 10ml usukuchi soy sauce
- 10g ginger, grated, to finish
- toasted white sesame
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
DashiSalted water & the float test
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish · 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
- Work the flour and salt into the intestine in a big bowl, kneading it like dough for two minutes, until your hands are gloved in grey paste. Rinse and repeat three times, until the flour comes away white and the rinse water runs clear.
- Cover with cold water, boil hard 10 minutes, drain and wash each piece under the tap. Do that twice more with fresh water. 10 min
- Cut into 3cm strips and simmer in the dashi with the shiitake, konnyaku and awamori for 90 minutes, until a piece gives under the tooth with no chew left but still holds its tube. 90 min
- Season with the salt and only a trickle of light soy. The broth should stay pale and read clean, not brown.
- Ladle out, grate the ginger over each bowl at the table, and finish with sesame.
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.
Salted water & the float test 188 recipes
- The water was salted before anything went in, and tasting it confirms it: seasoned on the tongue, with the salt dissolved rather than sitting on the pot floor.
- There is enough water, hot enough, that the pot returns to its boil quickly after the food goes in and never stops moving.
- Where the dish uses the float as its signal, the signal is obeyed: the pieces rise and they come out then, not several minutes later once something else was finished.
- Nothing is stuck to the bottom of the pot or welded to itself, and the water has not thickened into a cloudy sludge.
- Drained on a bite rather than on the clock: resistance at the centre, with no chalky raw core.
Where it goes wrong The pot was too small and the water unsalted, so it never recovered its boil: the food sat in slack water, went gummy at the surface, and comes out bland in a way that no sauce afterwards can fix.
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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