Okinawa · Salad
Umibudō with Shikuwasa Sanbaizu
- Easy
- 10 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, acid holding everything up to the light, ending saline and clean.
Ingredients
- 150g fresh umibudo (sea grapes)
- 60ml kombu dashi, kombu only
- 30ml rice vinegar
- 20ml shikuwasa juice, or lime
- 20ml usukuchi soy sauce
- 8g sugar
- 10g daikon, finely grated and drained
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · 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
- Keep the umibudo out of the fridge from the moment you buy it, on the counter, loosely covered.
- Warm the kombu dashi, vinegar, shikuwasa, soy and sugar only until the sugar dissolves, then cool the sanbaizu to room temperature and stir in the grated daikon.
- Rinse the umibudo in a bowl of room temperature water for 20 seconds, moving it with your fingers, until the beads plump and go from dull olive to translucent green. Lift it out and drain on a cloth.
- Pile it on a plate and set the sanbaizu beside it in a small dish. Dip at the table, a forkful at a time, and listen for the beads going off like small shot.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique 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.
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.