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Japanese Cooking Event! Okonomi-yaki, yakisoba and more!
Do you like Japanese cooking?
Because eating out is so common in Japan, perhaps many of you have had Japanese food in restaurants but haven’t made it at home.
This time at Coto Japanese Academy we invited as an instructor Yuka Togami, who runs a Japanese cooking class that is very popular on TripAdvisor, and had her show us her favorite ways to make easy and healthy Japanese food.
We started with “dashi”, which is the foundation of Japanese cooking.
Generally it is common to use granulated dashi such as “Hon Dashi”, but we saw a demonstration of how to make real dashi.
There are four ingredients that can make up Japanese dashi:
Kombu
Katsuobushi
Shiitake mushrooms
Niboshi
Generally two of these ingredients are combined to make Japanese dashi, so this time we made a kombu and katsuobushi dashi.
Dashi loses its fragrance if it boils, so the kombu is left to soak in water for around 30 minutes, and then heated, and removed right before boiling. Then the katsuobushi is added, and again it is removed from heat right before boiling, and the katsuobushi is removed. That’s it! It’s very easy!
We continued on to the menu for the day, which was tonjiru, okonomiyaki, and yakisoba. For each of these items, we broke off into groups to cook them after watching a skillful demonstration by our teacher. Everyone looked great in their aprons.
Lastly we tried making onigiri. It was hard to make them triangular, but we had onigiri with many individualistic shapes in the end.
After completion everyone ate!
Making something in a group is pretty fun. Hopefully both those who cook regularly and those who don’t had a good time.
Next time it would be fun to try some more difficult dishes!
We are looking forward to the next Coto cooking class.
