Curry Rice: Not Very Pornographic, but Japanese

I’m following up from my previous post in which I intended to post my tried-and-true recipe for Japanese curry but timed out for ranting.

Japan, as anyone with connections knows, has a long and illustrious gastronomic tradition reaching into its antiquity. A friend of mine moved there some years back and works as a game designer. He observed even non-foodies (I don’t love that word) he knows in Japan seem to engage in highly nuanced discussions about food. In 2010, Michelin released its Red Guide of Japan. Michelin awarded more stars there than anywhere else in the world: even major seats of western gastronomy. Consider too that not only is Japan a small country, its geography is such that its population is cluster in just a handful of major population centers. And you know what?

Japanese people complained.

They said Michelin missed out on the real gems. They said they awarded multiple stars to restaurants that weren’t really that big of a deal. They said a lot of things.* This is a culture that doesn’t screw around with its food, and Japanese curry rice remains one of its most popular dishes**

So what makes Japanese curry rice so special?

Hard to say. Honest to goodness.

A little background. Japanese curry rice is a pretty old dish in Japan, with roots in the Meiji era, shortly after opening trade with the west. Let’s examine the ingredients of a leading brand of curry sauce mix marketed in the U.S.:

Wheat flour, edible oil, salt, sugar, curry powder, spices, food color, monosodioum glutamate, malic acid, sodium guanylate, disodium inosinate.

Essentially just flour, oil, and seasoning. With the exception of malic acid and the flavor enhancers, nothing, in fact, one wouldn’t find in a typical Western kitchen. The above paste is dissolved into water simmered with meat and vegetables. As you can see. Curry rice is essentially a Western stew thickened with a roux. Not something you’ll find in a Betty Crocker Cookbook, is it? And certainly not anything like the curry we would eat in the West. We just don’t cook stuff like this anymore. But British sailors did a hundred and fifty years ago. It’s a simple, homespun stew seasoned with ready-made curry powder–maybe or maybe not to mask pungency of subprime meat.

That’s right. Japanese curry is a page out of culinary anthropology. Like an alligator,a coelacanth, a Lincoln Town Car: a dish that’s remain unchanged as the world has moved on. It is, in a country with more Michelin stars than anywhere else in the world, a dish invented by dirtbag seafarers to stave off scurvy.

I love it. Love it, love it, love it.

So on to the recipe. As I’ve written, you can find bricks of “curry roux” in most American grocery stores these days, but again, there’s not a lot in the commercial curry roux you don’t already have in your kitchen. In place of the malic acid and sugar in the store-bought stuff, we’re using grated apple. My first curry recipe came from a Japanese-language cookbook whose name I have trouble recalling–Something like “Mama’s 1000 Recipe Cookbook.” I use chicken, as did that recipe; thighs in particular. They’re not only one of the cheapest meats around, but also just about impossible to screw up. Variations will follow after the recipe.

Basic Japanese Curry Rice

Ingredients:

(serves 2-3)

½ to 3/4 lb. chicken, cubed

1 medium carrot, sliced into half-inch rounds

1 medium potato, coarsely diced

1 medium onion, coarsely diced

1 clove garlic, minced

1 medium apple (such as a fuji), grated or shredded

1 oz. (2 tablespoons) butter

1 oz. (about 3 ½ tablespoons) all-purpose flour (short-patent works best as a thickener)

¼ tsp. salt plus more to taste

1 tablespoon curry powder (more to taste)

2 cups broth, stock, or water (if using water, more salt may be needed)

Cooking oil

Pepper to taste

My mise-en-place, clockwise from top right: diced vegetables, cubed chicken, minced garlic, grated apple, home-made potholders, my pay stub, and a gingerbread house our cats f*cked up.

Directions:

Heat a lightly-oiled pan to medium-high heat until the oil is almost smoking.  Season the meat cubes with salt and pepper and sauté until browned but not necessarily cooked through.  Remove from heat and reserve.  Reduce heat to medium.

Melt the butter in the pan.  Add the flour and curry powder and stir until it forms a paste.  Cook this mixture, stirring frequently until it begins to brown.  Add the garlic and cook for another minute or two, until fragrant.  Add remaining vegetables, browned meat, and grated or shredded apple.  Add the broth, stock or water, salt, and pepper and stir until the butter and flour are incorporated.  Increase heat to high and bring to a boil.  Once it has come to a boil, reduce heat to low and cook covered for 20-30 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the meat and vegetables are tender. The sauce should be about the consistency of a gravy. Adjust seasoning to taste.

Serve with white rice.  May be garnished with beni shoga or other Japanese pickle.

Notes:

More heat can be achieved by adding cayenne pepper or increasing the amount of curry powder.

Japanese curry is a very versatile dish. Beef. pork, or seafood may be used instead of the chicken. Beef is more stereotypical of an authentic curry in fact. For cubed beef chuck, do not add the carrots, onion, and potato immediately to the pan. Instead, braise it covered with the roux and  broth for about an hour. Add the remainder of the vegetables for the last half-hour of cooking.

Other vegetables may be used–the recipe upon which this one was based called for minced carrots, celery, and onion. I’m also a fan or parsnips and sweet potato in curry.

Leftover curry makes a great sauce for breaded, fried cutlet (katsu curry; カツカレー)

• Optional ingredients can be added for a more complex taste:

• About ¼ cup wine or coffee (the wine should be allowed to boil down before adding the broth)
• Several dashes of Worchestershire sauce
• Five-spice powder
• ¼-inch slice of fresh ginger, peeled and minced
• demi-glace
• 1 to 3 teaspoons tomato paste

* I’m over-simplifying. A lot of people criticized Michelin. Here is a longer discussion from the Wall Street Journal.

** For a relatively brief, but more detailed account of the history and popularity of Japanese Curry rice, see this page on the Kikkoman Corporation website.

Flirting with Fire

Dry-cooked string beans are kind of a bitch unless you’re willing to fry and believe me, I’ve tried. They require pre-cooking. Here’s the problem with blanching in boiling water or steaming: the string beans become water-logged and the water leaches out some of their green-beany flavor. Only when deep-fried or pan-fried does the flavor properly concentrate.

And here’s my problem. I’m scared to death of deep-frying. Why? Well, I’m in the human services and going as far back as my fledgling days working in group homes, I’ve had to be CPR and First Aid certified through the American Red Cross.

Which means I’ve had to watch a video of some lady in a restaurant dipping her hand in a deep fryer. A lot. Sure, it’s not real.  Still it can mess with you. Add to it the fact my mother never deep-fried much at home and is it wrong that a half-gallon of hot oil freaks the hell out of me? Feedback welcome.

I’ve always loved Chinese cooking and married into a Chinese (Taiwanese to be exact) family. As such, we have a lot of Chinese ingredients about the house. My mother is from the old Southern school of cookery with two defining principles:

1. It needs cured, fatty pork.
2. It’s not done yet. It will probably never be done, but you have to do the best you can.

Fortunately for my mother: if I thought vegetables were a throwaway afterthought, I loves me some bacon. I could spend hours extolling the virtues of pork fat, but it’s been done, so I will spare you, reader. This time.

My mother-in-law hails from Taiwan. She’s the one who taught me how great simple, fuss-free vegetables could be. Nearly every big family meal on that side of the family is incomplete without a green vegetable and without fail, they’re always really, really good. Our families get along well and gather together for the major American holidays. My mother loves my mother-in-law’s vegetables and always requests she cook something like green beans. She has a simple method for stir-fried vegetables: precook and then stir-fry with crushed garlic and salt. That’s it. My mother still looks visibly bemused when we talk about this.

Not long ago, we had to scrap our dying teflon wok. It was scratched up pretty bad. It was also killing us slowly. That’s beside the point. I decided to pick up a new carbon steel wok and a copy of Grace Young’s Breath of a Wok. Amazing book about Southern Chinese culinary culture. Young writes about the Cantonese concept of wok hay: the elusive flavor inherent in good sir-fry. It’s the sort of smoky, concentrated, mouth-filling flavor when I stir-fry is done just right. Central to this is cooking over high heat. Not medium. Not medium-high, but high, high heat. The kind of heat that scorches eyebrows. She points out that finer restaurants in Hong Kong stir fry with compressed gas burners at hundreds of thousands of BTU’s: more like F-14 afterburners than the little metal coils of home kitchens.

The best green beans I’ve ever made weren’t deep-fried. No, I hardly do that. They did catch on fire though. I was cooking on a high-output Vulcan range at work–set it to high, and sort of forgot about it for five minutes or so. the oil ignited when I dropped in the blanched green beans. I tossed them around for about thirty seconds, doing my best not to singe said eyebrows, and then dropped them on a plate. When I served them, our administrative assistant was curious–what had a I added to give them such a rich, complex flavor?

Salt. A little bit of fire.

I don’t deep fry a lot, but I’m faced with incontrovertible evidence that some of the best food can be made when one flirts with fire without being burned.

I am not actually a professional cook, though I did use a professional range in my last job. And no, Phenix Nash is not, in fact, my real name. I love my day job dearly, but I need some space to explore my creative life. That’s why I decided to start this blog. I’m an avid reader and writer, an extraordinarily over-ambitious home-cook, an owner of a pair of strung-out cats, a dedicated coffee-drinker, sci-fi and fantasy geek, and all-around hot mess.

This past Thanksgiving, we hosted my parents and my in-laws. I bought a delicious bronze turkey from Whole Foods, but most of my attention went into planning the green beans. I made them as an homage–a compromise of sorts–to both of my families. Without further ado:

Dry-Fried Green Beans with Tasso Ham

Ingredients:

1 lb. green beans, trimmed

4 oz. tasso ham, chopped into ¼-inch dice

8 cloves garlic, thinly slivered

4 scallions, thinly sliced

¼ teaspoon salt

Cooking oil

Directions:

Pan-fry or deep fry green beans until cooked through and their skins are puckery. Drain oil and whipe dry.

Increase heat to high. Add 1 to 2 tablespoons of oi. Add the tasso and stir-fry until browned and crisp. Add garlic and scallions. Stir-fry until aromatic, less than a minute. Add pre-cooked green beans and salt. Stir-fry about a minute and serve.

Green beans with homemade tasso ham.