Are you a beginner in Japanese cuisine? Would you like to cook Japanese dishes more often, but it seems too complicated because you will need a bunch of unfamiliar ingredients? It’s true that you will need some special ingredients but it’s not as difficult as it seems. So how to make it all easier and where to start?
If you want to cook Japanese dishes more often, it’s better to keep some basic ingredients in the kitchen. Then it won’t be a problem. I can prepare Japanese dish much faster than some Italian dish or typical Slovak food because I already have most of the ingredients I need in the kitchen.
I also adapt a lot of recipes, because some ingredients are hard to find in our country. But I adapt only to a certain extent, because it does not make sense to replace five things out of seven. You will get a completely different meal.
These things are basic Japanese ingredients I keep in my kitchen:
- Soy Sauce
- Miso
- Dashi
- Wakame seaweed
- Sesame Oil
- Ginger (fresh one is better)
- Sesame seeds
Another ingredients that are nice to have:
If you are starting with cooking Japanese food, first I recommend to look for ingredients from the list above and then gradually stock up another.
- Saké (the best substitute would be dry sherry or Chinese rice wine or I often use dry white wine)
- Mirin (it’s a type of rice wine with a sweet taste. You can substitute with white wine with few drops of vinegar and sugar)
- Kombu (type of seaweed. Dashi could be a good substitute but not in every recipe)
- Gochujang (Korean spicy paste)
- Rice vinegar
- Oyster sauce
Of course, we could find much more, but these are the ingredients I use the most and it’s a good starting point.
Stocking up is worth it because you can cook a miso soup at home in 15 minutes. And that’s pretty good, isn’t it?
