Japanese Seasonings and Condiments 〜調味料〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiji's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you the five main Japanese seasonings and several other Japanese sauces and condiments that may come handy when you want to make Japanese food. Then let's get started. Before I'm going to explain to you about the Japanese seasoning, I want to tell you the major difference of a Western seasoning and the Japanese seasoning, and that is the fermentation. Most Western seasonings or spices are just in a pure form and don't go through fermentation except for wine and wine vinegar. But all five Japanese seasonings and also several other Asian seasonings go through the process of fermentation. As I explained in the other video of dashi or the Japanese broth, fermentation helps build umami and that's one of the main reasons why Japanese food is so delicious. Then let's get into the seasonings. So the first up is definitely soy sauce. You could not make Japanese food without soy sauce. Soy sauce is the essential seasoning in making Japanese food. I could probably only come with one or two hands which does not use soy sauce inside the Japanese cuisine. So if you want to make any Japanese food, get soy sauce. So as the name it tells, soy sauce is made from soybeans, water, salt, and wheat sometimes, and koji or fungus that they use to fermentate the soy sauce. So traditionally they're aged about a year to a couple years, but I think a lot of the soy sauce nowadays are made in a couple months. Steamed soybeans are mixed with salt and koji and go through the process of fermentation and depending on the different region and different type of soy sauce they age a couple months to a couple years even. So there are primarily three types of soy sauce. One is usukuchi soy sauce which means light soy sauce, second is a regular soy sauce or regular soy sauce, and the third is tamari or dark soy sauce. So a lot of people, even Japanese, make the mistake of thinking that the light soy sauce contains less sodium, less salt, in compared to regular soy sauce and that is not the case. Actually often that the light soy sauce contains more salt than the regular soy sauce. These light soy sauce are used more in the western Japan than the eastern Japan and in eastern Japan they use a lot of the regular soy sauce. It comes from the just kind of tendency that people in the western Japan, especially in Kyoto, they want to see dishes that are light colored and in eastern Japan people don't care and instead they want to have more rich flavor and so in my region we even use a lot of tamari or the dark soy sauce for regular cooking. So tamari or dark soy sauce is used often when people eat sashimi or sushi where we don't cook the soy sauce and instead dip the ingredients directly in the soy sauce and we eat the soy sauce as it is raw. So if you use soy sauce it will just japanize every food. Oh yeah one last thing. If you buy a big bottle of soy sauce like this or even smaller bottle, please store these in the fridge. Don't store this at a regular temperature in a cupboard and the reason is that soy sauce will start losing its flavor and its aroma and also start to oxidize and start being a little bit sour, a little bit tangier if it comes in contact with oxygen. So what I usually do is I buy this big bottle and then what I do is I buy this and I have this kind of small bottle. Most Asian stores have these kind of bottles as well. You can use these and then I fill it and I have this on the table or I have this in the kitchen where I use it for cooking. So this big bottle stays in the fridge, cooled and doesn't come in contact with oxygen often. So I would recommend doing that if you have a bottle of soy sauce like this. Next is miso. So the ingredients for miso is actually pretty much exactly the same as soy sauce. The only difference is that amount of water and the type of koji or the fungus that they use to fermentate. The ingredients for the miso are soybeans, water, salt and sometimes wheat and the koji or the fungus and there are primarily three kinds of miso. One is red miso, white miso and regular miso or sometimes called mixed miso, awase miso. There are also several different versions depending on the region where you go to but these are the main three types. So this is also a regional thing. Red miso is used kind of in the middle of Japan. Where I come from, Nagoya, we use pretty much only this red miso but if you go to Kyoto or the western Japan then you might find white miso and I would say the rest of Japan may use this regular miso or mixed miso and we also sometimes mix different kind of miso to get more of the rich flavor to get more of the layer of taste. The color difference comes primarily from the length of the aging. So the red miso is usually aged longer and therefore has rich flavor to my opinion and white miso is not aged as long and so you might taste a little bit of soy sauce and sometimes they're a little bit sweeter and regular miso I don't know how to explain that that's just regular miso. So if you are to buy the first miso then I would just recommend buying a regular miso or mixed miso because it doesn't have like a really strong flavor but it's just kind of a mild flavor. I think most people would prefer having this. So if you don't know how to make miso soup with these three different kind of miso then please look up my other video on miso soup where I'm using all three different kinds and kind of reporting the different flavor of the three miso. So next is mirin. So mirin is something that you might want to consider getting when you start getting a little more into Japanese cooking. You don't have to buy this. This can be easily substituted with sugar but if you want to get that authenticity and a little more of that glaze then I would recommend getting mirin. So mirin is also explained often as sweet rice wine and a lot of people don't know this but mirin does contain a lot of alcohol. So if I look here it says it's 14% alcohol so it is pretty strong alcohol. So mirin is pretty much the same as sake except that it uses different kind of rice specifically the glutinous rice or the mochi rice. So they go through the same process with the mochi rice and because mochi rice contains more gluten in the rice and that's why it's sticky and chewy and it makes it sweeter when it's fermented and because it's fermented it has a lot of umami which regular sugar doesn't have. So I would consider getting this if you start getting more into Japanese food and also adds more glaze to your dishes especially when you make teriyaki or something. So in mirin there are actually two types. One is this regular mirin which have this kind of like yellowy color and there's also another seasoning called mirin style sweet cooking seasoning. So it says mirin style which means that it is actually not mirin and the reason why they make this is that they want to reduce the price so these take less time to fermentate. They also add artificial or natural sweetness like here it says glucose syrup and the main difference is that these contains much less alcohol. I don't see that it says that it contains alcohol anywhere so I would assume that it doesn't contain any alcohol and which means that they have to like pay less tax and so it'll be available with less expensive price. I personally wouldn't get this. This doesn't have as much umami as the mirin and kind of lacks authenticity in my opinion. So you can also see the difference in color. Then next is sake. So sake actually just means alcohol in Japanese. We use this quite often in Japanese cooking and I would not use regular white wine as a substitute for Japanese sake because wine when I get using cooking it kind of leaves the sourness in my opinion. So if you don't have sake you don't have to get this but it just kind of adds a little more authenticity a little more depth to the flavor. And if you want to get sake there are regular sake for drinking and sake for cooking. I personally use a regular drinking sake because I can drink it and but also a lot of the cooking sake contains salt in order to avoid attacks and I personally don't like that because I want to know how much salt I'm adding to the dishes and if there's already salt in sake then I just kind of mess up with my cooking depending on where you are and depending on how much ingredients cost you can of course use that and just know that some cooking sake contains salt. And you can just of course look that up and the ingredients here this is just a regular sake so of course it doesn't contain any salt but you just want to be careful when getting sake. Then the last but not least is the rice wine vinegar or osu in Japanese. So this can be very very easily substituted with like apple vinegar or wine vinegar. The main difference is that Japanese rice wine vinegar is a little more milder it has a little more sweetness to it but unless you want to get really authentic you don't have to have this and we don't use this that often either. But if you want to make a really good sushi then you might consider getting this. So this is a regular rice wine vinegar but if you want to buy it just for the sushi then you might want to get sushi vinegar mix which already contains sugar in it so that you can just mix it with rice and you have sushi. Some Asian stores are starting to have those as well so instead of getting a rice wine you might just want to get that if you're using rice vinegar only for sushi. Then let's get into condiments and sauces. The first is dashi powder. So dashi means broth in Japanese. In most traditional Japanese cuisine you use dashi. And of course before people made dashi from scratch but now that we have these kind of instant dashi powder I use this quite often especially when I live outside of Japan. You could make your dish without dashi but it just kind of lacks the savoriness and depth of the flavor of the real Japanese-ness. And if you want to check out how to make authentic real dashi then please check out my other video on that. Next is ponzu. So ponzu I don't quite know where the name came from but it's just a mixture of citrus juice and soy sauce and sometimes a little bit of sugar or mirin for the sweetness. You could also just make this by squeezing lemon and adding soy sauce to it but it's not that expensive and it's worth getting one a bottle if you want to make nabe dishes like hot pot or if you want to make salad out of this. This is just really delicious. I advise you to give it a try. Next is mentsuyu. So here it says soba tsuyu. Mostly we call this mentsuyu. Men means noodles and tsuyu means soup sauce. So this is the base to all like udon noodle or like soba noodle. You could also use this for a base for nabe or hot pot and you can also give this to pretty much anything and then it'll give a little more depth to the flavor. The next is so called these sosu. Sosu is just a Japanese way of saying sauce. It bases off from Worcestershire sauce. We have basically three versions. The usual Worcestershire sauce. Here it says Worcestershire sauce. People at the time when they imported this they thought Worcestershire is too long and they made it Worcestershire. And then to that we have tonkatsu sauce and okonomiyaki sauce. So tonkatsu sauce is the sauce for the tonkatsu and okonomiyaki sauce for okonomiyaki. If I were to get one of these three I would get the tonkatsu sauce because okonomiyaki sauce is a little bit sweeter and Worcestershire sauce is a little bit um a little too sour for my taste. I could use tonkatsu sauce for okonomiyaki or yakisoba or also for other cutlet dishes but I couldn't use like Worcestershire sauce for okonomiyaki or tonkatsu and I could also not use okonomiyaki sauce for tonkatsu because it's a little too sweet to my opinion. This will cover everything but if you want to give it a try to really authentic okonomiyaki or yakisoba then you can consider getting these. But I would say tonkatsu sauce will cover everything. So the next is Kewpie mayonnaise. So you may think mayonnaise? Why is that a Japanese condiment? But this Kewpie mayonnaise is really special. It's my opinion and I actually got recommended from a foreign friend who have lived in Japan and what they missed the most about Japan it was Kewpie mayonnaise and I don't know why it is so but this has a really rich flavor and not this very strong sourness. A lot of the mayonnaise that I've eaten outside of Japan tends to be really sour and kind of lacks the depth and I think Kewpie mayonnaise is the best mayonnaise and I would recommend trying this. The next is sesame oil. So this is a Japanese sesame oil. You can of course also get Chinese or Korean sesame oil. They're pretty much the same. I haven't seen big difference. There are some sesame oil that doesn't have this brown color so the difference is that either it's squeezed after roasting or not roasted. If it doesn't have this brown color then that means it is not roasted and it doesn't have that roasty flavor to it. So I would get this kind of brown sesame oil. This just have a really great aroma of roasted sesame and this is just great to put it on top of any dish especially like salad. Then let's get into three Japanese condiments. The first condiment is wasabi. I'm sure you all know about wasabi. So wasabi is one of the only vegetable that only grows in Japan. What it is is Japanese version of horseradish. They kind of look like this when it's raw and you want to grate it when you use it. I haven't seen this raw outside of Japan so you would have to get these kind of tube. This is pretty good but it is really not the same compared to like a real wasabi. So if you ever have a chance to go to Japan try having this real wasabi. It has this really fine sweetness to it. You can use this of course for sushi or sashimi or raw fish but also you can use this in like dressing or like with some other meat or like steak. Wasabi with steak is also good. Yeah you can try to be creative but I usually only use it for sushi. Then the next is Japanese mustard. So of course there's western mustard like kind of like the Kewpie mayonnaise. Japanese mustard doesn't have the sourness. I think a lot of the western mustard have vinegar in them which makes it sour but Japanese mustard don't contain vinegar so it doesn't have that sourness and only that punch. That's what I personally like about this and we use this for tonkatsu or like okonomiyaki sometimes. What else? If you have a nikuman as a dumpling. I also like to eat like a western normal sausage with this Japanese mustard. I think it matches meat better. It doesn't interrupt with the flavor of the meat or whatever ingredients that's in there. That's why I have this and I use this but this has that variation of usage so you don't have to get this. Then our very last is yuzu kosho or here says spicy citrus paste. So I would assume that not many people know about this yuzu kosho. It is made from Japanese green chili and the peel of citrus fruit called yuzu. So this is the same fruit used for ponzu and they use the peel of it and it just has a very fine aroma. It's very difficult to explain. The smell, the aroma is distinctly different from lemon zest or lime zest but it has this really fine subtle aroma of yuzu and then to add the punch of the green chili and this is just a really great mix. I use this quite often if I make yakitori or like roasted chicken. I just put this over it or also I use this in like dressing to give it a punch to it. It just kind of adds a little more extra layer to the flavor. So I think 10 years ago so this was not so big in Japan either but I think somehow it got spread out. It got big and we all now have this. I got this in Germany even. So if you want to kind of give it a try something new I would recommend getting this. So that's that. So I hope you enjoyed the video. I hope it kind of broadened up your horizon and I hope got you some new information about Japanese cuisine, Japanese seasoning, condiments, sauces and next time if you go to Asian shop you can kind of recognize what they are and if you feel like it then you can give it a try. If you like what you saw please hit the like button. If you have any other requests or questions please feel free to write anything in the comments below and don't worry in the next video I'll make sure to make something delicious. Then I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye!