2 replies to this topic

[_john]

I recently got together the necessary items for a sous vide rig. I'm wondering what Japanese dishes would benefit from using the sous vide technique for part or all of their preparation. The one that comes to mind right away is buta no kakuni stewed pork belly. Is there any advantage to cooking beans sous vide? If there is it might be great for kuromame black beans. Onsen tamago soft boiled eggs of course. Any other ideas?

[mkayahara]

This is a really interesting question! I don't think there's any benefit to cooking beans sous vide; they're better handled in a pressure cooker. The first other idea that comes to mind is dashi: I made the dashi from Modernist Cuisine, which involves infusing the kombu sous vide at 60C for an hour.

[Brasshopper]

I think that chicken teriyaki would benefit from sous vide. The typical way my Japanese cookbook suggested is to make the teriyaki sauce by mixing sugar, mirin, saki and soy in equal quantities by volume, then placing chicken thighs in a skillet, cooking until brown, adding the sauce and simmering uncovered until the sauce reduces with the chicken in the pan. Tasty, and safe, because the thighs are well cooked, but they have the traditional overcooked chicken issue.

The sauce needs to reduce with the chicken fat until it becomes thick.

So I'm thinking you take your thighs and trim all visible fat - heck, sous vide you could use breasts. Make the teriyaki sauce in a skillet without the chicken and put it in the bags with the chicken. Cook at about 147 for a couple hours, until pasteurized and for an additional hour. Remove the chicken from the bags and crisp up the skin, either in a pan or using a torch. Transfer the sauce and any fat that has rendered off the chicken into the skillet and reduce the sauce until thick, you might have to add a little oil. Put the chicken into the skillet with the chicken and turn it so that the sauce covers the chicken completely, then serve the chicken crispy side up.

The hope is that the chicken would still be tender, while being thoroughly cooked.

Azuki red beans for bun filling are cooked for some time to convert the bean starch to sugar for sweetness. They might well benefit from a week or so in a water bath. My cookbook claims that at one point the Japanese had little access to sugar and would cook the beans until they were sweet, but most recipes I see online call for adding a lot of sugar to the beans. My thought is that you put beans and an appropriate amount of water in a bag then put them in with whatever you were cooking in the cooker for about a week, with the exception that when you were not going to use it, just turn it up to about 180. In that amount of time, they should convert if they are going to. This is just a thought.

I think that there are a lot of Japanese dishes where the food is overcooked - and they might benefit from pre-cooking the food in sous vide, just to let the food become completely cooked and tender - then you could remove the food from the bath early.

Tako (octopus) is boiled before being prepared sushi or sashimi style. Again, a maybe, it might not be so tough if not heated to a boil.

Just random thoughts, I'm not a big time Japanese cook or even Japanese. :-)