Typicall Japanese Ingredients - Short Guide to Japanese Cooking

The Japanese cuisine is known for its great selection of ingredients. However, Westerners often have a hard time to distinguish them due to their names. Listed below are the typical ingredients which you can find in every Japanese recipe.

• Soy sauce (shoyu) – In various Asian recipes, soy sauce is used as a substitute for salt. It is available in light-dark, reduced-salt and other varieties which are flavoured.
• Rice vinegar – Compared to wine vinegar, this is way sweeter and preferred by Westerners for general use.
• Mirin – Also known as aji-mirin. This is a syrupy and sweet wine from sake. In Western cooking, it’s used the same way as honey. Still, Mirin is runnier and possesses its very own distinct taste.
• Dashi – A soup stock which is created from bonito flakes. This is a major ingredient for many Japanese sauces and soups, including miso soup. It’s also available in powdered form.
• Japanese rice (called kome if uncooked and gohan if cooked) – It is available in brown or white, short-grained and very sticky. White rice is usually eaten by most Japanese; brown rice is famously known as health food.
• Miso – A soybean paste which has been fermented giving distinct flavour to the miso soup. It’s also used in various Japanese cuisines ranging from salad to dips to roasts. Miso is known for its very salty characteristic. It’s available in pale yellow or chocolate-brown shade. The sodium content gets higher as the miso gets darker. Lighter misos or white miso are known as shiro-miso; darker types or red miso is known as aka-miso.
• Nori – Nori seaweed sheets are quite thin. They are commonly used to wrap crackers, onigiri and sushi among other things. It comes in two forms, untoasted and toasted.
• Konbu/Kombu – A type of kelp usually used to give flavour to sauces and broths. It typically looks like a dried banana leaf.
• Daikon – Also known as Japanese radish. It is quite essential in every Japanese cooking and can be eaten either cooked or raw.
• Fish sauce – Heavily used in most Southeast Asian cuisine. It is a brown liquid with very strong flavour.
• Gyoza – Traditionally filled with vegetables and pork but also available in other flavours.
• Inari-no-moto – Small fried tofu pita pouches which are canned in soy sauce or mirin syrup. This is very important for making inari-zushi.
• MSG (aji-no-moto) – Japanese food is known to be full of MSG. It is a white, grainy powder sold in shaker cans or bags.
• Oden – Japanese fried cakes of fish-paste. The shapes range from little nuggets to round tubes to flat sheets. They come in various shades of tan.
• Pickles (tsukemono) – Japanese pickles are different from American pickles. Pickles are very important to every Japanese diet.
• Raw fish (sashimi) – Bear in mind not to purchase just any kind of raw fish. Raw fish which is sushi-grade is very fresh and has been checked to be sure that it’s free from parasite. There are fishes which would never be parasite-free, therefore, are not eaten raw (an example for this is the catfish).
• Seafood balls – Seafood paste which has been cooked and created into balls. They have different varieties, shrimp, cuttlefish and fish.
• Sesame oil – Oil with strong flavour which is used commonly as a seasoning. It’s not advisable to use this for frying though.
• Ramen – A kind of Japanese noodles.
• Somen – Very fine noodles which are created from wheat flour. It is a typical summer dish usually eaten cold.
• Tofu – White soybean blocks. It comes in many consistencies, from silky tofus to hard tofus.
• Udon – Thick noodles which are created out of buckwheat. It can be purchased dry in packages, or moist and placed in tightly-sealed packages as an instant meal.
• Wakame – A frilled and thin type of seaweed commonly used in salads and soups. It’s quite hard to find this outside Japanese groceries.
• Wasabi - It’s the perfect pair for sushi. It comes in a bright and candylike shade of green paste which has a very strong flavour.

Some Japanese cuisines are done with special twists. Adding tamarind is one of this. Tamarind is a reddish-brown and curved pod of seeds from a tropical tree which holds many big seeds. It has a dark-brown, sticky and moist flesh which varies from being very sour to very sweet. Many recipes call for this because with its sour characteristic, it gives special flavor to many recipes.