No Recipes – Techniques, inspiration and cooking tips from my Japanese kitchen

SVS: Sole Meunière

The idea here was simple, apply a modern French technique to a French classic. I lightly salted two cleaned flatfish and bagged them along with slices of lemon and sprigs of parsley. They went into the Sous Vide Supreme for half an hour at 60 degrees C. Because the fish is usually floured and pan [...]

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California Roll

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I tend to categorize American sushi restaurants into two buckets: traditional places where you can get a wide selection of fresh nigiri sushi, and the non-traditional places that have pages upon pages of inventive makisushi. If I had to choose between the two, I’d take the one with the stoic Japanese dude forming little pillows [...]

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SVS: Slow Cooked Eggs

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If you’ve never had one before, slow cooking an egg creates something magical from a mundane egg. It’s cooked in its shell, much like a boiled egg but that’s about where the similarities end. When you crack it open, it slips out with a white that has the texture of a thin custard and a [...]

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Sushi Rice

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It may not be the most exciting part of sushi, but the vinegared rice or sushimeshi (鮨飯) is what makes sushi sushi. By some accounts, the word sushi is a contraction of the words su which means “vinegar” and meshi which means “rice”. Another creation legend is that the kanji character for sushi “鮨” resembles [...]

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Chicken Ramen

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Since posting my recipe for Tonkotsu ramen two years ago, I’ve been getting requests to make a non-pork version of the rich collagen laden broth. Well… here it is finally! Tori Ramen (鳥ラーメン) is nothing new. People have been using chicken stock to make ramen since the early days of ramen’s popularity in Japan. Sadly, [...]

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Sous Vide Saturday

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Growing up, the most used kitchen gadget in my mom’s kitchen was a Cuisinart food processor. To call it well loved would be an understatement. Over two decades of regular use left the work bowl scratched and cracked, but the mechanical click of the front switch never failed to set the motor in motion with [...]

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