Japanese flavor enhancements

A few years ago I made bouillabaisse a few different ways. It's all recorded on another site. The base is fish broth with saffron added. The way to make that broth is to boil a few fish skeletons and heads and bits left over from filleting a few fish for a short period, the shortest boiling period of all the broths, like ten minutes, then strain out the solids. For another I used clam juice that comes in jars from the grocery store self, near the tins of anchovies.  For a third I used Japanese dashi made from dried seaweed and dried bonito flakes. The Japanese version won hands down.

You have to admit, Japanese cooks have their seafood act down.

What I am about to tell you, if you will accept it, will change your cooking-life permanently. It is the easiest, fastest, best way available to improve flavors. They turn water into pure ambrosia. They bring the sea right to your bowl. It does take ingredients not commonly found in American grocery stores. While they're available at Asian markets and online. I just now made a purchase where the shipping is more than the cost of the products, and that's enough to put you off the whole idea, then I think about driving around to find them, and then finding lower quality products, and the effect that they have on all that I do, compared with having the best of them brought right to me and the extra shipping cost seems a good bargain.

Then, learning each new element is one thing, while uncovering the truth of manufacturing and marketing behind them another thing altogether. With all these things cheaper imitations take over, and as with all Japanese things that endure over centuries and honed with each generation they become fanatical in every detail so that simple things must become exceedingly complex and impossibly overthought. They apply a samurai discipline to everything. The sake becomes complex over time conversely riddled with poor imitations, mirin becomes complex and graded along lines of excellence while ridded with ersatz imitations, kombu originally from Hokkaido with its established tradition through centuries is imitated poorly in China and elsewhere resulting in poorer products. The same patterns of refined complexity and excellence VS poor imitations and perverse copies develops for each item.

* Kombu is a large seaweed that is dried. It is the origin of MSG.
* Bonito flakes are smoked and dried skipjack tuna that is nearly petrified and shaved into flakes with a tool in the shape of a wooden box with a small cabinet on the bottom to catch the flakes and with a wood-plane on top to shave the hardened somewhat vulcanized smoked and dried fish. This is their art. They dry it for something like six months.

These two elements together make a dashi, a broth, nobody puts it this way, but it is seaweed and dry-fish tea. It is excellent. Much better than it sounds. It has so much flavor it knocks your socks off and it makes everything else that it's used with much better.

This same type of broth can be made with dried mushrooms and tiny dried fish that are sold in bags in Asian markets. Americans have this same idea in their western cooking by adding beef jerky to water for beans. Fried bacon does a similar thing.

Being Japanese, they must complicate things further. There is ichibandashi and nidashi, first and second dashi.

Second dashi is the same kombu and bonito, the used seaweed and used tuna flakes, simmered again with another handful of tuna flakes. It's not so difficult as it sounds. These ingredients are veritably instant.

Dashi is the base for miso soup. The miso is secondary ingredient. This 26 minute video makes this all clear. I like this video a lot because it shows kombu production and bonito production. You might not like it so well for its detail and its music is annoying. (Comments to this video at YouTube are disappointing.)

This shorter video shows the ease and speed of making the tea.

I'm going to call it tea, because that's what it is. That's how I make it. I don't care what other people call it. Because I've watched some dozen or so videos and they all have their particular conceits. Some soak the kombu for 6 hours and I never did that. Others scoop of the foamy protein that forms no matter how nearly invisible, and I never did that. Reviews for the products on Amazon are so off base they don't even count. And none of them mention that you can actually eat the kombu, cut it into noodle shapes and munch it. The texture is interesting and the taste is fine, but it's described in comments as "rubber bands." The whole attitude comes from a culture that doesn't eat seaweed. And that's a shame because the various types are excellent.

The shaved bonito flakes can be sprinkled on salads, and these flavors can be used on anything to improve them, steaks, beans, chicken, fish, shellfish, anything.

* Fish sauce. As American shoppers without this in our background we're open to exploitation. We are subject to the worst abuses. It's simple ingredients, anchovy, salt, and water, are adulterated. The original is fermented. That takes time and some trouble. To keep cost down we're presented with smashed fish processed with other ingredients to make it more pleasant.

*Mirin is lower-grade sake infected with mold that turns sake starches to sugar. It is an exceedingly sweet alcoholic ingredient. It's American replications are nothing to the real thing. Most of what is available is pure hoax.

* Toasted sesame seed oil.

* Soy sauce.

I wanted to use my Instant Pot pressure cooker to produce beef broth from bones to use in authentic French onion soup. I was disappointed that my nearest grocery store had so few bones. I bought all they had. The meat on them was terrible. As meat. And now, although tender little bits, they're devoid of flavor. All the tough meat flavor went to the broth. The broth turned out much better than I could hope. It is dark, and it is beefy, it is flavorful, and it is gelatinous all the way through meaning the marrow was extracted.

Last night I used the broth with low expectation but added these four ingredients in scant amount for a near quart of broth,

* 1/2 teaspoon toasted sesame seed oil
* 1 teaspoon fish sauce
* 1 teaspoon sherry (in place of mirin)
* 2 teaspoons soy sauce

And if I may say, the beef broth is the most excellent I've ever tasted. Much better than any beef broth that I've had in authentic French onion soup made in French restaurants, or any beef bourguignon that I loved, better than my own made with broth by experts at Tony's. And that was very good bourguignon too. Twice. I understood immediately with these few Japanese ingredients, although not anything close to French, they will make an outstanding French onion soup. They out-French the French. I added some cubed tofu and cut napa cabbage and that was my one meal for the whole day. It is perfectly satisfying.

I keep thinking, if only my parents could be alive to see this now, their minds would be blown. They did know so much already, more so than the usual person I meet, they did have an expanded appreciation for Asian ingredients and Asian food generally, and they both grew up with seafood prominent in their diets, but they did not know any of this. Now you have this advantage.

This is so far beyond the contents of The Deplorable Cookbook, it isn't even funny.

Here is where you can get started with these ingredients through the Amazon portal up there ↗︎.

* kombu seaweed
* bonito flakes
* mirin, is an alcohol so in the U.S. must be sold through a bottle shop. The grocery store version is similar to cooking wine version of real wine. Amazon does not have the real thing, just as a grocery store won't. Nevertheless American cooks are satisfied with what they know. Here is the page again. You can buy the real thing elsewhere. Takara Sake has the real mirin and it has the kind of sake to use too. There again, you are faced with a bewildering selection. Takara has what is needed. You only have to bite the bullet on shipping.

Wakame seaweed is the stuff floating around in miso soup and whole salads are made with it. It's a great element such a spinach in soups and with vegetables and fish and shellfish.  (The kombu is used to make the seafood-tea and the wakame is to eat as vegetable. It comes dried and it reconstitutes by soaking. It expands impressively, like those sponge toys crammed into pills.

When you go into a Japanese restaurant and notice large bottles on a shelf near the cook, these are the ingredients those bottles contain.