Monday, March 22, 2010
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Kitchen Experiment 03
Tonight's experiment - 關東煮Oden!
For some reason Oden is really not that common in restaurants anywhere. But it is the ultimate Japanese comfort food! Oden is very common in Taiwan because convenience stores like 7-11 widely advertise their Oden whenever the temperature drops. Taiwanese even created their own version of it called "Olen". A raining day like today gives me a great chance to try it out.
The ingredients are simple: hard boiled eggs, daikon (big white radish), konjak (Japanese yam jelly), any kinds of fish cake products, and carrots (optional but I like them). Basically you just slow cook these items in a soup base consist of daishi (bonito fish concentrate), soy sauce, sugar, salt, kelp, cooking wine, and mirin (Janpanese sweet cooking seasoning made from corn syrup and fermented wheat protein).
The recipe I look up only asking for 40 minutes of slow cook, but my friend's method is to cook it for 30 minutes, leave it to cool down over few hours, then heat it up again. This cooling down process allows the flavour to be absorbed into all the ingredients like sponges soak up water. There are other tips and tricks to create a good pot of Oden, but I will see how my simplified version work out.
The before and after pictures don't look too different... ^^||| but it sure tastes good! The mirin and fish cake gave the soup the sweetness, but the daishi, daikon, and egg created a more complex savoury. Hm....
Usually you use a little bit of yellow wasabi on you Oden, but I think the green type work just as well... okay okay, I am too lazy to buy another tube of wasabi. Rice and Oden go well together. And I have some raw igname yam (山藥) as a side dish (with bonito fish flake and soy/wasabi sauce). I can say this would be one of my favourite meal.
Thank you, Ray, for teaching me how to make this dish. Now I have successfully replicated it, I can also make this for my other friends!
For some reason Oden is really not that common in restaurants anywhere. But it is the ultimate Japanese comfort food! Oden is very common in Taiwan because convenience stores like 7-11 widely advertise their Oden whenever the temperature drops. Taiwanese even created their own version of it called "Olen". A raining day like today gives me a great chance to try it out.
The ingredients are simple: hard boiled eggs, daikon (big white radish), konjak (Japanese yam jelly), any kinds of fish cake products, and carrots (optional but I like them). Basically you just slow cook these items in a soup base consist of daishi (bonito fish concentrate), soy sauce, sugar, salt, kelp, cooking wine, and mirin (Janpanese sweet cooking seasoning made from corn syrup and fermented wheat protein).
The recipe I look up only asking for 40 minutes of slow cook, but my friend's method is to cook it for 30 minutes, leave it to cool down over few hours, then heat it up again. This cooling down process allows the flavour to be absorbed into all the ingredients like sponges soak up water. There are other tips and tricks to create a good pot of Oden, but I will see how my simplified version work out.
The before and after pictures don't look too different... ^^||| but it sure tastes good! The mirin and fish cake gave the soup the sweetness, but the daishi, daikon, and egg created a more complex savoury. Hm....
Usually you use a little bit of yellow wasabi on you Oden, but I think the green type work just as well... okay okay, I am too lazy to buy another tube of wasabi. Rice and Oden go well together. And I have some raw igname yam (山藥) as a side dish (with bonito fish flake and soy/wasabi sauce). I can say this would be one of my favourite meal.
Thank you, Ray, for teaching me how to make this dish. Now I have successfully replicated it, I can also make this for my other friends!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)