Thursday, February 17, 2011

Beyond Plain Rice--A Recipe for Shiitake Gohan

Ichi Go... One "Go" of rice in a wooden "masu" (also used for drinking sake)


Don't think I'm dissing plain rice--we eat it nearly every day, and I would hardly know how to cook any more without my Suihanki (rice cooker).  But sometimes it nice to gussy it up a little...



We had Shiitake Gohan for dinner yesterday--which everybody loves, especially the rice along the sides of the rice cooker that get a little extra brown...

If you have soy sauce, sake, mirin (sweet cooking sake), some powdered Hon Dashi (stock), 3 pieces of Aburage (fried bean curd--the light yellow stuff at bottom left in the photo), and 300g of shiitake... then you can make Shiitake Gohan!


Wash 3 "go" of rice, and set aside to drain...
Slice the aburage in half lengthwise and width wise, then into thin strips.  Pull the stems off the shiitake and slice the caps thin.

Soup:

600ml dashi (= 1 tsp dashi powder into simmering water)
3Tbls soy sauce
1Tbls each sake and mirin

Dump the rice into the rice cooker Kama (the inside thing--no idea what that's called in English).  Dump the sliced aburage and shiitake on top of the rice, and pour the warm soup on top of all that.  Mix it up a little.  close the lid and push the Cook button!




Dekiagari!  Oishiiii, ne!  Daisuki na Shiitake Gohan!


Give it a try next time you're tired of plain rice:-))  Leftovers are no problem--this rice makes great onigiri, too!

Enjoy!

Mata asobou, ne!

6 comments:

  1. that looks delicious, but i don't know where i could find half of those ingrediants. I'll have to try and find a more japanese oriented asian grocery (most of our lean towards Hmong ingrediants since MN has such a large Hmong population)

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  2. Hi Sarah! MN has a large Hmong population? Wow--I had no idea! I wonder if asking at an area Japanese restaurant would get you some information about where to go to get ingredients... I'm always a little reluctant to post recipes for dishes that require ingredients that would be hard-to-get for most people. I've been through that myself! I gave up trying to cook stuff my mom taught me to cook--can't get the right ingredients!

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  3. Thanks for another great food post! My Sanyo rice cooker manual just calls it the "inner pot". The picture looks like your pot has the inner liquid line markings like mine...I assume you shouldn't be guided by those in this case, since there are a fair amount of other solids other than the rice, so that would throw rice/liquid proportions off.

    Are there any side dishes that would normally be eaten with this?

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  4. Hi Brian! Yes--when making this, just make the soup using 600ml of hot water to which you add the powdered dashi and the soy sauce plus sake plus mirin. That's all the liquid you need for this. And you can eat anything you like with it! We had...ummm...kinpira gobo with renkon (red hot burdock root with lotus root), miso soup that I put some extra aburage in and turnips, and natto. We've also had this with sesame spinach (that I've posted a recipe for) and wakame soup... all sorts of things! It's a fairly filling kind of rice, so I find that I don't have to make a big protein dish with this. Often, natto or tofu or nira-tamago toji (did I post that yet?) is enough.

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  5. Go to united noodle in Minneapolis. They have Japanese products.

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  6. Good to know--thanks for the tip! I know that Portland (and probably also Seattle) has Uwajimaya, and San Diego has Mijiya (is that right? have I forgotten already?). The west coast, at least in bigger cities, has lots of Asian/Japanese markets. Midwest--I don't know! So, good to hear that at least Minneapolis has a place to go:-))

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