Customer Reviews

Favorite Japanese Dishes (Quick & Easy)

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"Favorite Japanese Dishes" is the second "Quick and Easy" cookbook that I have bought, and I remain impressed with the series. There is a good variety of dishes, and very simple instructions for cooking.

This one focuses on five fundamental styles of Japanese cooking, basically what a Japanese family would eat at home on a day-to-day basis. Shabu-shabu are generally meat dishes cooked in a metal hot pot, Sukiyaki is both meat and seafood cooked in either a metal or a ceramic nabe pot. Tempura is battered and fried...well anything, really. Teppan-yaki is thin slices of meat and vegetables cooked on a metal hot plate. Teriyaki is a slow style of cooking fish and meats that produces a distinctive taste.

Shabu-shabu, Sukiyaki and Teppan-yaki are all very social means of cooking, where everyone sits around a bubbling pot or hot plate and cooks their own meal at a table. They are really great ways to have a dinner party, even better in the winter when you can huddle around a hot dish.

Each style has a good sample of different ingredients using the same method. There is typically a beef dish, a pork dish, a chicken dish and a seafood dish. While I haven't tried everything, the Seafood sukiyaki is amazing, as is the salmon teriyaki.

"Favorite Japanese Dishes" is probably not a very good cookbook for vegetarians, as almost all of the dishes have meat or seafood of some sort. The exception is tempura, which can be cooked with pretty much anything.

This is a very nice publication from the excellent 'Quick and Easy' series. The book focuses on just 5 meals: Shabu-Shabu, Sukiyaki, Tempura, Teppan-Yaki and Teriyaki, but it provides a lot of variations on each. In particular, the Tempura section is one of the best and most usefully illustrated coverages of the topic I have seen anywhere. The book may be a bit too specialized to be a first book for beginners, but the way it presents techniques will make it easy for even novices to follow.