Lime & Soy Salmon Bowls

This was really very lovely indeed - and if I hadn’t used brown rice, and particularly if I hadn’t used the rice cooker, it would have come together very quickly indeed - probably 30 minutes max.

Keep an eye on the salmon, you really don’t want to overcook it. Take it out if necessary and cover with some foil while you get on with everything else - you’ll be rewarded with really succulent and extremely tasty salmon. Also you don’t need to toast the sesame seeds (and while I’m at it if you don’t have black ones just use the usual kind) but doing so will give a really nutty flavour that contrasts beautifully with the rich sweet sour umami sauce and tender fish.

Adapted from an Epicurious recipe.


Lime & Soy Salmon Bowls
serves 2

125g brown, basmati or jasmine rice
10g unsalted butter
1 large clove garlic, finely chopped
1 tsp minced ginger
½ tsp red pepper flakes
3 tbsp agave nectar or maple syrup (failing either, honey)
3 tbsp fresh lime juice
3 tbsp light soy sauce
½ tsp cornflour
2 salmon fillets, skin removed
½ tsp sesame oil
150g baby spinach
1 tsp black sesame seeds, lightly toasted

Preheat oven to 200°C.

Cook rice as directed (I liberated my rice cooker and cooked it in that - yay!).

In a small frying pan, melt the butter over medium heat and sauté the garlic, ginger and pepper flakes for about a minute until the garlic is lightly golden.

Add the agave or maple syrup, lime juice and soy sauce and simmer for 3 minutes. 

Meanwhile mix the cornflour with 1 teaspoon of water in a small bowl and then stir that into the sauce. Continue to cook until it has slightly thickened, about 1 minute.

Arrange the salmon on a foil-lined baking sheet and spread 1 tsp of the sauce over each fillet.

Roast in the oven until just cooked through which will take around 12 minutes.

While the salmon is cooking warm the sesame oil in a frying or sauté pan over medium heat and then add the spinach. Sauté until just wilted. Remove from the pan and set aside.

Divide the cooked rice between 2 bowls and top each with half of the spinach and a salmon fillet, broken into large pieces.

Drizzle with remaining sauce and sprinkle over the sesame seeds.

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Miso Sake Salmon with Bean Thread Noodles

I'm the first to admit that this doesn't look very pretty. At all. And honestly? Bean thread noodles (or glass noodles or Chinese vermicelli) are a pain in the butt to cook with. But this is a good recipe and other than the pain-in-the-buttness of the noodles is easy, quick and full of flavour.

If you don't have wasabi paste, you can use English mustard: you want that sinus-clearing heat you get from those two, but only a whiff of it, you don't want to be blowing your head off. 

Miso & Sake Salmon with Noodles
serves 2

2 skinless salmon fillets, cut into 2cm pieces
100 g bean thread noodles, soaked & snipped into smaller lengths
4 tbsp chopped chives
2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds
for the marinade
1 tsp wasabi paste
2 tbsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tbsp garlic oil
1 tbsp sake
for the sauce 

1 tsp garlic oil
1 red chilli, finely sliced

½ tsp grated ginger
2 tbsp miso paste
2 tbsp light soy sauce
zest of 1 lime & juice of ½
½ tsp sugar
4 tbsp sake
1 tsp fish sauce
1 tsp Worcestershire sauce
1 tsp wasabi paste

3 tbsp water
1-2 tbsp coriander, chopped, to serve

In a freezer bag, combine the mustard or wasabi paste, Worcestershire sauce, soy, oil, and sake and add the salmon. Leave to marinate for about half an hour.

While the salmon is in the marinade get the sauce ready: in a frying pan heat the oil and add chili and grated ginger and fry them a few seconds. Turn up the heat and splash in the sake: when it has reduced slightly add the remaining sauce ingredients apart from lime zest and juice and stir for a few minutes until the ingredients are combined.

Add the salmon pieces to the sauce and cook for a couple of minutes until they colour and lose translucency. Stir in the lime juice and zest.

Stir in the bean thread noodles and when they are well combined add the sesame seeds and chives and stir through.

Serve immediately sprinkled with chopped coriander and some wedges to squeeze over.

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Chicken Teriyaki & Miso Soup

So these are two of the recipes from the cookery class I took in Tokyo: both quite simple, I have made my own version of Teriyaki Chicken loads of times and am quite partial to a bit of miso but in either case I have never really known how to make properly authentic versions. Especially in the case of the miso where I have only used the ready to go powder or paste stuff.

You could of course cut a corner and use ready made dashi soup stock granules for the miso but the flavour you’ll get from using the kelp and bonito, if you can get it, will be far superior. Both can be found quite easily in Asian supermarkets.

If possible when making the dashi soup stock, try and soak the kelp overnight where possible but in any case make sure it is soaked for at least 30-60 minutes. Making slits down the side of the dried kelp (see pics) will also help to further release the flavour

To the miso you can add whatever vegetable you like such as diced potato, mooli, onion and so on as well as tofu: either cubed, puffed or strips of tofu skin. I just used enoki mushrooms here but really you can use whatever you like.

When making the miso soup, it is traditional to use brown miso in Tokyo: use to taste as different brands will have different strengths so add in a spoon at a time tasting as you go.


Chicken Teriyaki
serves 2

300g chicken thighs
pinch of salt
3 tbsp sake
1 leek, cut into 4 lengths, and slashed lightly at a diagonal across the surface
For the sauce
1½ tbsp soy sauce
1½ tbsp mirin
3 tsp sugar
3 tsp sake
3 tsp honey

Remove any excess fat, but not the skin, from the chicken thighs, then using a fork prick them all over the skin side. Season with the salt and sake which will help tenderise them.

Mix the sauce ingredients together.

Heat a little oil in a frying pan or wok and over a medium high heat cook the chicken skin-side down until browned.

Flip over and add the sauce ingredients and leek.

Continue to cook over a medium heat until the sauce is thickened and the chicken cooked through. About 20 minutes.

Dashi Soup Stock
10g konbu (dried kelp)
20g katsuobushi (dried bonito shavings)
4 cups of water

Cut the edges of the konbu down both sides.

Leave to soak in the water in a saucepan for at least 30 minutes but preferably overnight.

When you are ready to make the stock heat the konbu and water until you can see small bubbles start to rise.

Add the katsuoboshi and just at the point that it will start to boil turn off the heat.

Let it sit for a little while: the bonito should settle at the bottom and when it does you can then easily remove it and the kelp.


Miso Soup

Handful of enoki mushrooms, trimmed
Brown miso, to taste
3-4 cups dashi soup stock

Bring the dashi stock to a boil in a saucepan then immediately turn down to a low simmer and add whatever vegetable and / or tofu you are using.

Add the miso gradually and let dissolve into the soup (a good trick here is to add a little miso onto a wooden spoon, hold it just on the surface of the stock and then using chopsticks mix it up with a little liquid to let it melt - otherwise you may get big clumps of miso that are hard to dissolve).

Be careful not to boil - the temperature needs to be at around 90C.

When you have added the miso to taste and it is properly dissolved serve immediately.

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Pork & Ginger Gyoza with Dipping Sauce

Gyoza actually originated in China, but as with many other things it's gotten assimilated into everyday Japanese cooking. Closely related to shumai and wonton, the filling is usually pork- based, with cabbage, spring onion, garlic or garlic chives, and ginger although there are many variations.

You really need to have as thin a gyoza skin as possible - and of course you can always make your own but even in Japan thin, ready-made gyoza skins are usually used. I think my dumpling skins, bought in Chinatown were for wonton and I’m honestly not sure if it would have made a difference: I think my technique was more of an issue really!

The usual method for cooking gyoza is to “steam-fry” them so that they are crispy on the bottom and smooth and slippery on the top. It can be tricky to get it right to be honest - when you add the water you need to be sure not to add too much: obviously it is easy to add extra if needed but if you add too much at the outset you’re a bit stuffed really.

Gyoza are a traditional accompaniment to ramen in Japan, so I cooked these when I made ramen number 2 of the preceding post. The recipe came from a recent issue of Olive magazine but since making this I did of course go to Tokyo and gyoza were one of the things we made at the cooking class that I attended. That recipe will follow soon - and thankfully my technique improved a fair bit.

One final point to make: the Olive recipe didn’t specify light or dark soy sauce (and I’m used to the distinction with most regional Chinese recipes I follow) so I used dark but, as this was clearly an error, do use light soy if you can.

Oh, and by the way, a good tip is that you can freeze any extra gyoza that you don't think you'll eat in the first sitting (so to speak). The best way to do this is to put them on a metal baking tray in a single layer and pop the tray in the freezer. Once the gyoza are frozen you can then put them back in the freezer in a freezer bag or plastic container and TA-DAA - they won't get stuck together, and you can take out as many as you want, when you want.

Pork & Ginger Gyoza

makes about 20

100g spring greens, shredded, blanched for 2 minutes then drained & cooled

2cm ginger, grated

1 clove garlic, crushed

200g minced pork

1 tbsp soy sauce

1 egg white, lightly beaten

2 spring onions, finely chopped

20 gyoza / dumpling wrappers

1 tbsp sunflower oil

For the Dipping Sauce

3 tbsp light soy sauce

1 tbsp rice vinegar

1 tsp caster sugar

1 tsp sesame oil

1/2 red chili, finely chopped

Squeeze out any excess water from the greens then finely chop. Put in a bowl with the ginger, garlic, pork, spring onions, soy and 1 tbsp egg white.

Season then mix well and set aside to marinate for about an hour if possible.

Make your dumpling assembly station ready: you'll need a little bowl of water, a baking tray lined with parchment, the dumpling wrappers, the filling and a teaspoon. Keep the dumpling skins under a damp cloth or in the plastic pack they come in to keep them from drying out.

Put a skin / wrapper on your palm and using the tip of your finger moisten the edges with water. Put a teaspoonful of filling in the middle - try not to overfill them or you'll have trouble closing them up.

Bring the 2 sides together to make a crescent shape and pinch firmly in the middle. Fold over the skin on the side facing you, from both sides to make pleats, pinching firmly as you go. Place on the baking tray so that the top edges are straight up and push down slightly to flatten the bottom. Repeat with the other dumpling wrappers until you are out of filling.

When ready to serve, heat a little vegetable oil in a large non-stick frying pan that has a lid. Put in the gyoza flat side down and cook over a medium to high heat for a couple of minutes until the bottoms have started to crisp up and are golden. Lower the heat.

Add 125ml of water to the pan, immediately popping the lid on.

Steam for 5-10 minutes or until the wrappers are tender and look sort of transparent

When the water is almost all gone, take off the lid and turn the heat up to high to evaporate the rest. Place on a serving plate and repeat with any remaining gyoza.

Mix the dipping sauce ingredients together in a small, shallow dipping bowl and serve.

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Ramenarama

Prior to going to Tokyo, and probably as I had been planning the Tokyo trip I had a massive yearning for ramen one weekend. The bf was away, oop north camping with the midget, so I trudged into Chinatown (well slipped and slid, it was peeing down, I’d forgotten an umbrella and was wearing new ballerina’s.. West End pavements seem to resemble ice rinks in the wet: it was a bloody nightmare) to scour the shops for ingredients.

It wasn’t entirely successful to be fair, as there were a few things I just couldn’t find. And in the end after finding an interesting looking instant ramen noodles packet in the Japan Centre I decided that I would have two attempts: one made with said instant noodles, with toppings of my choice.. and one made with a bit more effort (although admittedly not much more) and using fresh ramen noodles.

In the case of the latter it would of course have been much better to make my own ramen broth but at this point I was soaked, had nearly slipped over at least a dozen times and was miserable - and I had found some ramen seasoning cubes in the Japan Centre so thought I’d give them a go.

Not exactly making from scratch then but still more so than the ramen noodle soup packet I was also to try out.

I also wanted to get chashu (char siu pork) but couldn’t find any anywhere and really just didn’t have the time to make that from scratch. So what I have instead is some pork loin slices, from the deli section in Tesco and just to up the pigginess some very finely sliced pork belly, also found in the Japan Centre. It’s actually intended for Shabu Shabu, hence the thinness of the slices but what the hell, I thought I’d give it a go.


Ramen #1
serves 1

Interestingly these weren’t particularly cheesy but rather gave a rich umami-ness that was kind of reminiscent of tonkotsu ramen. It really worked pretty well and I’d definitely get these in again as a store cupboard standby for a quick ramen fix.

pack of instant “cheese” ramen noodles
2 cooked pork loin slices
seasoned bamboo shoots
1 spring onion, finely chopped
1 medium-boiled duck egg
light soy sauce
nanami togarashi

Basically cook the noodles according to the package instructions: or if you are me study the Japanese instructions and ingredient packets until you can just about figure out the instructions.

I knew the noodles were cooked in 550ml for 4 minutes and that two of the 3 sachets went in with the noodles and the third on serving.. it took some doing: my knowledge of Kanji isn’t brilliant (ahem - I know about 3 characters and that is only since returning from Tokyo) but I got there in the end.

The sachets are:

Ramen seasoning -

Toppings (a bit stingy but I did like the bits of “fishcake”):

And cheese flavouring:

I think it was the cheese that was added last, I can’t recall.

Anyway, once the noodles are cooked, tip the lot into a bowl, and top in as an artistic fashion as possible the chopped spring onion, pork slices, halved egg and menma. Dash a little soy onto the eggs and sprinkle a little togarashi over the lot.

Slurp away!

Ramen #2
serves 2

Because I was ostensibly making a little more effort here I also went a bit more for it in terms of the toppings, as you can see

100g fresh ramen noodles
1 litre ramen stock (made up from ramen seasoning sachets, I used 3)
½ pkt dashi seasoning (about 2.5g)
2 medium-boiled duck eggs, halved
6 cooked pork loin slices, halved
4 slices thinly sliced pork belly (or unsmoked streaky bacon), lightly cooked
½ small can sweetcorn, drained
2 spring onions, finely chopped
Some nori (cut into strips)
3 tbsp seasoned bamboo shoots (menma)
chilli oil
light soy sauce to taste (optional: I sprinkle it over my egg yolks)
nanami togarashi (optional)

Place 2 bowls in a low oven or in hot water to warm them and make sure to have your toppings prepared and at hand, ready to serve. 

Make the ramen stock according to instructions, adding the dashi seasoning (for a little extra oomph). Allow this to gently simmer while you cook your noodles according to how you like them. 

In Japan there are varying degrees of “hardness” of noodle (also dependent on the type of ramen you get): yawame, bari, bari bari (very hard), mecha bari (super hard), and kona otoshi (noodles are plunged into boiling water just long enough to remove the flour). I tend to go for bari.

When the noodles are ready, drain them and divide them between the two bowls: add the stock into the bowl and then arrange your toppings on top, circular fashion around the bowl with the spring onions in the middle, topped with the chilli oil.

Serve with a little soy sprinkled over the eggs and togarashi over everything.

I also made some gyoza to go with the ramen: the recipe of which you can find on the next post.

In all honesty, both versions were terrific: the first was super quick and essentially surprisingly tasty considering that it was effectively glorified super-noodles but naturally the second version pipped it, so really the extra effort really did make all the difference.

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Miso Salmon

I was zumba-ing last night with the girls, following which it is customary to go for pasta and wine. In other words there was no time to blog the other seafood meal from the weekend - miso-marinated salmon.

High on my list of "would like to try"s has long been Nobu's Black Cod with Miso. Sadly it doesn't look like I will ever frequent Nobu so long as they continue to serve up endangered Bluefin tuna.  Yes they make a small italicised note on the menu (check it out) that perhaps one could ask for an alternative but frankly that just isn't good enough.

Still, I figured that I could make the effort to try it myself but chose to use sustainably sourced salmon fillets from Waitrose instead.  What follows is a recipe cobbled together from multiple sources, all slightly adapted.


Miso Salmon
Serves 2

Note: this needs to be started at least 24 hours in advance to allow to salmon to marinade for at least that long - potentially even longer would be better should the fish be fresh enough.

100ml mirin
60ml sake
120g miso paste (this should have been white miso paste but I didn't realise and only had brown - on top of which it had little bits of "sea vegetable" in it)
60g sugar (caster sugar is a good idea so it melts easily)
2 salmon fillets
pickled ginger slices (such as used with sushi)

Firstly mix the mirin and sake in a small saucepan and bring to the boil - boil furiously for about 30 seconds so the alcohol evaporates.

Turn the heat down and add the miso paste, stirring until it dissolves into the liquid. At this point turn the heat back up and add the sugar - stirring constantly until it has completely dissolved.

Leave to one side to cool completely and when it has done slather the salmon fillets in a bowl with the mixture. Cover and keep in the fridge for at least 24 hours, turning the fish occasionally.

When you are ready to cook, preheat the oven to about 200c and turn the grill on (this is what you would ideally do - my grill is, annoyingly, in my oven so I have to do the grilling bit and then put the oven on after). Wipe the miso off the salmon and put under the grill until the top is just starting to turn brownish. Remove from the grill and place in the oven for about 10 minutes.

Meanwhile tip the marinade into a saucepan and simmer until it is heated through and has thickened slightly.

Serve the salmon with a drizzle of the sauce, a couple of slivers of pickled ginger (traditionally eaten after the salmon - I actually forgot to serve it completely), steamed broccoli (sprinkle a tiny bit of vegetable bouillon powder over the broccoli while it steams) and spring greens sauteed in a drop of Sichuan pepper oil with some chopped red chilli.

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