Latest news with #SonokoSakai
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Lamb chops with lemongrass and cumin are a feast for the senses
This column comes from the Eat Voraciously newsletter. Sign up here to get one weeknight dinner recipe, tips for substitutions, techniques and more in your inbox Monday through Thursday. 'During the summers in Kamakura, the part of Japan where I grew up in, my grandmother would bring out a round cast-iron griddle to cook Genghis Khan Mongolian barbecue and invite the neighbors,' Sonoko Sakai writes in her cookbook 'Wafu Cooking,' a collection of recipes from around the world adapted to use Japanese ingredients or techniques. It's a style of cooking known as wafu.
Japan Times
12-04-2025
- General
- Japan Times
As rice prices rise, a bit of tea adds needed luxury
Despite sounding similar, the Japanese words "cha" (tea) and "chāhan" (fried rice) are etymologically unconnected. What if we were to combine them though? Frying rice is a way to add flavor and color to the white grains, but if we boil our rice in tea first, all we need to do is add seasoning. Various varieties of tea can work, but since I'm currently cutting down on caffeine, I was drawn to infusing my rice with rooibos. When it comes to frying, a quality cooking vessel makes a world of difference. On that subject, I highly recommend J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's bestselling book 'The Wok: Recipes and Techniques.' It spurred my household to invest in a carbon steel chūka-nabe (literally, 'Chinese pot' as it is known in Japanese). For a dish as simple as this, however, any heavy, heat-conductive, nonstick pan will do, and even baking your rice in the oven can be an alternative way to achieve delectable results. By adding your favorite fillers, this dish can be made as elaborate as you like and for any meal of the day. Use a rice cooker if you have one, or, if you prefer the stovetop, the method below is loosely adapted from Sonoko Sakai's 'Wafu Cooking: Everyday Recipes with Japanese Style.' Serves 2-4 Cook time: 45 minutes This dish is infinitely customizeable with your favorite toppings and different varieties of tea. | SIMON DALY Ingredients: 400 milliliters tea 300 grams rice 4 eggs 25 grams butter (or oil) 2 small spring onions Salt and pepper Directions: 1. Boil 400 milliliters of water and add enough of your favorite tea to make 2 cups. Brew for the recommended time, drain out the leaves and cool. 2. Wash your uncooked rice until the water runs clear, then drain completely. Place the rice either in a rice cooker with the cold tea and cook according to directions, or place the rice in a small pot to soak in the cold tea for at least 30 minutes. 3. If using a rice cooker, just wait. If using a pot, set it to medium heat and leave it uncovered. Bring it to a vigorous boil, then cover with a tight-fitting lid and turn the heat to as low as possible to simmer for 15 minutes. Without peeking under the lid, remove the pot from the stove and leave to rest and steam for a further 15 minutes. 4. Spread the cooked rice out on a baking tray, fluffing lightly, and leave to cool. If time permits, place the uncovered baking tray in the refrigerator overnight. 5. Crack your eggs into a bowl, mix and preheat a wok or frying pan. Add 10 grams of butter to your cooking vessel and scramble the eggs. Once fully cooked, set aside. 6. Reheat the wok and add the remaining butter and rice to pan-fry rice until lightly crisped and fragrant. 7. Add the scrambled eggs back into the rice, seasoning with salt and pepper and an extra knob of butter if you're feeling decadent. Spoon into a serving dish and top with finely sliced spring onions.
New York Times
19-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
The Surefire Way to Cook Perfect Rice (Without a Rice Cooker)
To hear the cook, writer and teacher Sonoko Sakai tell it, '1955 is the year my mother was liberated.' Several things happened that year: Sakai was born, but more liberating still for her mother? The birth of the first home rice cooker as we know it (automatic, electric). Recipe: Basic White Rice The son of a similarly 'liberated' Korean woman, I was raised on rice-cooker rice, the chirping bells and whistles of the cooker signaling dinnertime. Both elemental and overlooked, rice was the main starch in our house, one of the first things I learned to cook as a child, but it wasn't until I started making it on the stovetop that I really understood how it cooks, and how much better it could taste. I'm convinced that it's the fire under the pot that produces a flavor worth striving for, something a rice cooker can't achieve. Eating a bowl of perfect stovetop white rice — or at least rice that's more perfect than you've ever had it — is like wearing glasses for the first time. Everything comes into focus: grains that are shiny, fluffy and tender, yet somehow still individual, sticky and standing. Grains that are ready to take flight, the dandelion fuzz of carbohydrates. Sakai's recipe, from her latest cookbook, 'Wafu Cooking,' confirmed for me that you don't need a fancy rice cooker to make brilliant rice. 'All you need,' she said to me reassuringly over the phone, 'is a saucepan with a heavy bottom and lid.' The rest is technique: a brief rinse (no need to wait for the water to run clear), a longer soak, a shorter cook and two separate but successive rests — before and after the rice is fluffed. 'Don't mash it,' Sakai said of the fluffing stage. 'It's like a pillow.' Note that most of this time is inactive. I say this before I tell you: It takes one hour to make flawless white rice. Few recipes change my mind about the fundamentals of my own cooking. But as Sakai said, 'Rice is sacred.' Her recipe, which considers each grain, taught me that the best way to cook rice is to first understand the crop. Grains grown in water can take on water. You can't really oversoak them, she said, because they take the water they need and leave the rest. That's why Japanese home cooks rinse and soak their rice overnight: to speed up the process for the morning, when rice is served with leftovers from the night before — a fish, an egg, a soup, a vegetable. I love Sakai's rice topped with tuna mayo or crispy bacon and mirin-basted eggs. Dal and rice, a complete protein, is a regular staple on my table. Have you ever seasoned fresh sushi rice with a little salt, sugar and rice vinegar? Wrap scoops of that with crisp sheets of nori, maybe even sneak a sliver of avocado or crab in there, and relish in your own makeshift California rolls. Did you even know that you could do that, that you could build a life around rice? One of the best Christmas gifts I ever received was a bag of Hokkaido Nanatsuboshi white rice from my friend Junnan. According to the bag, it was milled just days earlier. I had never eaten rice that fresh before. I made a pot one night, and again another night, and a few times more until all of it was gone, and I was sad. The gift of rice that fresh — good rice — is worth more than a Wagyu steak or a diamond engagement ring in my book. And it's not that you need just-milled heritage rice flown in from Japan to enjoy that wealth: Whatever medium- or short-grain rice you can find at the store works. If you can maximize its character — individual grains that each want to be loved, celebrated and steamed until soft — a world of quiet, everyday joy may open up for you.
