Kyoto & Kaiseki · Side
Yuba Maki no Ankake
- Intermediate
- 35 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
- Vegetarian
- Vegan
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, a sweet edge rounding the corners, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- 40g dried yuba sheets, about 6
- 500ml kombu dashi
- 15g hon-kuzu
- 30ml cold water
- 20ml usukuchi shoyu
- 20ml mirin
- 2g salt
- 100g fresh shiitake, sliced thin
- 60g kintoki carrot, in fine strips
- 30g mitsuba, chopped
- 10g ginger, grated
- 1 yuzu, for zest
Equipment
Grater / zester
The skills inside
DashiThe bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · soy · 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
- Soften the yuba: wipe each sheet with a damp cloth, or dip it for ten seconds in water at about 40C, until it bends without cracking. Hot water turns it to shreds.
- Cook the shiitake, carrot and mitsuba in 100ml of the dashi with the salt until the carrot bends but still grips the tooth; drain and cool.
- Roll the filling in the yuba, seal each seam with a smear of kuzu slurry and cut the rolls into 4cm lengths.
- Season the rest of the dashi with shoyu and mirin, bring it to a bare tremble and poach the rolls three minutes; lift them into warm bowls.
- Slake the kuzu in the cold water, stir it into the dashi off the heat, then bring it just to a boil until it turns from cloudy to clear and coats the back of a spoon. Pour over, add ginger and grate yuzu on top.
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.
The bare simmer: holding liquid below the boil 183 recipes
- The surface is read rather than assumed: bubbles break slowly in one or two places, or the surface merely shivers, and it does not reach a rolling boil at any point.
- It was held there: the pot was watched and the heat adjusted rather than set once and left, and there is no tide mark up the pot wall from a boil-over.
- The liquid stayed as clear as it should be: no clouding from agitation, and no fat churned into an emulsion through it.
- Whatever is in the liquid is still intact: nothing shredded, broken up, or worried apart by movement.
- The level is roughly where the elapsed time should have left it; a large drop is the evidence that it ran hotter than this while nobody was looking.
Where it goes wrong It was brought to a boil and then left on the same heat, so it churned for the whole cook: the liquid clouded, the fat emulsified into it, and the solids broke apart into the broth.
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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