Cold brewed dashi

[_john]

Recently I have been experimenting with a cold brew method of making dashi. I don't know if this is an already known method or not. I got the idea from the Toddy cold brew coffee method. I put the katsuobushi and kombu in a large pitcher and fill it with water and stick it in the refrigerator. I don't filter anything out unless I am pouring it for use. It makes a sort of concentrated dashi that I can use little by little. One liter lasts me about a week. I will measure how much raw ingredients I use next time I make it. The flavor is pretty good in my opinion. Has anyone else tried this?

[shellfishfiend]

I've never tried it that way but would love to. I eat miso soup for lunch often and would love having a dashi supply in the refrigerator. Let us know when you have the amounts of raw ingredients.

[origamicrane]

have a look at the sous vide thread in the cooking forum

someone made dashi by vaccum packing kombu and bonito flakes into a sealed bag with water.

Then poached the bag at 80C to extract the most flavour but with no sliminess.

[smallworld]

What a great idea. I've heard of making kombu dashi this way; the technique is called "mizu dashi". I don't know if there is any reason why it's only used for kombu dashi, but maybe spoilage is an issue? Even with kombu alone I think one week would be pushing it, and wouldn't most of the flavour be extracted after a day or two anyway?

I think I'll give this a try (as soon as I can make room in my fridge) but take out the kombu and katsuobushi after a few days. If it works I will buy myself one of those mizu dashi ice tea makers.

[Hiroyuki]

No, I haven't. As for kombu, niboshi, and shiitake, cold brewing is nothing new, as described here (Japanese only).

In the Kaiseki thread that I started, I posted about a non-boil, non-squeeze method of brewing. Have you checked it out?

I wonder if you use tap water directly without boiling it first.

As I become more serious about cooking, I can't help thinking that water is one of the most important ingredients of a dish. Fortunately, I found that the water in my area is very soft (average hardness of 16). As I mentioned in the thread above, you can't extract umami components from kombu if the water is hard. Do you know how soft your water is?

[BarbaraY]

In the Kaiseki book author Murata stresses the importance of soft water. My water is very, very hard so I have yet to make cold brewed dashi even though I have all the components. I'm still using dashi powder.

[_john]

Osaka seems to have fairly soft water. I don't boil the water before I use it, just straight out of the tap. I agree that water is very important in cooking but I'm not sure what is the best type of water for different situations. I have been continuing my experiments and I have some measurements. For katsuo dashi I use 30g of thick cut katsuo and 8g of konbu for 1 liter of water. for niboshi dashi I used 45g of niboshi and 8g of konbu for 1 liter. I have now been taking out the konbu after the first night. I don't think the flavor improves by leaving in the materials longer than the second night so you can strain them out if you want. Right now I'm working on my sanuki udon recipe so here is a picture of my niboshi dashi and one tama not yet rolled into noodles. Is there an udon thread?

[helenjp]

noodle (m,enrui) topic

I was just coming looking for this topic when John revived it!

It's not really worth making cold dashi for more than 2 people, as it takes up room in the fridge, but it's excellent for one or two people. As Hiroyuki says, it's a method that has been used for a while.

It works best for katsuo dashi, and fairly well for niboshi (though they really need heat to release full flavor), but dashi with a lot of kombu tends to spoil very quickly.