Chicken with simmered kabocha pumpkin
Ingredients
- 1/2 kabocha* pumpkin sliced and edged
- 4 ladlefuls** dashi 20 fl ounces or 591 ml
- 1/2 lsdlrful mirin *** 2.5 fl ounces or 74 ml
- 1/3 ladleful usukuchi soy sauce about 1.5 fl ounces or 44 ml
- 2 tablespoons sugar
- 1 Small piece of kombu **** 2 inches approx
- 2 deboned chicken legs skin on
- 1 teaspoon arima sansho *****
Instructions
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Add the kabocha to a medium sized saucepan, skin side down. Add the dashi, mirin, sugar and kombu. Place over medium heat and bring the liquid to a boil. When the liquid boils reduce the heat so the kabocha just gently simmers. Cook until the kabocha is just cooked through — a skewer or toothpick will go through it easily. When the kabocha is ready, turn off the heat and add the usukuchi soy sauce. Let the kabocha steep in its cooking liquid for at least an hour (more is fine, even a few hours – don’t refrigerate). Once the kabocha has steeped, carefully remove it and set aside, and reserve the cooking liquid in the saucepan.
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For the chicken, preheat a skillet over high heat. When the skillet is hot, add the chicken, skin side down, and brown for a minute or two to give the skin color. Now transfer the chicken to the saucepan with the kabocha cooking liquid. If you need more liquid, add some dashi. You want to just cover the chicken. Bring the liquid to a boil. Reduce the heat so the liquid simmers and place a drop lid over the chicken (I’ll get into drop lids in detail in another post, if you’re not familiar with them. For right now, cut a piece of aluminum foil to fit inside the pot, poke a couple of holes in it, and place directly on top of the liquid and chicken, which will help the cooking). Cook for 15 minutes.
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When the chicken is done, transfer to a cutting board and slice across the grain and set aside. Place the kabocha back in the cooking liquid and bring it just to a boil over medium heat. As soon as it boils, turn off the heat. Plate the dish by piling chicken slices besides kabocha slices. Top with sansho arima (sansho peppercorns cookedtsukudani-style)
Recipe Notes
* Kabocha: This squash must be ripened for at least a month after harvesting to convert its starches to sugar. The result is a luscious, sweet squash. Here’s what Yamada-san did to bring out this lovely natural flavor: First, he carefully cut the kabocha in half and seeded it. Then he cut it in half again. He pointed out that the quarters have a thicker top part, and a thinner bottom part. When he cut the kabocha one more time (into eights) he cut the thicker side a little smaller — so all the chunks had the same weight. Now he cut each chunk into even slices that weighed the same. The aim is to have same size slices so they all cook evenly. Once he finished the slices, he processed to trim the edges of each slice (called mentori I believe). Why? A couple of reasons: To create more surface area of the kabocha to absorb flavor, to make the slices aesthetically beautiful and to remove hard edges, so when the kabocha slices cook and hit each other, the delicate ingredient won’t break apart. Finally, Yamada-san tapped the heel of his blade into the kabocha’s skin to cut nicks into it, so when the kabocha cooks and the flesh expands, the harder skin will be able to expand with it and the slice won’t crumble. Wow. Okay, I went through all this description to give you some small idea of what it means to become a top-notch Japanese chef. What amazed me about cooking with Yamada-san was how aware he was of his ingredients, to such a deep level of specificity and sensitivity. Incredible. Watching him was just breathtaking. Now, of course, at home you don’t have to get this deep, but keep in mind what Yamada-san did, and become more aware of your own ingredients. I know I have.
** Ladlefuls: Why the heck am I talking about “ladlefuls” in the ingredients list? Well, if you know how much liquid your ladle holds, it’s faster and easier to measure out ingredients using it than pouring liquids into a measuring cup! I’m all about expediency, so I know that my ladle (a shallow Japanese otama) holds 150ml or about 5fl oz of liquid. How much does your ladle hold?
*** Mirin:. Mirin is an essential condiment used in Japanese cuisine. It is a type of rice wine similar to sake, but with a lower alcohol content and higher sugar content. The sugar content is a complex carbohydrate that forms naturally during the fermentation process; no sugars are added.
**** Kombu: (by Wikipedia) (from Japanese: translit. konbu) is edible kelp from mostly the family Laminariaceae and is widely eaten in East Asia. It may also be referred to as dasima (Korean) or haidai (simplified Chinese). Kombu is sold dried (dashi konbu) or pickled in vinegar (su konbu) or as a dried shred (oboro konbu,tororo konbu or shiraga konbu). It may also be eaten fresh in sashimi. Kombu is used extensively in Japanese cuisines as one of the three main ingredients needed to make dashi, a soup stock. Konbu dashi is made by putting either whole dried or powdered kombu in cold water and heating it to near-boiling. The softened kombu is commonly eaten after cooking or is sliced and used to make tsukudani, a dish that is simmered in soy sauce and mirin. Kombu may be pickled with sweet-and-sour flavoring, cut into small strips about 5 or 6 cm long and 2 cm wide. These are often eaten as a snack with green tea. It is often included when cooking beans, putatively to add nutrients and improve their digestibility. Kombu is also used to prepare a seasoning for rice to be made into sushi.
***** “Arima sansho” by Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity: Sansho spices, also known as Japanese pepper, come from the Zanthoxylum piperitum small tree. They are said to have arrived from China during the Heian Period, and it was first mentioned in important historical documents such as the Gishi-Wajinden and Kojiki. Used to flavor many dishes, it was appreciated for its medicinal properties against heat, diarrhea and coughs. Nowadays it is common to find sansho on the market, but the most widely cultivated variety is the Asakura sansho, whereas Arima sansho is a specific variety from the Arima region, which occurs in the wild and has a different, stronger taste. There was a strong tradition in Arima region to eat the flower, fruit, leaves and skin of the spice. Arima is indeed well known for this spice, and there are many dishes called Arima sanso in Japanese cuisine, which contains sansho to give a spicy flavor. The name was given because of the strong gastronomic culture around this spice in the region, but nowadays the sansho contained in most dishes is Asakura sansho. Indeed, until the 1960s there was a culinary tradition among families in Arima to use the wild Arima sansho but it is now disappearing. One of the reasons of the disappearance of this tradition is the fact that people were very secretive about where the fruit-bearing trees were, and never spread the word outside the family. Nowadays it is difficult to find the wild tree but some species have been rediscovered on the Mount Rokko and local communities have started projects to grow the tree. The spice has been used as a basic spice in Japanese cuisine. Different parts of the fruit can be used for different culinary purposes. The young leaves are used for simple soups, for flavoring miso, and they can also be grilled. If boiled with soy sauce, the fruit, with its kind of small berry, can be perfectly paired with some sake. The unripe ones are called blue sansho and can be used for braising and pickling. In autumn, the ripe fruit can be used granulated for grilled eel. This ripe sansho is used for shichimi togarashi, a general mix of spices in Japanese cuisine. Dishes such as “Arima-braise” and “Arima-grill ” all contain sansho, which gives a slightly spicy flavor.
Recipe on https://www.japanesefoodreport.com/2010/02/simmered-kabocha-pumpkin-and-c.html
by Harris Salat
In my last post I made dashi with Chef Isao Yamada, who I cooked with recently. So now that we had some beautiful dashi, the fundamental stock of Japanese cuisine, what to do with it? Yamada-san didn’t waste any time cooking a slew of fantastic dash-based dishes, including this one, Braised Kabocha Pumpkin and Chicken. I had asked Yamada-san to teach me something about nimono, the technique of simmering. Simmering is a central cooking style in Japanese cuisine, and an incredibly versatile method to prepare fish, meat, vegetables and poultry. What I love about nimono — and all of Japanese cuisine — is how it relies on such a remarkably constrained palette of seasonings to create so many different tastes. We’re talking soy sauce (2 kinds mainly), mirin, sake, sugar, miso and dashi. Within these half-dozen ingredients, four are brewed and fermented with variants of the same koji mold (soy sauce, mirin, sake, miso), or prepared from fermented ingredients (dashi) — so the components that make up these foods (rice, soy beans, kombu, bonito, sometimes barely) have been broken down and their flavor compounds released and blossomed, in other words, their umami, their incredibly intense umami or sense of savoriness. So cooking with these seasoning means infusing foods with and irresistible flavor fundamental to human beings (breast milk is extremely rich in umami compounds, fyi). That’s why Japanese cuisine is so appealing, even though it traditionally has not relied on butter or olive oil or other fats to create flavor, like in other cuisines. With nimono, foods are simmered in umami-rich liquids so they (a) taste incredibly good, and (b) cook quickly because the flavor is already so developed in the seasonings — you don’t have to cook for hours to tease out the flavor (think French braising).