Sunday, June 1, 2008

Hijiki and Carrot Salad


Since I had pledged to try a new vegetable each week, to familiarize myself with Japanese produce, I knew eventually I'd want to try some sea vegetables. While wandering through the fish section last week at the supermarket, I found packages of fresh hijiki, and decided to have a go at carrot and hijiki salad. I found the recipe for this in Washoku, and was interested in it, as the author mentions it keeps well for bentos. In fact, she said it would keep happily for 5 days in the refrigerator, which is just the sort of side dish I need when I drag myself out of bed every morning, and start scrounging to fill the lunch boxes. (Although recently, I've taken to diagramming the bento-breakdown on our kitchen whiteboard to help jog my memory for side dishes - some smaller leftovers tend to get lost in the back of our fridge and end up in the garbage on Sunday-purge-the-fridge-day).

I made the salad with julienned carrot and fresh hijiki. The recipe calls for dried, reconstituted hijiki, but I'm not sure if that is because the cookbook assumes that fresh hijiki would likely be unavailable for her readers. It's not really a salad, but more of a braise I suppose, as the carrot and hijiki are simmered in dashi, but it looks like a salad, so that's what I'll call it. The vegetables are sauteed briefly with a bit of oil, then sake is added, and sauteed until it evaporates. Then, after adding about 125 ml of dashi, you cook it covered, on a low heat. You cook it until the liquid is almost gone, then add a tablespoon or so of sugar, plus another 125 ml of dashi. That should
be cooked down again, and finally the soy sauce is added, and cooked for another minute or so. It should then be cooled in the pan with the lid on, to allow the flavours to mingle.

When I made this, I hadn't read that final step, and was a little disappointed with the salad - I thought the carrot and hijiki were too separate - and I thought the hijiki really overwhelmed the whole dish. But when I tried it the next day in my bento, I found that the flavours had settled, and it tasted like more than the sum of its parts. It looked so pretty in the bento as well - the orange and black provided a nice colour contrast with the green bean side dishes I had this week. When I mentioned to some of my co-workers I had made this, they were surprised- I guess it's a pretty old-school Japanese side-dish.

Next week, I want to make a few of the side dishes Maki has featured over on just bento - her spicy miso asparagus looks incredible!

7 comments:

Hiroyuki said...

Fresh hijiki... That sounds great! I have never used it before. Hijiki no nimono (simmered hijiki) is a favorite "jobi sai" of mine. Kiriboshi (cut and dried) daikon no nimono is another.
I'm curious, how long did it take to make your "hijiki and carrot salad"?

nakji said...

Is fresh hijiki unusual? I found it near the fish section. It took about ten or fifteen minutes of simmering. Since the recipe called for dried hijiki, it just said to simmer until the hijiki was tender - but it started off tender! So I just added the dashi in stages and simmered it until it was absorbed.

Hiroyuki said...

Personally, I have never seen it, or maybe I haven't looked far enough.
Anyway, there can be no "fresh" hijiji at the supermarket, because hijiki is simmered for four hours before being shipped, according to the TV show, Tameshite Gatten. When raw, hijiki is inedible.

nakji said...

Wow, I wonder what I had...aside from the "hijiki" in hiregana, all I could read was the kanji for "fresh" on a gold sticker up in the corner. Tasted great, though - in fact - it got better every day in the fridge.

Hiroyuki said...

Don't worry.
According to
http://www.tbs.co.jp/hanamaru/tokumaru/t080324.html
yours looks like "kama age" hijiki.
When raw, hijiki is greenish brown.
I'll look for the same kind of hijiki the next time I go shopping!

nakji said...

Yeah, this stuff was so black, it blew the rest of the picture out, and made my husband cranky because he couldn't get a decent shot. I left it, because I thought it looked cool. I hope you find it, because it's quite tasty!

Hiroyuki said...

Follow-up:
Today, I went to a bigger supermarket and found packs of fresh hijiki. I looked at the back of one pack and found it was dried hijiki that was reconstituted (乾燥戻しひじき).