Chef Hiro Sone’s Niku-Jaga
From La Fuji Mama
Memory is a powerful tool, especially when it comes to food. I recently got a cookbook called Cooking from the Heart, a book put together by the organization Share Our Strength. The book features recipes from one hundred of the country’s well-known chefs. The book is wonderful.
Usually I love cookbooks with lots of pictures–I like to be able to see the food before I make it. This book however doesn’t have any pictures, yet it is filled with images–images that are created by the chefs’ memories. Each recipe is accompanied by the story of what the recipe means to that particular chef. The Introduction of the book, Michael Rosen explains, “recipes are simply a kind of memory: an attempt to re-create the taste of some familiar dish . . . a way of passing along a particular method for preparing pie dough or gravy . . . an experiment in recapturing some experience remembered from travels or childhood. A recipe is a memory made indelible.”
As I flipped through the book and read some of the stories, I could see Ming Tsai with his family stuffing potstickers around the ping-pong table in his house at Christmas time and I could see Gale Gand when she was a young girl baking pies with her mother, adding her initials in the bottom of the crust with a rope of dough. Reading these stories I wanted to crawl into the pages of the book and experience them for myself. This book perfectly captures why I love being a food blogger: being able to create, capture, and share these types of memories. As Rosen wrote, “Each chef’s table–whether oceans, generations, or cultures away–will link with yours as though we were all sitting down to eat at one universal table assembled from each of our individual leaves.”
The first recipe I made out of the book was Chef Hiro Sone’s recipe for niku-jaga. I was immediately drawn to it, because it is finally starting to cool down here in Southern California, and niku-jaga, which is a wonderful comforting and filling stew made of meat, potatoes, and mushrooms, is one of my favorite Japanese comfort foods.
Niku-Jaga
Recipe adapted from Chef Hiro Sone’s recipe in Cooking from the Heart: 100 Great American Chefs Share Recipes They Cherish
Makes 4 servings
2 medium onions, cut into quarters
3 pounds beef short ribs, bones removed, sliced against the grain into 1/4-inch pieces
1/2 cup soy sauce
1/3 cup mirin
1/4 cup granulated sugar
2 large Russet potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/ 1/2-inch cubes
8 large shiitake mushrooms, stemmed and quartered
1/4 cup chopped scallions, use both white and light green parts
Shichimi (Japanese spice mix)
Steamed Japanese rice, as an accompaniment
1. Place the onion and beef in a medium saucepan and add enough cold water to cover everything. Bring the water to a boil over medium-high heat. Skim off any foam or impurities that rise to the surface. Add the soy sauce, mirin, and sugar. Bring the liquid back to a boil, reduce the heat, and simmer, covered, until the meat is tender, about 30 to 35 minutes.
2. Add the potatoes and simmer until the potaotes are tender, about 20 minutes.
3. Add the mushrooms and simmer for another 5 minutes.
4. To serve, spoon the beef and vegetables into individual bowls, sprinkle with scallions, and add a bit of shichimi to taste. Ladle the broth over everything and serve with a side of steamed rice.
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Tags: beef, chefs, comfort food, cookbooks, Japanese, La Fuji Mama, memory, mirin, parent food, short ribs, soy sauce
