The Japanese Pantry

Here’s another short post on a source for excellent ingredients.

The Japanese Pantry imports and sells outstanding artisan-quality Japanese ingredients to restaurants, merchants and home cooks. It offers miso, soy, tamari, vinegar, kombu, sesame-based products and seasonings that far surpass the quality of ingredients that one finds in even well-regarded specialty food stores.

 

The Japanese Pantry recently added Donko dried shiitake mushrooms to its offerings. With these world-class dried mushrooms from the island of Kyushu and other Japanese Pantry staples, you are set to make dashi using the following David Kinch recipe that appears in Umami: The Fifth Taste (Japan Publications Trading Company, 2014). This dashi is a component in his recipe for Summer Clams, Peas and Beans in a Pine Mushroom Broth.

 

1.8 liters filtered water

12 grams dried shiitake mushrooms

15 grams dried kombu

25 grams dried tuna flakes (magurobushi)

4 to 5 tablespoons white soy sauce (shiro shoyu)

Sea salt

 

1. Combine water, mushrooms and kombu in a large pan and heat to 140F/60C. Turn off heat, cover, and steep for 1 hour.

 

2. Remove and discard kombu. Heat mushrooms and broth to 175F/80C. Add tuna flakes, stir for 15 seconds and immediately strain through a linen cloth. Discard the solids and season the dashi to taste with white soy and salt. If making ahead, reserve in the refrigerator

 

I don’t follow Kinch’s recipe to a T; I use my fine PNW water for filtered. I also don’t discard the mushrooms. Rather, I save and cook with them. For the sea salt, I use 1.25 grams Amabito No Moshio.

 

The Japanese Pantry currently sells three different types of kombu: Ma, Rausu and Rishiri. I use what I have in my pantry. I mostly swap out the recipe’s white soy for 75 grams of white tamari that The Japanese Panty sells. Made with 100% wheat, the Japanese government prohibits its manufacturer, Notto Jozo, from calling this sauce soy. However labeled, this light sauce tastes fantastic.

 

Regrettably, one cannot buy dried fish and shellfish from The Japanese Pantry—at least not yet. I’m told it wants to offer these products, but it’s difficult for the small artisan companies that it promotes to navigate certain import regulations. But, hopefully, one day soon we can also find dried seafood and fish at The Japanese Pantry.

Japanese Rice

I often enjoy sourcing ingredients as much as cooking, especially if the ingredients come from people committed to quality. During these tough times, these merchants and suppliers can use our support. To this end, I’ve penned a series of posts that feature my favorite sources for excellent cooking ingredients. First up, a near everyday staple food in my household: Japanese rice from The Rice Factory.

 

The Rice Factory, located in Scarsdale, New York, imports Japanese rice varieties that it sells in its shop and on-line. Its website lists its seasonally available varieties—some offerings sell out very quickly—and classifies the rice on a chart with 4 quadrants divided by two axes: (1) sticky to smooth, and (2) tough (i.e., firm) to soft. After choosing a rice variety, you select your desired quantity (5, 10 or 15 pounds) and a mill rate (e.g., brown, 50% milled, 70% milled, or white). The rice is then milled-to-order and, to those of us scattered across the country, shipped.

 

I’ve tried almost ten different rice varieties from The Rice Factory. I’m about halfway through a 10-pound bag of Tsuyahime rice from the Yamagata Prefecture. Per The Rice Factory, Tsuyahime has excellent sweetness and umami and “has a good reputation for its good looks, such as whiteness and gloss after cooking….”

 

My favorite rice—so far—is Nanatsuboshi, which is slightly more firm than soft and more smooth than sticky. I’ve ordered this rice milled 70% and white. However milled, this rice tastes absolutely delicious.

 

I count The Rice Factory as a culinary treasure here in the United States. I enjoy supporting the company and the Japanese rice they sell is fantastic.

Spelt & Kamut Pasta

I take and keep notes when making pasta with a new flour blend. I often shoot a reference picture of the recipe with the finished pasta. If the dish turns out, I store the photo on my computer and the recipe in my pasta journal. (Sometimes it takes me a while to move my notes into my journal.)

 

About week ago, I came across a photograph of an emmer and Kamut pasta that I made back in 2016. I wanted to try out the recipe again, but couldn’t find any emmer grains in my pantry. I did, however, find a bag of spelt. I decided to improvise.

 

If you root around on The Internet, you will find a lot of conflicting information on…well, a lot of things, but, for purposes of this post, on emmer, spelt and einkorn grains. Each is different, but these grains often get lumped together as farro. Although mixing-up emmer, spelt and einkorn is easy, it’s hard to confuse these grains with Kamut, which is a trade name for Khorasan wheat. I love cooking and baking with Kamut. I often blend this ancient durum wheat with other flours to make pretty much everything taste better. When I received my first bag of Kamut from Montana Flour & Grain, I understood why some call it “Camel’s Tooth”. If you have not worked this grain, I suggest you give it a try. Finding Khorasan wheat gets easier with each passing year.

 

Per my 2016 notes, I used 75% emmer and 25% Kamut flour. I wanted to keep close to these percentages with my spelt and Kamut pasta. With a goal of making 2 serving portions, I started with 250 grams of spelt that I milled and sifted through a No. 40 and No. 50 sieve. (More on bolting flour here.) This produced 75 grams of spelt flour. I then milled 150 grams of Kamut grain and similarly sifted the flour achieving 32 grams of Kamut flour. I wanted 115 grams of total flour, so I added 8 grams of Central Milling Organic Type 00 Normal to my flour mixture.

 

I usually add an egg and a yolk to 115 grams of flour when making pasta. In this case the egg/yolk mixture weighed 78 grams. After mixing the flour and egg together by hand in a shallow bowl, I kneaded the dough for 8 minutes, wrapped it in plastic, and set the dough to rest for 30 minutes at room temperature.

 

After resting, the dough felt soft so I decided to make a laminated noodle using my Imperia R220 manual pasta machine. After multiple passes through the rollers, I stopped at the machine’s number 3 setting. The pasta still felt a tad soft. I cut the pasta into 4 sheets, dusted it with semolina and let the sheets air dry on my kitchen counter for about 15 minutes per side. Because I planned a sauce of fresh borlotti beans and razor clams, I cut the pasta into tagliatelle. I wrapped the cut noodles in a kitchen towel and let them sit for about 45 minutes as I made my sauce.

 

I taste my fresh pasta while it cooks. Although the pasta felt soft after rolling, the cooked spelt and Kamut pasta had a firm bite to it. After about 2 minutes in salty, boiling water, the pasta achieved the right texture to finish cooking for another minute or so in my sauce.

 

Spelt pasta has a lovely mild wheat flavor. Bolted Kamut flour helps the noodle’s strength. Conclusion: Switching out the emmer for spelt worked out great. For the last couple of years I have experimented with making an extruded Kamut pasta using my torchio pasta press. After a lot of fine tuning, I’m getting closer to a recipe that I can share with you.