Cooking Methods
The cooking of Japanese-style meals requires a fair amount of clean water. Rice is rinsed to wash away remaining bran prior to steaming; spinach for the side dish is blanched in boiling water, then plunged into cold water to preserve its fresh green color. In preparing raw fish for sashimi, plenty of water to wash the fish is indispensable.
Water is also needed to simmer or steam foods, such as niku-jaga (simmered meat and potatoes) or chawan-mushi (steamed egg custard); even when serving chilled tofu (hiya-yakko), the tofu is chilled in cold water and the accompanying green onion and ginger garnishes require water in their preparation.
Because Japanese-style meals are eaten with chopsticks, skill with kitchen knives is considered of great importance. Japanese kitchen knives are traditionally single-beveled, thought to help retain flavor in slicing fish for sashimi, for example. Although professionals use single-beveled knives, many households today use double-beveled, Western kitchen knives.
Many dishes call for ingredients to be cut into very thin, uniform strips or bite-sized pieces, and so a good cutting board is as indispensable as the proper cutting technique: cucumbers and daikon radish, for example, are often sliced very thin, and the white stems of long onions are precisely cut into long, fine, delicate strips called shiraga-negi, used as garnish.
Until recently, the Japanese-style meal was also the norm for breakfast in most homes: children would wake to the rhythmical sound of their mother's knife chopping vegetables, accompanied by the fragrance of miso soup.
Although ingredients differed from one family to another and each had its own favorite tastes, the basic styles of eating were repeated every day, and standard cooking techniques were mastered and used in all households. The recollection of such meals brings back warm memories for many.