Customer Reviews

Dashi and Umami

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I absolutely (please excuse my spelling, i'm spanish) loved this book, not only the content, the book in itself is a beautyful object, printed with care, and the pictures are incredibly beautyful.
The 1st part has 4 different subchapters where 4 chefs of great japanese restaurants explain how they make dashi and produce recepies with dashi for each of the 4 seasons of the year.
after that there is a comprehensive explanation on each of the ingredients used for dashi and on umami's taste perception.

to make a long story short, beautiful and perfect in content. and for a passionate lover of japanese cuisine.

hope you find this interesting
regards,
[...]

I lived in Japan for a few years in the early sixties. I was a kid and my father was teaching at a university there. Food then was very traditional, few western foods were available, even in Tokyo. What is now thought of as Japanese food: tempura, sukiyaki and sashimi, were rarely prepared in home kitchens and were only found in restaurants. In homes, in ryokan and country-side restaurants the cuisine was very different, more seasonal and with less meat. Dishes had few ingredients but very specific, painstaking cooking techniques. Dashi and Umami nearly perfectly describes this cuisine and, in the process, strips Japanese food to its bare essentials. If the heart of French cuisine is its sauces and the basis of chinese food lies in the principal of ying-yang, dashi, the ubiquitous kelp broth, is the essence of Japanese cooking.
This wonderful book is a great corollary for its subject: simple yet deep. Graphically it is warm, yet minimal. The beautiful photographs tell exactly what you need to know but no more. Though it has only thirty-odd recipes, they are organized seasonally, precisely chosen to illustrate the concept of umami. A couple of the recipes I cook often. They remind me of my grandmother, who ran a restaurant in the Japanese ghetto of downtown Honolulu before WW2. She was from Wakayama and cooked in a regional, provincial style. Like this book, her food was odd, slightly exotic but ultimately hearty, satisfying and full of umami.

The book traces the discovery of umami by professor Kikunae Ikeda and the creation of monosodium glutamate, but that is only a tiny bit of Dashi and Umami.

This book includes the contributions of many star chefs, including Takashi Tamura (of Tsukiji Tamura), Eiichi Takahashi (Hyotei), Kunio Tokuoka (Kyoto Kitcho) and Yoshihiro Murata (Kikunoi). Photos of their kaiseki cuisine make this a handsome coffee table book, and students of Japanese cuisine will be impressed with the depth of information on umami-rich ingredients like kombu, katsuobushi, niboshi, and shiitake, all of which are essential in making dashi. Even water around the world is ranked from soft to hard--a hot topic for kaiseki chefs who have traveled the globe.

Umami has been covered in many other books, and not always well, but this work captures the essence and explains it without missing any details. The tutorials on dashi may change the way you make this staple at home. The end of the book includes simple home recipes that are easy to incorporate into your repertoire.