♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - Now, I just got back recently from a trip to Japan with our food editor, Matt Card, and I was surprised because I thought Japanese cooking was going to be super complicated.

Well, it turns out at the base level, the foundational level, it's actually fairly straightforward, and it's based on pantry ingredients.

So there are five things they use almost all the time: miso, sugar, mirin.

They have sake, and they have soy sauce.

In fact, a lot of recipes I found had a one-one-one formula.

That is sake, soy sauce, and mirin in equal parts.

And it's used as a marinade, it's used for basting, it's used as a tare sauce.

So once you see that underneath all the other recipes, the basis of it is a few really powerful pantry ingredients.

Now, the key here, United States, is you want to get good mirin, right?

And you want to get really good miso that really tastes like something, and good sake, etcetera, and soy sauce.

So if you have a pantry with those five ingredients and they're quality ingredients, you can cook hundreds of Japanese dishes just starting out with your pantry.

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♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - We're here in Japan on the coast, it's absolutely gorgeous.

And we're here at Akihiro, and they make vinegar.

Now, some of this vinegar is actually stored for up to 15 years, so it's totally different than what you and I are used to in the States.

It has depth, some of it has sweetness to it.

There's a lot of umami, they use lots of different ingredients.

Now, this is something I just learned here.

Mirin in the States has no alcohol, which means it's not fermented.

So it's basically water with sugar and salt.

So the mirin you buy at the supermarket is completely worthless, totally different than what you have here.

Japan is really about ingredients, right?

And so part of our trip here at Milk Street is to taste the ingredients and understand the ingredients.

So when we go back to Milk Street, we have a better understanding of how to get the flavors that we're experiencing here in Japan.

♪ ♪ - Japanese cooking is based on the five seasonings.

We call it sa, shi, su, se, so.

Sa is sugar, shi is shio which means salt, and the su is vinegar.

Se is miso, and so is soy sauce.

- Those sauces are based kind of to uplift the main ingredient, not to overshadow it.

And that's basically why most things are just simple sake, mirin, soyu, and dashi.

They're light enough to add flavor, of course, but to not overshadow the, the core ingredient that you're trying to serve.

- (shouts) For the daily basis, we prefer to make more simple food, limited ingredients, which is normally some protein and vegetables and then soy sauce, mirin, sake mixture.

And it's a one-one ratios.

So that's the most basic Japanese.

Simmering, cooking the, the sauce.

- For me, the two basics of Japanese, makes a Japanese taste simply is one is kombu stock.

And then my umami sauce.

That's a one-to-one portion of soy sauce and the mirin.

And then add the dried shiitake mushrooms.

So this is my homemade miso and I use for everything, really.

And if you like sweet taste, buy whiter, lighter color one.

And if you like umami, strong umami of miso, buy dark color one.

And white miso uses more koji.

So miso is made from cooked and mashed soybeans and koji-- this is rice koji-- and salt.

So only three ingredients.

Very, very simple, but different ratio makes a different type of miso.

♪ ♪ (grinding) White miso.

- If you don't have the sansho leaves?

- Right, basil, yeah.

♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ - This is the case where pesto is the most forgiving thing in the world... most of the time.

It's something green.

It could be parsley, it could be basil, it could be sansho leaves, whatever.

It's usually some sort of nuts, right?

And in this case, we're not using cheese, we're going to use something else, which is really part of the secret of this recipe.

Really changed the way I think about pestos.

You can really improvise.

Now, I rarely say that, because I say follow the recipe.

If you're making a cake, please don't improvise.

But if you're going to make a pesto, you can.

As I said, she used sansho leaves.

Now that goes great with fish.

Obviously, you're not going to get them here, so you're just going to revert to basil.

Scallions.

Toasted nuts, walnuts.

You know, you can use any kind of nuts you want.

You know, almonds are fine.

So we're just going to process this.

Let's talk about garlic in pesto for a second.

There was a recipe I made from all places Milk Street about a month ago.

And it was a parsley pesto, and it called for four cloves of garlic, raw garlic.

So I wasn't thinking, as is often the case, and I just threw it in and made it.

I couldn't eat it.

I mean, it was so overpowering, that raw garlic.

So in pestos you can put garlic in it, but only put one small clove in, please.

Because otherwise it's just gonna blow out the rest of the flavors.

Now, we have vinegar, rice wine vinegar.

We have mirin.

And then you see there's no parmesan, right?

There's no other cheese here.

This is miso, that takes the place of the cheese.

Now, cheese has a lot of umami flavor and so does miso.

So they're very similar.

Miso is actually great in pesto 'cause it gives you this foundation.

It's very creamy, which is great, and you can make it at home.

I actually make it at home.

I tasted homemade miso a couple years ago out in California, in L.A., and it was a total game changer.

Wow!

It's rich, it's earthy, it's deep.

It's totally unlike what you get in the supermarket.

So you can get a starter, you get a koji starter, you add that to soybeans, and you can get a pot and just let it sit in your own basement for two or three months and you have really good miso.

I strongly suggest you do that.

(whirring) You can actually see this is, like, super creamy because of the miso.

This is a case where adapting, you know, what I consider, most people consider to be an Italian recipe to, in this case, Japanese ingredients.

Actually, I think is, wouldn't say it's better, but it's, it's really good.

(whirring) It's interesting that the cheese and miso are really almost the same thing in terms of what they do in a recipe.

They both have deep flavor, they both have-- I can't stand the term umami, because I hear it 25 times a day at Milk Street-- but, you know, it does.

It has that really great base to it.

So if your basil or parsley, whatever green you're using, doesn't have a lot of flavor, umami will step it up and sort of take over and substitute for it if you don't have it.

I've been saying for 45 years, the Italians don't undercook their pasta.

Chewy pasta is anathema to a true Italian cook.

And I just learned, actually, I was in Calabria in southern Italy, that in southern Italy, they do tend to somewhat undercook their pasta.

And then they tend to cook it fully in the north.

So, I stand slightly corrected.

In my mind, I don't want chewy pasta, I'm sorry.

Always reserve some cooking water.

The reason is when you make the sauce, especially a pesto, you're going to add a little water to loosen it up.

You notice we didn't have that much water in the pot to start with.

The less water you cook pasta in, the more starch is going to be in that water.

Also, the more you, you move the pasta around, the more you're going to emulsify the sauce.

The miso, I think the miso actually helps bring the sauce together.

Now, the one thing you should never eat on camera is spaghetti, right?

So I, I apologize before I do this.

That is very good.

I mean, the miso really adds a lot of flavor to this.

So this is a great recipe because it tells you that it's a recipe that doesn't need a recipe.

And number two, if your basil or parsley is not first class, the miso is always there to give you a great umami depth pesto.

You don't need a recipe.

Follow ours if you like.

But it is the most, and I can't stand this term, versatile dish in the world.

You can make it in any country with almost anything.

♪ ♪ - If you make a lot of Japanese food, you, of course, are going to come across the ingredient mirin.

There's a big difference between true Japanese mirin and what we can find in the supermarket in the United States.

We rounded up every kind of mirin we could find in the Asian supermarkets, regular supermarkets and put them all to the test.

Here's what we found.

There's two different kinds of mirin.

Hon mirin, which is a traditionally produced Japanese mirin, like this bottle here, which is from Japan.

When you taste a beautiful Japanese mirin like this hon mirin, you can see the color is nice and dark and rich, it almost looks like bourbon.

It has a real earthy flavor.

And also, using mirin in dressings and glazes adds a lot of viscosity.

It can make beautiful luster on a roasted chicken or would be also great in a lot of salad dressing.

So now when you go out to the supermarket here in the United States to look for mirin, you're going to find what's referred to as aji mirin.

That is a very, very different product than, say, this beautiful bottle from Japan.

So we thought we'd take a deeper dive into mirin and did a little bit of tasting here with hon mirin and aji mirin just to see what the differences were.

We tested them plain.

We drizzled a little bit on steamed rice, and we also tried them with rice noodles.

We were looking for a few different criteria.

We wanted to check the aroma, we wanted to check the flavor.

And more importantly, even the mouthfeel.

Did it have that nice viscosity that's going to make a beautiful glaze on your tare chicken?

That one tastes like vanilla and lemon.

One's really salty.

Smoky, caramel, a little bit salty.

So in this blind tasting, of course, we had the standard.

We had a real Japanese mirin, we had an organic version, and then we had some aji mirin to taste alongside.

So what we found was that the aji mirin really just added sweetness.

Most of these list glucose syrup or corn syrup as the first ingredient, not rice syrup.

The one that came closest was an organic version, and when you flip that bottle over, you can see the actual ingredients here are organic sweet rice, shochu, which is the grain alcohol used to ferment it, a little bit of salt, and that tasted the closest to the Japanese mirin.

Now, if you can't find a good quality mirin in a supermarket, even in an Asian supermarket that has all of those ingredients you're looking for, we've got a great workaround.

It's very simple-- equal parts maple syrup and sake.

They both add a little bit to the mix here, but together, they are very close in flavor and texture to a true Japanese mirin.

So does a good mirin really matter?

Well, we made Chris's miso pesto with it, and, boy, let me tell you, it does.

Now he's also going to show you what difference it can make in a beautiful chicken with tare dish.

♪ ♪ - You know, I love to travel, but what I really love is after two or three days in a country like Japan, you start to realize that these little formulas that everyone has in the back of their head.

And in Japan, they really cook out of the pantry a lot.

Now, the three ingredients I noticed were soy sauce, mirin, and sake.

They use them, like, one-one-one equal amounts of each.

It's a marinade, it's sort of a tare sauce, you can use it for basting.

You see it in hundreds of recipes, so today we're gonna take skin-on, boneless chicken thighs and use this tare, this sauce, both as a marinade and to baste the chicken.

You get a great color on the chicken.

You get great flavor to it as well.

And it's as simple as one-one-one.

So we're gonna start with chicken thighs, skin-on, boneless.

Sometimes, you can't find them here.

They're either skin-on with bones, or they don't have any skin and no bones.

So if you have the bone-in, skin-on type, you're just gonna go like this, kind of scrape around the thigh bone.

And then we'll just have to cut it off here.

And chicken thighs, by the way, are impossible to overcook, so I use them almost exclusively now instead of the breast, which is harder.

You may know that I'm no fan of marinades.

I've been saying this for 40 years now.

This is boneless, they're very thin chicken thighs.

So a marinade actually will get in, you know, a quarter-inch or so, we will actually add flavor.

This actually makes sense to me.

But if you got a big roast, forget the marinade.

Okay, so let's go back to our basic formula.

One-one-one, we have soy sauce, third of a cup.

We have mirin, third of a cup.

Make sure you get the good stuff.

Sake.

So that's our cup-- a third, third, and a third.

Now, sugar is a very common ingredient.

So a little light brown sugar.

The kitchen's having fun with me today.

You can put dried mushrooms in this if you want.

I'm not going to do it, because it's a pain.

Like, you probably don't have them sitting around.

This should be, like, ingredients you absolutely have available.

You can do this anytime, so I don't have those sitting around my kitchen, so I'm not going to do it.

Two ginger coins.

You don't even have to smash them or anything, or... just a clove of garlic.

So we're going to cook this down for about 15 minutes.

Sometimes-- I'm really gonna make the kitchen mad now-- I just take those three ingredients, throw them together and I don't even cook it down.

So if you're really in a rush, you can use the mirin, soy sauce, and sake, equal parts.

Throw that as a marinade for the chicken, and then use it to baste later.

But this is better cause you're infusing those ingredients with extra flavor-- ginger, garlic, etcetera.

So it's been about 15 minutes.

We wanted to reduce it, obviously the flavor with the ginger and garlic.

But also it's a little thicker.

So it's going to be... make a good base.

And this is a time when you do need to strain.

So now we have maybe a third to a half a cup of sauce, something like that.

So we're going to use a quarter-cup on the base in the bottom of this baking pan.

So, skin side up.

If I can fit all these.

So we're gonna let that sit.

For just about 15 minutes.

Now, as I said, the chicken's very thin.

It will penetrate, especially the salt and the soy sauce is gonna do most of the work here.

So when I'm done here in 15 minutes, I'm gonna throw it under a broiler for, you know, 15 minutes, that seems to be the number here.

And we're gonna crisp up that skin on the outside and then we're gonna use this tare, the sauce, to baste it and put it back under the broiler to finish.

So you get beautiful, crisp, really dark skin.

Usually, you know, I'd say six or seven inches under the broiler most of the time.

This is going to be in there for 15 minutes, which is a pretty long time to broil something.

So we're putting it on the lower third rack in the oven.

♪ ♪ So this goes back under the broiler for four or five minutes.

You want to keep an eye on it so you don't end up burning the skin on top.

♪ ♪ So we're almost ready.

It does look great, I have to say.

Of course I, I made it, it looks fabulous.

So, the way it's usually served is you cut it into three pieces.

You can hear that skin, so great.

A little bit of reserved marinade.

So that is my idea of Tuesday night supper, right?

This whole thing is going to take maybe half an hour.

It's delicious.

Something even kids might like.

Maybe not my kids, but some kids will like it.

Mm.

So if you're sick and tired of baked chicken parts which, growing up, I had too much of that, this is a way to take skin-on, bone-out, boneless chicken thighs and then within half an hour, turn out, like, fabulous chicken.

So thanks to Japanese home cooking and cooking out of your pantry, you can take a common ingredient and turn it into something I think is, like, the best way to cook chicken.

♪ ♪ - Perhaps the most charming afternoon I had on the recent trip we took to Japan was with Nobu and Yuko Namiki at their tiny jewel box of a restaurant in a Tokyo suburb.

They taught us a variety of very simple dishes.

And one of my favorites was this Hokkaido-style dish.

It's called chan chan yaki and it is really just salmon with a very simple butter soy sauce over vegetables.

There's nothing finicky about it.

This is not like searing salmon on the stovetop that it overcooks in a second.

It's just perfectly cooked, very moist, very juicy, very flavorful salmon atop these vegetables with this gorgeous, simple sauce.

There is magic when you combine butter and soy products.

Soy products tend to have a fair amount of sodium in it.

So we're not going to overseason the fish, we're just going to season it very lightly with salt to start.

And here's one of my favorite parts.

We're going to sprinkle it with white pepper.

And the vegetables for this dish are really simple.

We're going with cabbage, shiitake mushrooms, and these really cute beech mushrooms.

Now, beech mushrooms are also called shimeji mushrooms, and they have great flavor, nice texture that works really well with the cabbage.

We're going to add these whole.

It's about a three-and-a-half- ounce package.

You can find these at most supermarkets.

So, shiitake mushrooms, very tender caps, but the stems are very tough.

So I went ahead, I took the stems off.

We're going to go ahead and we're going to cut these shiitake mushroom caps into quarter-inch-thick strips.

And let's add those shimeji.

Now, we don't have to cut the shimejis, but we do want to trim the bottom.

For cabbage, I'm going to cut it in quarters.

You really don't want to eat that thick root end.

So I'm going to go ahead and cut that out and then I will cut the rest of the cabbage into ribbons.

So at this point, I can just go and cut it crosswise into strips.

♪ ♪ What we're going to do, like our salmon, is we're going to go ahead and salt it, and what salting is going to do, it's going to help draw out moisture, which means it's going to cook faster once it's in the oven.

It's also going to prompt steam to create the juices necessary to cook the salmon.

So I'm really massaging it a bit.

And now that I've salted the cabbage and mushrooms, I'm going to add about five scallions sliced one-inch thick.

Now, I'm gonna let the salted veggie mix sit for about 15 minutes as the oven preheats.

So it's been about 15 minutes.

And it's amazing, you really do see a change in the texture of the vegetables.

They're softening, they've lost some volume.

Before we can assemble our packets of beautiful salmon, we need to make our sauce.

Now, our sauce is really, really simple.

And, of course, it's based on those core flavors of the Japanese palate-- soy, mirin, sake, and miso.

so we have about two tablespoons of soy sauce.

We have a tablespoon of brown sugar, and then we have two tablespoons of mirin.

And two tablespoons of sake.

And lastly, we're gonna add our miso, and we're gonna use this white miso, otherwise known as shiro miso.

So something multiple people said to us on the last trip to Japan was that you use the miso from your hometown or you use the miso your mother cooked with.

So I love how these memories of flavors really stick with us.

I love that these professional chefs were telling us that they use their mother's miso.

So we have all our components done.

We have our sauce, we have our salt-massaged vegetables, we have our salt-and-white- pepper-seasoned fish.

Let's go ahead and assemble our packets and get them into the oven.

And what we're going to do is really, really simple here.

We're going to divide this vegetable mixture.

We're gonna add about two-and-a- half tablespoons of sauce, and we're gonna fold up the outside to meet in the middle.

So as you can see, I didn't crimp the top down all the way to the fish.

I left a little headroom for air circulation.

If you crimp it down tight, it's not gonna cook as effectively because the air isn't circulating.

So left some room.

Then can just seal that up.

I'm gonna pinch the edges, sealed up tight with all those really delicious vegetables and that really umami-rich sauce-- Chris is gonna scream if he hears "umami" again, but he's gonna hear it from me right now.

This is not origami-- I failed origami.

I'm miserable at it.

So this is perfect for me.

We've got our four portions ready to go.

It's gonna be the 325 oven, middle rack, and we're gonna cook it for 25 to 30 minutes.

Now, it seems like a long time for fish, right?

I mean, a lot of times we cook fish, you know, five, eight minutes.

But it's such a gentle cooking method.

It really preserves the moisture of the fish, keeps everything very tender.

So I'm going to go ahead and put these in the oven.

Oh, wow.

That smells amazing.

You can smell the soy and the miso and the fish and those mushrooms.

But what we're going to do, we're going to open the packets up, and we're gonna chuck in a cube of butter.

So why didn't we add the butter at the beginning?

Because we want that freshly melted butter, and really the delicate dairy flavor and the way that's going to combine with everything and create this beautiful sauce.

So while I'm waiting for the butter to melt on the salmon, I'm going to slice up some scallions for garnish.

♪ ♪ Oh, come on!

That looks amazing.

Let's crack the salmon.

And it's just beautifully flaky and very moist.

So, I absolutely love this dish, and I get to remember my experience at Kermis that lovely afternoon with Nobu and Yuko.

The details are really paid attention to and it's not fancy cooking, it's not complicated cooking, it's just cooking done right that any of us can do at home.

You can get this recipe and all the recipes from this season of Milk Street at MilkStreetTV.com.

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