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RECIPE: How to Make Japanese Dashi stock

20th August 2021 / 3 Comments on RECIPE: How to Make Japanese Dashi stock

Dashi is a Japanese soup stock which is really easy to make and very delicious indeed. It is a fundamental component of many Japanese dishes, such as miso soup, surinagashi and noodle dishes such as ramen and udon. It’s a very simple stock but provides a huge amount of flavour and definitely puts the “mmm” into umami, the fifth flavour. You can buy instant powdered dashi and just add water but if you can find the ingredients in your local Asian supermarket it’s really not much effort to make. The process is very simple and much quicker than traditional stock making in European cuisines, which generally require ingredients such as meat, vegetables and herbs to be boiled for several hours. Here is our Japanese dashi stock recipe

Japanese Dashi Stock Recipe

Dashi usually only uses a couple of ingredients. The dashi we made used konbu (kelp – a seaweed) and katsuobushi (bonito flakes, which are skipjack tuna flakes that have been simmered and smoked, then dried in the sun to ferment and finally shaved to wafer thin slices). Katsuobushi, like many fermented fish products (think nam pla – fish sauce from Thailand), smells somewhat stinky and not very pleasant when you open the packet, but somehow it adds a magical quality to the finished stock. Other dashi ingredients could include dried shiitake mushrooms or dried anchovies.

Ingredients

3 sheets of kombu kelp seaweed

EITHER

40g bonito flakes

OR

5 dehydrated shiitake mushrooms (for vegetarian or vegan version)

1 litre of water

Method

Make the dashi: Put kombu and bonito flakes (or shiitake mushrooms) into a saucepan of water.

Bring to a simmer. Skim off any froth.

After 15 minutes, turn off the heat. You should have a clear broth

Sieve the solids from the broth.

Keep the solid ingredients. You can dry these out and use them again to make a secondary dashi.

This Japanese dashi stock recipe is so easy to make and can be used in many delicious dishes.

Okonomiyaki Osaka — Japanese okonomiyaki

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