I'm Just the Curry-ier, Ma'am.

It finally turned cold here in central Texas last week, and even then it's short lived - we'll be in the middle sixties by the end of the week. Being from a more northerly clime, I greatly enjoy these bursts of cold (sometimes foul) weather more than some of my neighbors (okay, most of them).


Due to the cold weather last night and an overabundance of desire to do so, I made more curry today. Most of the days between blog posts are taken up with other foods - misoni pork, oden and other nimono, the odd pizza or bowl of ramen - but this felt like it was going to be a curry day. I'm assuming it was on my mind because of both the cold weather and this video the Wife sent me last week. We had discussed making some changes to our home curry recipe, a la JMSDF ships and their post WWII traditions.


Just like everyone's grandma's way of making pot roast or mama's spaghetti sauce secrets, every ship's cook in the JMSDF has a specific way in which they make curry sauce. Curry sauce (as I explained briefly before) was introduced by the British in the late 1800s, then morphed over the course of time to become so popular that it's now considered a national dish. In the early parts of the 1900s, the IJN began a practice that would become a weekly tradition. Ships would have lots of scraps of vegetables and meat saved up from cooking during the week, and various other things that needed some use: tomato sauce, worchestershire sauce, bread crumbs, you name it it was possibly in the galley. Cooks would make curry rice based upon these leftovers and sundry herbs and spices, all made in a thick lard-and-flour-based gravy.


After WWII, the dish continued to skyrocket in popularity to the point where in the 1960s when viable 'roux blocks' of curry began to be sold in supermarkets. Suddenly, you didn't have to spend hours mixing your own sauce and tending the stove twice (or three times if you still used a traditional rice pot) in order to make what was really a simple dish, if you even knew how to make it.


So I did some of my prep last night by chopping up some veggies and mixing my dry spices and flour. Instead of my usual mix of straight curry powder and flour, I went with curry powder, garam masala and flour. This morning, I made some quick beef stock (I have got to get rid of this free instant broth somehow), made my roux block, and  sautéd the vegetables and beef in butter before the usual steps of adding and boiling the beef stock, then adding the roe and letting it start to thicken.


This is where things took their second different turn: I added about five tablespoons of Bulldog chuno sauce, three tablespoons of honey and half of an apple's worth of apple puré  (made directly over the pot with an oroshigane. After simmering for about forty-five minutes, it was ready to eat.


Super spicy by Japanese standards, yet sweet and a little lighter than usual, it tastes like I'd imagine a combination of Java-brand super hot curry would if you mixed it with House-brand Vermont curry. Next time, I think I'll put some puréd tomatoes and maybe a little less garam masala in. Eventually, we'll find a mix that is specifically our home version. When that day comes, I'm not going to share it openly!


Final Ingredients:
5 cups beef stock
1/2 cup lard
2 Tbs butter
5 Tbs S&B Curry Powder
1 Tbs Garam Masala
5 Tbs Bulldog Chuno Sauce
3 Tbs Honey
4 Tbs Unsweetened Applesauce
2/3 Onion, finely chopped
1 1/2 Carrot, finely chopped
1 lb Beef Stew Meat, fine cut

Pickling

Tsukemono are a huge part of the average Japanese meal. They're one of the reasons you'll see a very pretty set meal that screams variety. All sorts are available for purchase in lots of grocery stores, and there are so many different recipes that it's most likely impossible to catalog them all.


Highly popular at all times, tsukemono are both a wonder and a potential health risk. Such things as the "seaweed salad" available at most sushi stands in the U.S. are relatively healthy and nutritive dense, but often loaded with calories as well. Then there's the fact that Japanese pickles use lots of vinegar, salt, and (sometimes) some carcinogenic elements. If you're eating takuan or fukujinzuke three or more times a day, you might have some health problems when you're older - Japan has the highest rate of digestive tract cancers in the world! 


Often, tsukemono is taken to mean pickle. In the traditional European sense that's not always the most correct word. Many are simple flavor combinations or treatments (like seaweed salads or nukadoko) meant to be consumed right away while others (like takuan or umeboshi) are truly preserved vegetables. Seeing as nukadoko ingredients can be hard to come by at times, I haven't taken that leap yet, though I plan to in the future.


Often used to stretch a meal, and just as often used as a "chopstick rest" much like sorbet or a cheese course between courses in a finer European style, there are plenty of reasons to keep a few simple ones around that can be used as okazu. I have a few standard ones that I keep in supply here in the house, and sometimes they're all one needs to have with a bowl of rice and some miso.


My favorite one is a simple fridge pickle of small kyuuri (small seedless cucumbers similar to those you'd make dill pickles with) and wakame in a vinegar dressing.


Recipe: Kyuuri to wakame aemono
Serves: 4 +


Ingredients:
3-6 seedless cucumbers
3-6 tablespoons fueru wakame
1 tablespoon kosher salt
4 tablespoons rice vinegar
1 tablespoon sugar


Slice the cucumbers as thinly as possible - I usually use a Benriner branded mandolin on a 1mm setting. Place in a bowl and sprinkle them with the salt, then rub the salt in and let them sit for a few moments to draw some of their moisture off.


Reconstitute the wakame and discard the water. Squeeze the excess water from the seaweed, and place in the bowl with the cucumbers. Add in the remaining ingredients, and stir to combine them. They're ready to consume in about an hour, but are best the next day.


Adjust the vinegar content as you like, depended on how pungent or sour you want your pickles to be. This usually lasts about a week in the fridge.

Kabocha Soup

Last time the wife and I went to the Chinese grocery store down in Austin, we procured a nicely sized, deeply green type of pumpkin called a kabocha. Kabocha is one of those wonderful foods that have a multitude of uses for a huge variety of food styles; it can be steamed and sauced or battered and fried, anything really works so long as it's been cooked.

The older Japanese man who writes the only food blog I follow with any kind of dedication had put the bug in my ear that I needed to revisit this big ol' rock-hard winter squash with his mention of having made a soup out of one the week before. His picture of a half-empty tureen of smooth golden soup and a heavily coated ladle had intrigued me, but alas he'd posted no recipe!

Enter a few hours of searching on Google for recipes, and I finally had my way of going about it. It turned out so creamy and smooth that we both had a second helping before putting away the rest to give to my pumpkin-loving mother-in-law this weekend. I will warn you, however, that it's an extremely tough squash to cut cold, but this produced some of the most amazing soup ever that it was well worth the time I spent with sawing knife and cleaver.

Kabocha Soup

Ingredients:

1/2 Kabocha, seeded, peeled and cubed (1 inch chunks)

1 1/2 - 2 cups milk (I used soy again)

1/2 cup water

2 tablespoon cooking oil

1 tablespoon salt

1 tablespoon ground cinnamon

1 tablespoon ground ginger

1 teaspoon pepper

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and grease a shallow baking pan with the oil. Toss the kabocha chunks with the spices and oil before roasting for half an hour, turning once during cooking. After removing from the oven, blend with the milk and water in batches in a strong blender. Transfer to a stock pot and simmer.

Makes six to eight servings.

Currying Favor

Last night I made pork curry rice at the wife's request. We've been putting it off all summer long because it's so blasted hot in central Texas this year, but finally our cravings outweighed our dislike of being warmed up.

In Japan, the most common way of making curry sauce (and thus curry rice) is to chop up your ingredients (often carrots, onion, and some form of potato or tuber, perhaps a little meat), saute them in some fat, then add water and some roux blocks (think of House or S&B) and cook until the sauce forms. Lots of folks still make their own from the way things appear, or else S&B probably wouldn't bother to continue producing a tinned curry powder.

Because of the Wife's foresight in purchasing large quantities of Tamanishiki Gold brand rice, we've got lots of high quality short-grain rice on hand. It's truly convenient to have our main starch just sitting in the pantry, not having to worry for two months at a stretch about running out (like we used to with bread). The one thing we were sadly missing was tsukemono to serve the curry rice with. Traditionally and taste-wise curry rice gets served with fukujinzuke or pickled rakkyo. I haven't tried it yet, but I suspect that it would go well with curry udon as well.

The recipe I use is adapted and tweaked from a translated article about the Imperial Japanese Navy's traditional form of curry served since before World War II. It was an expedient way to rid the galley of excess carrots, potatoes, onions and beef, and became a hallmark of their food services. Originally, the cooks made it more oily and thin than modern curry sauce (and I'd bet they did it to stretch the ingredients out).

The first time the wife and I tried going directly from the recipe, there was a large amount of excess fat to skim off of the surface. Since them, I've cut my recipe down in a lot of ways, and made it an ideal way to make dinner for four to six people. It keeps at least a week in the fridge if you seal it up nice and tightly.

Fortunately, you can profit from our mistakes and trials. If you need to make something gluten-free, I usually use rice flour (mochiko) and potato starch in a 4:1 ratio to replace wheat flour in gravies like this. Give it a shot - this is one of those times where gluten-free cooking doesn't leave some texture or flavor to be desired!

Curry Recipe:

Sauce -

4 Tbsp Curry powder

2 Tbsp Rice flour

1/2 Tbsp Corn or Potato starch

4 Tbsp Lard

32 oz. Beef Stock

Ingredients -

2 Lg Carrots, peeled and sliced

1 Med Potato, peeled and cubed

1 Sm Onion, peeled and diced

1 Tbsp Butter

OPTIONAL -1/2 Lb Meat (I prefer pork, any land animal will do!)

In a 1 quart sauce pan, melt the lard on medium high heat. Combine all the dry ingredients of the curry sauce and add to the melted lard. Stir and cook until it forms a thick paste, adding additional flour if needed. Set aside.

In a medium stock pot, melt the butter over high heat. Saute onions and carrots briefly, then add the potatoes and any meat. Continue to saute until ingredients are mostly cooked. When the onions are translucent, add all beef stock and bring to a boil. Add the curry roux and stir to combine. Bring close to a boil to thicken, then lower heat to medium-low and stir occasionally.

Serve over rice (count on needing 1/2 cup uncooked rice per person at a minimum) or udon (1 bundle per person).