Japanese Recipes25 authentic family recipes

Japanese food is the opposite of Indian food in almost every way — where Indian cooking layers spices, Japanese cooking strips them away; where Indian cooking simmers for hours, Japanese cooking flash-cooks or eats raw. What both cuisines share is a fanatic attention to ingredient quality and a clear-eyed understanding that the cook's job is to get out of the way.

The Japanese pantry runs on a small set of high-leverage ingredients: dashi (the stock that underlies almost everything), soy sauce, mirin, sake, rice vinegar, miso, and the rice itself, which is treated as a primary ingredient rather than a starch on the side. Aromatic accents come from ginger, scallion, shiso, and yuzu, and the fat is minimal — usually sesame oil or vegetable oil for high-heat work.

Our Japanese recipes cover the everyday (chicken katsu, miso soup, onigiri, gyudon) and the slightly more ambitious (sushi rolls, tempura, ramen, okonomiyaki). The rice handling is deliberate — Japanese rice is short-grain and sticky, and using basmati instead won't get you to the same place. We've called that out in every recipe.