Japanese Comfort Cooking

This week, we’re serving up another cookbook review. In this edition of By the Book, our associate editor Robin Babb reports on her adventures in cooking from Japanese Comfort Cooking: An Opinionated Guide to Modern, Homey, Classic Japanese Recipes.

And while the authors, longtime cookbook collaborators Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat, have some intimidating bona fides—Ono is currently chef at Taruko at the infamous Chelsea Hotel, and Salat has staged in esteemed restaurants in Japan and picked up a James Beard Award nomination for his food writing—this cookbook, Babb finds, is not intimidating at all.

In the world of Japanese cookbooks, this is no small thing. It also promises, here on the cusp of summer, to add some lighter spins on comfort food to your repertoire.

By the way, thanks to those of you who’ve shared your enthusiasm for this series and the books you’ve discovered through it. We love to hear from you, and we appreciate every time you pass this letter on to a friend. If you’re that friend, you can subscribe right here.

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By the Book

Words and photos by Robin Babb

Japanese Comfort Cooking: An Opinionated Guide to Modern, Homey, Classic Japanese Recipes

By Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat

The very first recipe in Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat’s cookbook Japanese Comfort Cooking is for All-Purpose Dashi, made from dried kombu and bonito flakes—and it’s easy to see why it’s there.

The simple but incredibly savory broth forms the backbone of so much of Japanese cooking, and it’s comforting even on its own: rich, umami, and lightly salty. A steaming cup of the stuff would be a perfect tonic for a winter cold. Sure, you could make dashi from a store-bought packet that’s mostly MSG—but why would you, when this is so much tastier, and just about as easy as steeping tea?

With a few cups of that homemade dashi in your fridge, you can whip up just about any of the recipes in this cookbook in decidedly less than an hour, with minimal fuss. It is seasoning staples like this, and their capacity to easily add a rich base note of flavor to any dish, that, to the authors, embodies the beauty of Japanese home cooking.

Salat calls it “the refrigerator test”: Whenever he visits a home in Japan, he likes to watch how everyday cooks “magically conjure a sublime meal from whatever they find in the fridge—with the aid of key seasonings like dashi, soy sauce, mirin, sake, and miso.” The goal of Japanese Comfort Cooking is for you, dear reader, to achieve that same level of ease and expertise.

And that goal is not as overambitious as it might seem on the surface. The book’s first three sections are “Miso Soup (and Other Soups),” “Rice,” and “Noodles,” which are sort of the holy trinity of Japanese home cooking, and, you know, generally fairly straightforward dishes to make.

Gomo Dare Soba, or Cold Sesame Soba, combines the book’s base Shiitake Dashi with soy milk, neri goma, Japanese sesame paste, and a few other seasonings to make a layered and rich vegetarian broth—one that I’ve since repurposed for other soups, hot and cold, as well as eaten ladled over soft-boiled eggs with a handful of chopped scallions and toasted sesame seeds on top.

And nearly every recipe comes with a short and chatty dive into a bit of Japanese culinary history. There are simple rice dishes like Tamago Kake Gohan, freshly cooked rice with tamari and an egg cracked in to cook in the residual heat, and Chazuke, soupy rice in green tea, that are traditionally eaten for breakfast in Japan, as well as some much more novel takes, like Gobo Karaage, or Burdock Root Fries, and Sauteed Branzini with Yuzu Brown Butter.

In the intro, Ono and Salat make a claim that, although a bit of a generalization, seems sound to me: “Western cooking is about layering spice, fat, and heat to deliver a hardy flavor wallop. In Japanese cooking, you’re looking for harmony.”

In these recipes, much attention is paid to the overall combination of things—flavors, textures, cooking methods, and even colors and sizes. One tends to chop things differently when the ingredients are meant to be eaten with chopsticks rather than a fork, after all.

Small amounts of sugar or mirin appear in most recipes, explicitly as a balancing component. None of these dishes could be called sweet, but the flavor layer would be missed if it weren’t there. The Agedashi Tofu recipe is a revelation on its own, and also a perfect model of that balance: combining hot and oily fried ingredients with something fresh and bright-tasting—grated daikon and ginger, a little wasabi paste, or some finely shredded green cabbage.

Balance also comes in the Japanese tradition of meals that combine several small dishes, instead of what the authors call the “appetizer-to-main-course orthodoxy.” This is especially noted in the case of sozai—made-ahead side dishes that are mostly vegetables, either raw or pickled, and can be stashed in the fridge and eaten alongside several meals.

Shredded Cabbage with Creamy Daikon Dressing is one such dish, whose sinus-clearing dressing is so addictively tangy I’d eat it with a spoon. Wakame Sunomono, a quick pickle of wakame seaweed and cucumbers that also works with whatever veg you have in the fridge, provides a vinegary flavor note to any meal, and is especially a nice contrast to eat with something fried.

If you’ve wanted to dive into Japanese cooking but don’t know where to start, Japanese Comfort Cooking is an excellent ally. While knowledgeable and reverent of culinary traditions, it’s meanwhile never precious, especially when clarity or accessibility are on the line.

Every Japanese ingredient and traditional technique is thoroughly explained, as are the departures from those ingredients and techniques. As the authors themselves say of the beauty of Japanese comfort cooking, “It’s cooking that doesn’t live under museum glass, never to be touched or altered. It’s both deeply of the culture and boldly influenced by American, Chinese, Korean, and European chow.”

Who’s Your Source?

There are very few ingredients in this book that can’t be found at your standard Smith’s. When Ono and Salat do get particular about ingredients, it mostly has to do with traditional Japanese preparations: their reasoning for dunking nearly every fresh ingredient in cold water for a few minutes before serving, how finely to slice things, or why homemade dashi will always be worth making.

An explanation on how to cut hari shoga, which literally means “needle ginger,” gets a sidebar in one of the recipes.

Nevertheless, you will want to shop somewhere that multiple kinds of miso, soy sauce, and dry seaweed can be procured—you’ll need kombu and nori for many of these recipes, and wakame for a few.

In Albuquerque, Talin Market is a great source for those, as well as bonito flakes and some of the Japanese produce called for: burdock root, lotus root, kabocha squash, and Japanese eggplant.

A1 Oriental Market can provide yuzu kosho and any specialty cooking implements you might want to pick up. An oroshigane, a traditional Japanese rasp grater, is certainly not required for any of these recipes, but it sure does make ginger and daikon radish into less of a pulpy mush than a Microplane does.

Santa Fe Asian Market is your best bet for most of these ingredients up in The City Different. They don’t carry yuzu kosho nor fresh burdock root, but they can cover bonito flakes, as well as kombu and nori.

Let it also be known that my beloved Talin Market does deliver to Santa Fe on Thursdays, so, as long as you plan ahead, you can secure many of your ingredients that way, and at a more reasonable price than many online retailers charge.