The new Japanese Cooking Thread: Now With 72% Less Pocky and Instant Ramen.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > The new Japanese Cooking Thread: Now With 72% Less Pocky and Instant Ramen.

«‹›2 »

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 13, 2017

# ¿ Dec 26, 2016 21:39

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 8, 2024 20:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 13, 2017

# ¿ Jan 16, 2017 20:36

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Feb 13, 2017

# ¿ Jan 27, 2017 04:50

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Feb 13, 2017

# ¿ Jan 29, 2017 04:07

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Feb 13, 2017

# ¿ Feb 8, 2017 07:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Myself and the CDC would respectfully disagree citing increased risk of high blood pressure, heart disease, and stroke.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2017 00:36

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Mr. Wiggles posted:

You don't understand the CDC. Nor do you understand msg. Go drink soy sauce and live happy.

You don't know me. You know what, do whatever. Sorry for interrupting.

# ¿ Feb 13, 2017 18:46

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

HookedOnChthonics posted:

Funnily enough, I just looked up MSG on the CDC's website and other than an entry for chinese restaurant syndrome still included on a clearinghouse page for foodborne illness etiology they seem mostly very interested in its use as a stabilizer in vaccines

MSG's entry in their alphabetical index of topics is literally "Monosodium Glutamate (MSG) � See Vaccine Ingredients." You have to go to the mainline sodium entries if you want nutritional information.

So, Babylon Astronaut, I can say with the confidence of research that you do not understand the CDC.

On topic, though, does anyone have a good beginner's tsukemono guide? It was the best surprise I had eating in Japan in terms of being totally ubiquitous and awesome there and totally absent from stateside Japanese. I'm interested in getting into pickling myself eventually but I don't even know what exact vegetables I sampled over there so that might be a little further down the road yet for me.

https://www.cdc.gov/salt/
:milk:

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 00:20

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I just do an easy french omlette, set it on top of the rice mix i form in a small bowl. You cut it gently down the middle and it should open up inside out, so the runny center is on the top. Give it some demiglace, and you're golden. Cooking with dog version seems more complicated than it has to be, and kinda dry. Work on making good omelets, and just put one on top.

Like this: https://youtu.be/s10etP1p2bU

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 08:26

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Tampopo knows what's up.

# ¿ Dec 21, 2017 08:58

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Compound butter is good. I like shiso and katsuobushi compound butter for red meat. Whatever you have left, you can flavor some oil with. You can kinda stuff them like dolmas. It goes well ripped up in tons of japanese food like namatamago kake gohan. It's also part of one of the "easiest" ways to eat natto. Put natto on rice, pick up rice and natto with the shiso leaf and down the hatch.

# ¿ Dec 28, 2017 08:18

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Casu Marzu posted:

If you're looking to make the more traditional broth/dipping sauce that goes with soba, you wanna look at making mentsuyu.

Replace the soy in this recipe with tamari if you want to dilute the sauce into soup with hot water at the end of the meal. This just makes tsuyu: sake, mirin, shoyu and dashi. A cool derivative of tsuyu is tsuyunomoto. If you don't have tamari, tsuyunomoto does a really good impression of mentsuyu. Make the tsuyu and reduce it to 1/3rd. It's a fantastic ingredient to use for anything from a soup tare, a marinade, braising liquid, stirfry sauce. Toss steamed vegetables in a pan with a little tsuyunomoto and hot water. Makes good umami.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2018 07:46

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

You can form the onigiri with dilute soy sauce on your hands instead of using salt water. I assume you could also coat the mold. I like mirin in everything. It does a decent enough impression of amalyase but doesn't cost anywhere near as much. Miso is a no-brainer with onigiri and also one of the best things to eat. Dip both sides of the triangle in miso and grill all 5 sides.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 08:02

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

GhostofJohnMuir posted:

salt and no soak time, my grandma is rolling in her grave

Yea. It was almost perfect, but soaking your rice in the water for ~30 minutes will make fluffier rice. I can't resist adding a square of kombu either. What can I say? Kelp is good.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2018 02:16

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

manny kaltz posted:

Hello thread, I'm thinking of making miso soup for my work lunches next week. Is this soup a dish that can be reheated once it is made, or should I be looking to add the miso to the dashi & tofu etc. after the latter have been reheated?

Add the miso. Miso soup does not store well, at all.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2018 18:01

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

big black turnout posted:

Taking my first shot at making broth for tonkotsu ramen today. Wish me luck

So when my chef gets interviewed or whatnot, they always ask the joke question of "what's the worst" and he always cops to getting the firedepartment called because he slept in and burned the tonk. loving hilarious, they fire axed both us and the neighbor's doors because they didn't know where the smoke was coming from. I guess the advice in this is that you really should do the full 30 hours. On the odd chance you have a refractometer, you should be hitting 14-16 easy, and it is not liquid at room temp. it's jello.

# ¿ May 23, 2018 23:38

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Cool the hot food quickly. 6 hours is safe, 4 is better, leaving warm food in the bacterial growth zone overnight is how food poisoning happens. Most crap like curry can be heated up with a handwarmer in the insulated bag or whatever.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2018 08:41

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I will ship some goddamn kombu, because kelp is king and you shouldn't have to make bonito dashi without it. It's hosed and I hate it.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2018 06:34

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Uhh. hondashi is Japanese for dashi powder. You probably mean ajinomoto brand. They're the guys who invented msg.

# ¿ Jul 29, 2018 05:32

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

ntan1 posted:

The best quick-make dashi comes from the packs that consist basically of bonito (plus some other fish) and some kelp in, without any MSG.

Brace yourself for the hondashi brigade to koolaid man into the thread to tell you how wrong you are.

# ¿ Aug 29, 2018 17:27

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Mongoose posted:

Nanohana is rapeseed blossom, the same rapeseed that is the base of canola oil. It's a seasonal bitter green that's in season in early spring. Most greens, especially a slightly bitter mustard family green would fill in well and pair with the mustard spread. A lot of the satisfaction of cooking / eating the seasonal greens like nanohana is eating it for the limited time it's available, so don't feel obligated to find it now.

Yu choi sum would be pretty close I imagine.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2018 07:18

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

If you make your own, you can significantly cut, or completely remove the saturated fat and heroic amount of sodium. Pre-made curry rue is not very good for you, but I guess it's fine, because the SA "saturated fat and high sodium is actually good" crew can tell you otherwise.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2019 20:00

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Tonkotsu takes 30 hours. You aren't getting close to 6 on the refractometer in 18 hours.

# ¿ May 13, 2019 02:44

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

It might "work" but as you can see, the fat is separating. If you cook until a reading of 5 or 6 on a refractometer, this will not happen. I don't need to try the recipie. It has been scientifically discovered by the yamato school of ramen. There are all kinds of good pork stock you can make for northern styles of ramen. When I say refractometer, I mean the viscosity of the broth.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 00:29 on May 14, 2019

# ¿ May 14, 2019 00:25

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

I'll try to scan some material from ramen school if I can dig it up later. Are you going to make noodles too?

-edit- Really, the best advice would be find a copy of "no one wants to teach you yamato style ramen." But I use the one from work. It's very expensive, but it is meant to be the capstone textbook. It has scientifically derived recipes for 100's of stocks and 1000's of tares. It's not really for the home cook, but I can go pilfer some info from work if there's anything specifically that interests you. I have access to nearly every English language book about ramen. Ivan and Momofuku are a good place to start. This book on tare is very good too. It has pictures, so it might not be too terrible if you only read english. You could make a new ramen a day and not repeat for years and years.

The stereotype of japanese cooking being more folklore than science are becoming less and less true as bored aerospace engineers and salarymen turn their hobbies into vanity projects.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 00:56 on May 14, 2019

# ¿ May 14, 2019 00:33

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

totalnewbie posted:

Is it possible/can you give an example visually of the difference that you're describing?

See the good eats tonk? The fat has separated and is floating on the top. If you do it long enough, the fat globs get smaller and smaller until they are completely dissolved into the stock. You might have a nice pork soup, but the emulsion is breaking. Then again, I learned from the foolish Japanese, so I probably don't know how to make ramen the cool blogger way. I think ours is the same as momofuku, also Asian, so take it with a grain of salt.

If you dont have time for tonkotsu, make a nice pork stock, skim off the fat and make a pork ramen.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 23:18 on May 14, 2019

# ¿ May 14, 2019 23:12

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Grand Fromage posted:

The two soup chicken/dashi ramen in Ivan's book looks pretty good and a simple way to start. Though I'm going to make a shoyu tare instead, I never liked shio ramen much.

E: Also I really like the burnt miso ramen I got at Gogyo in Kyoto, I don't know if that's a wider style or what. I have no idea how they do it. I can tell from the fire when they make it that they aren't joking about the burnt part, but other than that it is a mystery.

Those two Ivan ramen recipes are very good. I don't remember if he steeps the shoyu tare in dried bay scallops, but it's a drat fine step in making it awesome. The trick I've found in shoyu tare making is blending various soy sauces to get a complex tare. Marudaizu is great for a little oil, and fat from the soy. A high quality tamari can add depth and color, a chinese dark soy is cool here too. Light shoyu, you can use to get the salt level right, and you should be pretty close to excellent. That's the part where you can put in more or less effort. I never tried it, but it's probably not disgusting with just kikkoman.

I had a multi-unit ramen shop owner claim that our shop was the third best ramen in the world, better than his own shop, just off of our ability to use and improve that specific recipe. I just graduated again, been avoiding work like the plague, but I'll see what all I can dig up on burnt miso. I personally pan fry my miso most of the time.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 02:31 on May 29, 2019

# ¿ May 29, 2019 02:28

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Yea, we say "rolled sushi" to indicate that you weren't running a sushi line.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2019 19:58

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Curry blocks are salt, and preservatives. They are fine un-refrigerated. It may preserve the flavor to seal and refrigerate, but it's curry blocks; if you cared that much use some fresh spices.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 05:06

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

You're describing flour, something famously stored at room temperature, and saturated fat, a preservative of foods.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 09:17

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Shibawanko posted:

Well they're spring onions, but there are several varieties, there's the regular kind that you can find in western supermarkets, but there's another kind that's more slender:

I tend to prefer them as toppings on things. I don't know if they have a specific name, I always just call them negi like normal spring onions and Japanese people seem to just call it negi as well, but they look different. They're almost like chives but they don't taste exactly like the chives I have in my garden, for instance.

(Not a native English speaker so they might have some obvious name in English that I don't know of, in Dutch we don't really have a word for them)

Probably talking about bunching onions.

# ¿ Jul 8, 2019 16:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Yea, thousands. You mean broth or tare?

# ¿ Aug 7, 2019 04:42

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Grand Fromage posted:

Doubanjiang is another possibility, though what you describe sounds like a weird Japanese derivative and not the real thing. You don't really eat doubanjiang on its own and it is super chunky, you'd see whole pieces of fava beans in that.

It's probably tobandjan. You can get Japanese tobandjan without the whole beans now. It's usually mung beans though.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2019 00:04

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

A nice Negi dish is to braise them in soy, mirin, sake, and a couple drops of sesame oil. Arrange on plate, top with white sesame seeds. Decent enough side dish for a bento or set to meal. Great with rice to dilute and enlarge the flavor i.e. triangle chewing. You can eat the roots. Just go for it.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2020 02:22

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Tonkotsu is a 30 hour broth. There are other, less time consuming pork broths you can make. They are usually ginger/scallion flavored. Braise the bones, cook for ~5-6 hours or until viscous. Then make a black garlic tare of some kind.

Sorry for the edit fest, it's going to be like that. I have a ridiculous amount of experience with ramen and filtering it down to something people understand and will listen to is kinda brain draining. I just finished reading the tan-tan men recipe: you can do better. Their stock is garbo. Take out your stock pot; use that to sweat the aromatics and pre-cook the meat (just til light brown). WITHOUT REMOVING (that's where they hosed up the soup) add the broth, the tobandjan ( or add it at the end of the meat browning really, don't get it too hot, it loses potency) and the sesame paste whisked separately with some stock and the soy. Now, when they stock is done, strain out the meat and aromatics, brown them in the pan like you do to finish it, and add the broth. The flavor is actually in the broth this time.

Babylon Astronaut fucked around with this message at 05:31 on May 6, 2020

# ¿ May 6, 2020 05:23

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Personally, I'd do a citrus vinaigrette and put them on some greens with strawberries, or watermellon. Teriyaki is too strong for langostino. You can make doria, or dynamite with them too if you want a heavier dish.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2020 05:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Yuzu vin pairs great with langostines.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2020 08:55

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Lard is usually with the butter and shortening at the grocery store. You can render and season pork fat for better results. Actually, that recipe is pretty amateur and I'm guessing the reason you had to use double the shoyu is that they didn't use dashi in the stock, so it lacked the vegetable based glutamates.

# ¿ Jul 22, 2020 03:27

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

If you can double the tare, and it itsn't over seasoned; then it was too weak, probably with glutamates to begin with,

# ¿ Jul 23, 2020 07:43

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ May 8, 2024 20:13

Babylon Astronaut: Apr 19, 2012

Kaiware is awesome for that too. Mustard and natto are classic together. It can stand up to strong flavors that's for sure.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2020 17:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Goons with Spoons > The new Japanese Cooking Thread: Now With 72% Less Pocky and Instant Ramen.

«‹›2 »