Okinawa · Main
Rafutē
- Intermediate
- 40 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, richness that coats and comforts, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 1kg skin-on pork belly, in one piece
- 30g ginger, sliced
- 2 leek greens
- 400ml awamori
- 600ml katsuo and kombu dashi
- 120g kokuto (Okinawan black sugar), broken up
- 80ml koikuchi soy sauce
- 20ml usukuchi soy sauce
- karashi mustard, to serve
The skills inside
DashiFrying the paste until the oil splitsThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boilSkimming: foam, fat and a clear brothThe wobble & the skewer: testing a bake
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish · soy · mustard · 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
- Boil the belly whole with the ginger and leek greens in water to cover for 40 minutes, skimming the grey scum until the surface runs clear. Lift out, rinse under hot water and cool enough to handle. 40 min
- Cut into 4cm squares, skin left on every piece: the skin is the dish, not a trimming.
- Boil the awamori hard in a wide pan for 2 minutes, until the raw spirit smell has burned off and what rises smells of rice. Add the dashi and the pork, lay on a drop lid, and hold at a bare shiver, about 85C (185F), for 90 minutes, until a skewer slides through the fat with no resistance at all. 2 min
- Only now stir in the kokuto, and 20 minutes later both soy sauces. 20 min
- Simmer uncovered another 30 minutes, spooning the liquid over the pieces, until it darkens to a gloss on the skin and falls off the spoon in a slow ribbon. 30 min
- Cool in the pan, lift off the set fat cap, and rewarm to serve with a dab of karashi.
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.
Skimming: foam, fat and a clear broth 73 recipes
- It is held below a rolling boil for the whole time. Agitation drives fat and fine protein into the liquid as an emulsion, and nothing skimmed afterwards will take them back out.
- The grey foam that rises in the first minutes is lifted off and discarded rather than stirred back in.
- Fat is taken from the surface where it gathers, the pot moved off the centre of the heat if that is what it takes to collect it in one place.
- The liquid is visibly clearer at the end than it was at the start: it is possible to see down into it.
- Nothing lifted off goes back in. What was skimmed is discarded, not tipped back once the ladle is full.
Where it goes wrong The pot was allowed to boil, usually while something else was being attended to. Fat and protein emulsify into the liquid under agitation and cannot be lifted off afterwards, so the finished broth stays cloudy and greasy however patiently it is skimmed from then on.
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.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.