8 Essential Ingredients for Cooking Japanese at Home

A cook is only as good as their ingredients…do you know what the top eight essential ingredients for cooking Japanese are?

Many Japanese dishes are made up of carefully balanced flavours, with the seasonings that make up these complex tastes usually from the same components.

For example, a lot of dishes require a broth – think miso soup, ramen or udon noodle soup – which starts with a dashi stock base. This base is often made from kombu, bonito flakes and wakame, all of which should be on your pantry shelf.

Here are eight ingredients that are a must for Japanese cuisine:

One of the most basic flavourings in Japanese cuisine, soy sauce Is used instead of salt to add savoury flavour. Made from brewed fermented soy beans, it can also be used as a dipping sauce.

 

It is usually mixed with rice wine vinegar, mirin and sometimes chilli, ginger or spring onions to create a base for many dishes.

This is used for seasoning rice such as sushi rice and is also combined with soy to make a dipping sauce with is great with oily fried food such as gyoza.

This is a sweet rice wine which adds a slight sweetness to dishes such as yakitori chicken. You will often find it added to soup stocks or dumpling filling mixes.

 

Miso is also a product of fermented soy beans and is often mixed with sea salt and rice to make a paste – this is the basis of miso soup. A great base for broths, miso also adds great flavour to meat dishes.

Another element of dashi stock, kombu is a type of dried seaweed kelp, which is aged to achieve great flavour. In Japan, kombu maturing is a serious business and the best restaurants have their favourite trusted suppliers.

 

Wakame is a seaweed often used in miso soup, usually in dried form it is softened by adding it to hot water. It is a great addition to any Japanese soup or broth as it has a subtle, sweet flavour and lots of vitamin power.

 

Bonito is a small variety of tuna, which is often dried then shaved into thin flakes which are used as the basis for many Japanese broths. The flavour is not as overpowering as tuna and when heated in water to make stock, it provides umami. 

 

Made from a Japanese variety of horseradish, real wasabi is very expensive as the root is difficult to farm correctly – most cheaper wasabi pastes are actually horseradish. Top restaurants will freshly grate real wasabi from the root into a paste; it is a fiery accompaniment for sushi and also great with meat.