My wife of 20 years is from Japan, and we cook a mix of Japanese food and American food in the house.1 The key to Japanese cuisine is using good dashi (だし), or powdered fish stock. Most Japanese foods that you’ve probably tried use dashi as the base even if you don’t notice it.
Needless to say, we use dashi almost daily at home. However, getting good dashi can be tough. Sometimes, you will find dashi sold in supermarkets, but it is usually filled with MSG, and not always good quality.
Thankfully, we discovered that the Japanese brand Kayanoya has a nice online store available in the US. From the web store, we ordered a batch of regular dashi, and a batch of vegetable stock. The packages arrived a week later:
The package also comes with some nice Japanese-style wrapping paper. This sheet features several flowers: chrysanthemum (kiku), irishes (ayame), bamboo (také) and so on. I saved this paper and decided to use this as a makeshift bookcover (more on that in a later post). Anyhow, the paper is seasonal, so depending on what you order, you may receive different wrapping paper.
The dashi is terrific, and well worth the purchase, but the real surprise was the vegetable stock. It was delicious, more so than other domestic vegetable broth I’ve purchased before, and makes a really good lentil and vegetable soup.
If you are in the US, and cook Japanese food regularly, or want to make a nice vegetable soup, definitely consider ordering from the online store if you can.
1 My wife loves Korean food a lot (I do too), so we cook that too. We are lucky to have an H-Mart nearby, and a large number of Korean restaurants. I also experiment with making Indian-style curries, but I am still a long ways off from mastering it.
Gleanings in Buddha-Fields 