The secret to the taste of Japanese food and the 4 main dashi soup stocks

 Japanese cuisine has become more and more popular recently, but do you know the secret ingredient behind its delicious taste?

Today we want to talk about an extremely important component of what makes our cuisine so special. It's called "dashi."

From ramen and okonomiyaki to oden, all of these popular Japanese dishes use the traditional Japanese dashi soup stock.

This article aims to give you an idea of what dashi is, the differences between it and other soup stocks that are used in cuisine from other countries, and the main ingredients of dashi and their health benefits!

1. What is dashi?

Dashi is a soup stock made by boiling or steeping ingredients in water and imparts the traditional Japanese umami flavor to the dishes it is used in.

The umami component of dashi brings out the flavors of the other ingredients in the dish and acts as a decisive factor in the overall taste. Various meat, fish, and vegetable ingredients are used to make dashi. In Western cuisine, these kinds of ingredients are called bouillon or soup stock, and in Chinese cuisine, they are referred to as "tang."

Just like in other cuisines, the type of dashi that you use depends on what you will be cooking.

 Katsuobushi bonito flakes and konbu kelp are the main ingredients used to make dashi, but there are supposedly more than 100 types of dashi stock used in Japanese cuisine as the island's geography gives access to many types of ingredients from the mountains and the ocean.

2. The history of dashi

Dashi first emerged within Japanese cuisine during the Jomon period (14000–300 BCE) when people began to realize that the broth that was left over after cooking shellfish, animal meat, nuts, etc. tasted delicious.

Dashi first appeared in Japanese historical documents during the Nara period (710–794 AD), which mentions the bonito and kelp variations in particular. Both have also been found to be given as gifts to the imperial court, indicating that they initially spread among the imperial family and aristrocats.

The word "tashi" appears in what is said to be the oldest cookbook in Japan, which was written in the Kamakura period (1185–1333 AD), which is assumed to be what we now call "dashi".

It was from the mid-Edo period (around 1688 AD) when the dashi culture began to spread nationwide. Kyoto is where this culture was refined to what it is today.

During the Edo period, when the Edo Shogunate was in control, the capital shifted from Kyoto to Tokyo. This shift resulted in higher rates of poverty among the citizens of Kyoto, including the nobility, and food shortages in the home.

This is how "Kyoto cuisine" evolved, resulting in a cuisine that has a lighter flavor but expresses its umami to the fullest. Inhabitants of Kyoto also placed an emphasis on tableware in order to eat local products as luxuriously as possible without having to spend money on expensive seasonings.

This culture then permeated into commoner cuisine in Osaka, which was a logistics and commerce hub at the time, and went on to spread throughout the country.

3. Types of dashi and nutrition

Here, we will introduce two main ingredients that we use for dashi: dried bonito and konbu kelp. Niboshi and shitake are less commonly used in dashi, but are also good variants to know.

Katsuobushi bonito flakes

After slicing raw bonito into 3 pieces, it is boiled, smoked, and cooled. 

The repetition of this process makes the bonito look like a wooden stick as shown below. Katsuobushi is so hard that it has been certified as Guinness World Records as "the hardest food in the world"!

 If you were to compare it to jewels, it is about as hard as crystal...

Konbu kelp

When hard and dried katsuobushi is shaved with a shaving tool, the resulting flakes become thin and brittle like pencil shavings.

These flakes are at their most delicious just after they have been freshly shaved! So in the cooking world, we have a saying that "Katsuobushi should be shaved only after seeing your customer's face."

Because it is smoked, you can enjoy its smoky and fragrant aroma and if you put them in your mouth, you can immediately taste the richness of the seafood.

70% of the nutritional content is made up of proteins and these flakes are also rich in amino acids and minerals.

The fragrant and beautiful golden kelp soup stock is very popular with Japanese people.

Most of the kelp eaten in Japan is harvested in Hokkaido between early July and late September.

Konbu is sun dried after harvest and sorted. Usually, the thicker it is, the more expensive it is priced at as it yields more dashi.

The taste of soup stock from kelp varies greatly depending on where it is harvested in Hokkaido.

For example, "Rishiri kelp" harvested in the northernmost part of Hokkaido can be used to make a clear and refined soup stock.

It is one of the types of kelp that is most often used in restaurants in Kyoto. "Hidaka kelp" which is caught on the south side of Hokkaido is kelp that is mainly popular in the Kanto region. It has lighter fibers and is used as an ingredient in boiled oden and tsukudani.

Not only is kelp full of dietary fiber, but it is also rich in minerals like calcium and magnesium. Any dashi stock made with kelp would contain the same, so kombu dashi is a great way to boost a healthy diet.

Niboshi dried sardines

"Niboshi" are small boiled and dried fish. Generally speaking, dried sardines are used to make niboshi, but it can also be made from horse mackerel or mackerel depending on the region.

While dashi was becoming more popular and well known during the Edo period, bonito flakes and kelp were still products that only the rich could afford.

This is why niboshi was introduced as a substitute. People used the small sardines that were caught with the larger ones to utilize entire catches and drive down costs.

The quirk of using dried sardines is that the taste of the dashi stock changes depending on the size of the fish. Smaller sardines will impart a much lighter flavor while bigger sardines will result in a much stronger taste.

Cooking enthusiasts often keep both sizes and use them depending on the dish they are cooking. Niboshi is rich in calcium as well as protein and works well in Japanese water which is lower in minerals than the water in other countries. Dried shiitake mushrooms

Shiitake

Dried shiitake mushrooms are made by drying raw shiitake mushrooms in the sun or in a dryer.

It is an ingredient that is widely used along with dried bonito and kelp and gives dashi stock a strong aroma and umami flavor even when used in small amounts.

Shitake dashi is great for deepening and strengthening flavors, but a certain amount of skill is needed to utilize it effectively without overpowering any other flavors. 

It contains a large amount of guanylic acid, which gives the umami flavor and is often used in "mixed dashi" together with kombu dashi in shōjin ryori, which is a vegetarian cuisine developed by the monks of Buddhist temples. That's all for today for our dashi crash course.

Although Western soup stocks like bouillon require time, effort, and extra care to impart their rich flavor, using Japanese dashi tends to be more simple and easy. 

So in the next article, we will show you how we actually use the dashi above and introduce some sample dishes that use them!