katsuobushi– tag –

Harder Than Rock Salt: Katsuobushi and the Mould That Dries a Fish From the Inside Known in English as bonito flakes, a finished block of katsuobushi rings when you strike it. Getting there takes six months, ten fires, and four generations of a fungus that thrives in conditions close to a desert — and whose entire j...

Ichiban and Niban Dashi: The Two Lives of a Handful of Shavings A professional kitchen draws two entirely different stocks from the same kombu and the same katsuobushi. The first is made in about a minute and treated as perishable. The second is boiled, pressed, and wrung dry. Neither is a lesser version of the othe...

Water hardness critically affects dashi: soft water enables full umami extraction from kombu and katsuobushi, while hard water blocks it, explaining regional Japanese flavors and why results differ abroad.

The Fish That Japan Follows Through the Year: Katsuo and the Meaning of Two Seasons No fish is more deeply embedded in the Japanese sense of season than katsuo — known in English as skipjack tuna or bonito — that arrives in spring as a lean harbinger of summer, and returns in autumn transformed, fat and rich, from i...

The Philosophy of Dashi: Japan's Invisible Foundation Japanese cooks do not make dashi. They draw it. That single verb — hiku, to pull — contains an entire philosophy of cooking, and an answer to why Japanese cuisine tastes the way it does. Set a bowl of good miso soup in front of someone who has never encountered J...