Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from My Family's Kitchen

A new cookbook from food writer and cookbook author Emiko Davies explores the recipes, flavors and cooking techniques from everyday Japanese cuisine. She joins us to discuss Gohan: Everyday Japanese Cooking: Memories and Stories from my Family’s Kitchen.     SUKIYAKI Welcome Home Sukiyaki Serves 4 This dish has a special place in my heart. It was everyone’s favourite signature dish of my obaachan, and one of the rare occasions she would cook meat. It felt like such a special treat and still is for me when my mother makes it. I’ve lived continents away from home since going to university; after being away for a year, sukiyaki was the dish (along with Temaki – page 97 – if it was summertime) that my mother would make to welcome me home. Invented in the Meiji era, after the Emperor dropped the 1,200-year-old ban on meat, sukiyaki was a dish that encouraged the Japanese to embrace eating beef. We make sukiyaki in the Kanto (Tokyo) style, where the sauce goes in first and everything is simmered in it, then taken out as each ingredient is cooked. In Kansai style (around Osaka), the meat is grilled first in the pot, usually with some beef tallow to grease it, and can be savoured as is, followed by the sauce and vegetables. Starting with a sweet sauce of mirin, sake and soy sauce, simmering right at the table, you place the well-marbled, paper-thin slices of beef into the sauce, along with vegetables, tofu and shirataki noodles. Every ingredient takes on the most wonderful flavours and everyone has their favourites. (Mine?... The tofu, which is like a sponge that soaks up that sauce, and the spring onion, which becomes impossibly sweet – I love it so much I make an easy version of it to eat anytime, see page 138.) Guests are served bowls of rice and bowls with a single raw egg cracked into them. You beat the egg with your chopsticks and it serves as a dipping sauce for the boiling-hot foods coming straight out of the pot. As the hot, saucy meat or vegetables hits the raw egg, it becomes a deliciously, creamy sauce – think carbonara – and it is one of my favourite parts of this dish.   INGREDIENTS 300 g (10½ oz) marbled beef  (such as sirloin), very thinly sliced 1 block of medium-firm tofu, cut into 1.5 cm (½ in) slices 2–4 spring onions (scallions) or 1 leek, cut on the diagonal into 5 cm (2 in) pieces 1 pack of enoki mushrooms 4 king oyster mushrooms,  sliced lengthways 1 small head of napa cabbage,  chopped into 2.5 cm (1 in) segments 1 large bunch of shungiku chrysanthemum greens, or similar,  cut into 5 cm (2 in) sections 200 g (7 oz) shirataki noodles 4 bowls of freshly cooked Japanese short-grain rice (page 80) 4 very fresh eggs, for dipping (optional)   SUKIYAKI SAUCE 125 ml (½ cup) mirin 125 ml (½ cup) sake 125 ml (½ cup) soy sauce 2 tablespoons sugar, or to taste 125 ml (½ cup) water   METHOD To make the sukiyaki sauce, place the mirin and sake in a saucepan and  bring to the boil, which will evaporate the alcohol. After 2 minutes, turn down to a gentle simmer and add the soy sauce, sugar and water and continue simmering, stirring occasionally, until the sugar is dissolved.  Set aside. (You can make this in advance and keep in a jar in the fridge for up to a week.) To prepare the table for sukiyaki, set up the burner in the centre of the table with the pot of sauce on top (sukiyaki is normally cooked in a cast-iron pot). Arrange the beef on a platter and arrange the tofu, vegetables and shirataki noodles attractively on a separate platter. Serve each guest a bowl of rice,  a bowl with a freshly cracked egg, if using, and some chopsticks.  Turn on the burner and bring the sauce to a simmer over a low–medium heat. Add the meat and some of the vegetables (enough to fit – you’ll do a few rounds). Pick out the ingredients as they are ready – most things take mere  minutes to cook: the tofu and greens are very quick; the cabbage, leek or spring onions can go longer, for example.  To avoid contamination of chopsticks in the sukiyaki, rather than allow every guest to use their own chopsticks, use a pair of saibashi, cooking chopsticks, which are longer than regular chopsticks, that stays by the pot and anyone who wants to take something out can use those alone. Otherwise, appoint a ‘cook’ who is in charge of distributing the foods as they are ready to come out.   VARIATION  Simply leave out the beef and add a little extra of the other ingredients  (my favourites are the tofu and the leek, but mushrooms are excellent  in this dish, as they soak up the sauce so well); vegans only need to leave out the dipping egg, too.   ON THE INGREDIENTS My mother eyeballs this recipe, so it is always  a bit different each time, so when I asked her for her recipe she turned to one of her oldest and best friends, Chieko, who is also a brilliant cook, to share her recipe, which is just perfect. Sukiyaki sauce has a distinctly sweet flavour, and my mother likes  to keep the sugar to a minimum – you could use  a little less if you prefer, too.  Traditional ingredients in sukiyaki include shirataki noodles, which are gluten-free noodles made of yam starch; different types of Japanese mushrooms, such as enoki, fresh shiitake or oyster mushrooms; and chrysanthemum greens (shungiku, 春菊), which are confusingly not the leaves of chrysanthemum flowers but actually another plant that resembles them – they are deliciously bitter, and you could substitute another bitter green for them, or simply try spinach, bok choy (pak choy), broccoli rabe or even watercress. If you manage to find shungiku to include here, note that like spinach they cook very quickly and will only need about 30 seconds in the pot. The quality of the beef is important here and, for an occasion dish like this, it is worth splurging for – there isn’t too much meat as it isn’t the main star of the dish. Not only should it be good quality but it should also be well marbled so that it remains very tender. Recently, in Nagano, we enjoyed sukiyaki with a delicious wagyu particular to the region where the cows are fed only apples. My mother buys impossibly thin, pre-sliced frozen beef from her local Korean grocer and it is perfect for this, as the slices should be paper thin – about 2 mm or at most 3 mm (¹⁄8 inch) thick. If you can’t get the pre-sliced beef, choose  a nice piece of marbled steak from your butcher, put it in the freezer to firm up for about 1–2 hours and then you should be able to slice it thinly.