Stock & Fond Atlas · Sauce
Shojin Dashi, Kombu and Shiitake
- Easy
- 20 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes.
Ingredients
- 20 g dried kombu, two pieces about 10 cm square
- 30 g dried shiitake, whole caps
- 2 litres cold soft water
- 20 g dried soybeans, for depth (optional)
Equipment
Fine sieve
The skills inside
DashiDry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nutsStraining & passing through a sieve
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: soy
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
- Wipe the kombu with a dry cloth and leave the white bloom on it. That is mannitol and it is flavour, not mould, so do not rinse it.
- Toast the soybeans in a dry pan over medium heat for about 4 minutes, until they smell nutty and one or two split. 4 min
- Submerge the kombu, shiitake and soybeans in the cold water, cover, and refrigerate 8 to 12 hours, until the water is pale gold and smells of sea and forest floor. 600 min
- Set over the lowest heat and bring to 60C (140F), then hold between 60C and 70C (140F-158F) for 45 minutes, never letting a bubble rise anywhere in the pot. 45 min
- Lift out the kombu and strain through a fine sieve without squeezing the mushrooms. A squeezed shiitake gives bitterness and cloud. Keep the caps for another dish.
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.
Dry-pan toasting: spices, seeds and nuts 70 recipes
- A single layer on dry metal with nothing added: no fat, and nothing else sharing the pan or the tray and competing for the heat.
- It is kept moving: shaken, stirred, or turned. Anything left still scorches on the face touching the metal while the rest of it is barely warm.
- It is judged by smell before sight: once it is fragrant there are seconds left, not minutes, and the nose reaches that point well before the colour does.
- It leaves the pan the instant it is done, onto a cold surface. A hot pan keeps toasting whatever stays in it, and carryover here is the difference between done and ruined.
- The colour is even and light rather than patchy, with nothing black at the edges: one scorched piece taints the whole quantity it is ground into.
Where it goes wrong It was left alone for a moment while something else was attended to. Dry heat has no margin: the pieces against the metal go from fragrant to acrid inside a minute, and the bitterness cannot be picked back out of a ground mixture.
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.