IT SEEMS IT WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO that if you wanted to eat Japanese food you had to pretty much go to Japan. Then Michelin stars rained down on Tokyo and suddenly you couldn’t turn a corner without tripping over some hipster joint with a menu influenced by the Land of the Rising Sun, and every other cooking show on TV was urging us to fill our larders with panko bread crumbs and sake. But we’re here to tell you something sunshine – you don’t have to sell the farm for wagyu beef or pay a fortune for imported wasabi to bring some Japanese flavours to your summer BBQ. Rika Fukushima, Tokyo native and Bay resident, is here to show you that getting Japanesey is actually easy peasy.
One of the biggest misconceptions about Japanese food is that it is complicated. Yes, some of our dishes require ninja-level cooking skills to master – take fugu, or puffer fish, for example; mess that one up and your dinner guests die in agony from tetrodotoxin poisoning! – but for the most part Japanese cuisine is all about maximising the inherent flavours of seasonal ingredients. No super heavy cream sauces, no hefty seasoning, just good honest flavours making friends with one another and brought to life with a little help from the chef.
So first up for a summer Japanese BBQ is a super simple entrée that was a favourite of mine back home in Tokyo; it looks fantastic – and we all eat with our eyes as well as our mouths – anyone can make it, and it tastes great. Just cut a ripe avocado in half, remove the stone and fill the cavity with smoked salmon, a splash of soy sauce and garnish with a sprinkle of white sesame seeds. You can easily skip the sesame seeds, and substituting tinned salmon or tuna will make it popular with the kids, but you gotta have the soy sauce – that brings the salty tang to the creamy avo and the omega oil of the seafood. Eat it with a spoon straight from the skin and then you are ready to get down to the main event: yakitori.
The secret to great traditional yakitori – as opposed to just chicken on a stick! – is the tare sauce, but this is easy to master and in addition to being used on yakitori it does double duty as a teriyaki sauce for chicken, tofu, fish, vegetables, or simply use it as pizza sauce with lots of cheese and left over yakitori. It is essentially sweetened and thickened soy sauce, so the ingredients are simple, though many chefs have their own elaborate variations that they guard fiercely, so don’t be afraid to experiment – though I can assure you that adding some of that six month old tomato sauce in the back of your fridge won’t work!
And a quick word here about sauce: you don’t have to buy expensive boutique soy sauce, but you do want to buy a good quality Japanese brand because the flavour is deeper and completely different from those made elsewhere. The Kikkoman label offers a good reliable soy sauce and is available in any decent supermarket, and believe me you will taste the difference.
To make the sauce, pour two cups of cooking sake into a saucepan and boil for a couple of minutes to evaporate off the alcohol, then reduce heat to low and add two cups of sugar and stir till it begins to thicken a little. Once it is slightly syrupy, add two cups of soy sauce and continue to stir from the bottom of the pan till it has thickened nicely. This process is best done on the stovetop where you can control the heat better, and it takes a bit of time so you may want to have some non-cooking, but drinking sake on hand to help control the chief stirrer in the kitchen.
Now to make the skewers. As mentioned earlier, you can just use chicken pieces and veggies, but here are a couple of classic Japanese yakitori. First, tsukune, or chicken balls: combine the minced chicken with the juice squeezed from grated ginger (or if you like the tangy hotness, peel and use the grated roots), add a few teaspoons each of sake and soy sauce, a pinch of salt and sugar, and if desired, a little miso paste and finely chopped spring onions and then form them into balls about 3cm in diameter. Next, place them in small batches into a pot of boiling water for about 10 seconds till the outside turns white, but don’t leave them boiling too long as all the flavour and juice will get lost. This last step ensures the balls will hold together better and avoid sticking to your cooking surface when you put them on the skewers.
The next yakitori are even simpler and are the most common variation of the dish called negima: tightly pack skewers starting and ending with chunks of chicken (use thigh not breast) and with spring onions in between. And last but not least, ever-so-lightly blanch some shortly cut asparagus stems, wrap in bacon and mount on the pre-soaked skewers; same drill with cherry tomatoes and bacon, because as an old Japanese proverb says, everything is better wrapped in bacon. Actually I’ve never heard of such a proverb, but everything really is better with bacon.
Then everything goes on to the – preferably charcoal – BBQ, but you want to get the skewers up off the surface a little so use an oven rack or similar. The bacon-wrapped
skewers won’t need any seasoning whatsoever, but you want to lightly grill the negima and tsukune to seal in the flavour so keep turning for a few minutes and then start brushing on the tare. Keep brushing and turning till there is plenty of colour, and don’t worry about some of the tare dripping off into the flames – that just adds to the flavour as the smoke seeps into the meat.
And finally, with sweet corn season on us, here is a great way to jazz up your cobs after you’ve grown tired of the classic Kiwi boiled version with butter. Melt the butter a little and then combine the soy and sugar and mix well, then lightly grill the cobs on the BBQ before brushing on a few coats of the sauce and returning them to the grill. A few minutes of turning and you will see some colour on the cobs and they are ready to eat.
So there you have it, simple, tasty and also pretty healthy options for a Japanese twist to the Kiwi BBQ. To compliment the food, the avocado entrée and yakitori both go great with a crisp New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc or spicy Pinot Gris, but if you drew the short straw and are working behind the BBQ then you deserve the perfect pairing of an ice cold Japanese lager like Asahi Super Dry, which you can get in most supermarkets here now.
And yeah, nah I know a lot of you Kiwis aren’t too sure about drinking beer from Japan, but hey – 40 years ago you weren’t too sure about our cars either.