ゆで卵の正しい作り方
Cooking hard-boiled eggs, the right way
It seems everyone's method of cooking a hard-boiled egg is the best way. But here's one that really is.
Hard boiled eggs that have no dis-coloration around the yolk. (Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times / March 28, 2012)
Los Angeles Times
April 7, 2012
Every year around this time millions of eggs are hard-boiled, artistically decorated and then thrown into the garbage. Frankly, that's probably just as well. Because most hard-boiled eggs are pretty terrible. The whites are rubbery, the yolks are pale and mealy and, even worse, surrounded by that sulfur-green ring of shame.
Cooking hard-boiled eggs is easy; cooking them right is not. Unless you know what you're doing. Then it's as close to a foolproof no-brainer as you can get in the kitchen.
Here's what you do: Arrange the eggs in a single layer in a wide pan. Cover them generously with water. Bring them to a boil without covering the pan. Turn off the heat and let them stand for about 15 minutes. That's it. The white is firm but still slightly creamy, the yolk is deep orange and rich.
I learned this method almost 20 years ago the old-fashioned way — from somebody's mom. I'd spent a week or so digging around in cookbooks and talking to cooks to come up with almost a dozen different techniques for hard-cooking eggs. But I wasn't totally happy with any of them.
Then a co-worker laughed and said her mom's way was the best. How often have you heard that? Out of desperation I thought I'd give it a try. And it worked perfectly.
Today, the broad outline of that technique seems pretty well accepted. Google "perfect hard-boiled egg" and the first dozen or so hits will be some variation on it. But it still seems that every writer requires some specific little twist. All of them are unnecessary.
Just stick with the original. When something is so simple and works so well, there's no need to complicate it.
Pizza toppings are normally placed upon a pizza in a specific order, not because it is tidy but because the pizza sauce keeps the pizza dough moist, the cheese then provides a bed for the toppings to rest on and they do not dry out or fall off as the pizza slice is held. More cheese is added to keep the dough moist and the garnish is not cooked so it is applied last after baking. The following list is the traditional order:
And here's a list of popular or some more obscure pizza toppings. Maybe you can get some inspiration out of this list, you may encounter some toppings that you didn't think of before:
Total Time: 35 min
Prep 5 min
Cook 30 min
Yield: 4 dozen bite-size cream puffs
Level: Difficult
Ingredients
1 cup water
3/4 stick butter (6 tablespoons)
1 tablespoon sugar plus 1/8 teaspoon salt (for sweet)
1 teaspoon salt (for savory)
5 3/4 ounces flour
1 cup eggs, about 4 large eggs and 2 whites
Directions
Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
Sushi is great, but it can get expensive when you to go to a restaurant. Sushi rolls can cost you anywhere from $8 to $20 dollars and up in the restaurant! Would you believe you can make it at home for less than three bucks? And, it's easier than you might think.
Kathryn Herod and her partner run their own business, "Well Done Cooking Classes." One of the most popular requests is DIY sushi.
Tips for Making Sushi:
1. The most important thing is the rice. You should buy either called sushi rice or mishiki rice.
2. Measure out the rice you are going to use and wash it about three times. Try to get as much of the starch out as possible so the rice isn't as sticky.
3. Follow the package directions and put it on the stove to cook.
4. When it's done, add the sushi seasoning, which you can get at any grocery store.
5. After it is done cooking, transfer it to a larger bowl so it cools quickly and stops cooking. If it stays compacted, it will get mooshy.
6. In a bowl, mix 1 cup water and 1 tablespoon vinegar.
7. Place a piece of plastic wrap over a sushi mat made out of bamboo.
8. Then put a piece of nori paper and then spread a layer of rice evenly over that. Then you can fill it with your desired ingredients towards the bottom of the nori.
9. Roll the bamboo mat up with all the ingredients inside. Gently roll it and squeeze it to get the lumps out.
10. Take it out of the mat and cut it into eight pieces.
Herod says making your own sushi at home is not just affordable.
"You can really put anything you want to and be creative with your own ingredients. You can use crab, salmon, steak, cream cheese.. whatever you want, you can put it in your roll."
Recipes:
California Sushi Rolls
Philly Sushi Rolls
United States and CanadaNorth Americans use many different terms to describe fried eggs, including:
A style known simply as 'fried' — eggs are fried on both sides with the yolks broken until set or hard.
'Sunny side up' — cooked only on one side; yolk is liquid; the egg white is set. This is often known simply as 'eggs up'. Gently splashing the hot cooking oil or fat on the sunny side uncooked white, i.e., basting, may be done to thoroughly cook the white. Covering the frying pan with a lid during cooking (optionally adding a cover and half-teaspoon of water just before finishing) allows for a less "runny" egg, and is an alternative method to flipping for cooking an egg over easy (this is occasionally called 'sunny side down').
'Over easy' or 'over light', cooked on both sides; the yolk is a light runny and the egg white is fully cooked. "Over easy" fried eggs are also commonly referred to as dippy eggs or dip eggs by Marylanders, by Pennsylvania Dutch persons living in central Pennsylvania and those living around them, mainly due to the practice of dipping toast into the yolk while eating.
'Over medium' — cooked on both sides; the yolk is of medium consistency and the egg white is thoroughly cooked.
'Over well' — cooked on both sides until the yolk has solidified.
'Over hard' or 'hard' — cooked on both sides with the yolk broken until hard.
'Overcook' — cooked on both sides until the egg white and yolk have hardened and started to brown.
トコロテン
Chilling with tokoroten jelly noodles
Friday, Aug. 24, 2012
By MAKIKO ITOH
When temperatures are in the high 30s Celsius you may not feeling like eating much of anything. But even on the hottest, stickiest day a cool, refreshing dish of tokoroten — a kind of noodles made from seaweed — can help revitalize even the most flagging appetite.
Tokoroten is made with agar, a jellifying agent that is extracted from tengusa seaweed. The red seaweed is washed and sun-dried repeatedly until it turns white, then boiled in plain water to jellify it. The liquid is strained through cloth to be clarified, and left to set in square molds at room temperature.
The solidified mass is then put into a tentsuki, a square wooden box that's open at one end with fine thread or wires strung across it in a crisscross pattern, looking rather like a French-fry cutter. The jelly is pushed through the strung end to cut them into long, thin noodles.
Nowadays most tokoroten is just machine-extruded, but purists still use a tentsuki, claiming that it gives the noodles a much better texture.
The glassy tokoroten noodles are served in different ways depending on the region. In most of the country, including the regions surrounding Tokyo, Nagoya and Hiroshima, tokoroten is a savory dish served with nihaizu (a 1:1 mix of rice vinegar and soy sauce) or sanpaizu (rice vinegar, soy sauce and dashi stock). The noodles and sauce are chilled, and served with a little karashi (Japanese mustard), toasted sesame seeds or nori seaweed on top.
Savory tokoroten has almost no calories and is about 98 percent water, with plenty of water-soluble fiber in the agar, and the vinegar sauce helps to awaken your appetite for more nutritious food. It's also surprisingly filling, making it a perfect snack if you're on a diet. In the Tokai (Nagoya/Shizuoka) region you're even supposed to eat it with only one chopstick. In Kansai, however, tokoroten is traditionally served with brown-sugar syrup and fruit, which does up the calorie count.
Tokoroten is such a part of the traditional Japanese summer that it's considered a kigo, a word that indicates the season, in haiku. Both Kobayashi Issa and Matsuo Basho wrote haiku using tokoroten as a metaphor for the flowing, cooling stream of a waterfall.
Kanten, the form of agar that's better known, is actually freeze-dried tokoroten. Kanten has become popular worldwide among vegans recently as an alternative to animal-based gelatin. Unlike gelatin, both kanten and tokoroten stay solid at room temperature, and also have a harder mouthfeel.
Kanten is used to jellify a variety of sweets in Japan, especially mizuyōkan, a sweet adzuki-bean jelly that was traditionally only available in the summer. Cubes of plain kanten jelly are a feature of another summertime snack called anmitsu, together with an (sweet adzuki-bean paste), mitsu (sugar syrup), shiratama (soft mochi dumplings) and fruit. Both tokoroten and anmitsu can be enjoyed at an amamidokoro or traditional Japanese tea and sweets house, or bought ready-to eat at any supermarket.
Makiko Itoh is the author of "The Just Bento Cookbook" (Kodansha USA). She writes about bentō lunches at www.justbento.com and about Japanese cooking and more at www.justhungry.com.
JAPANESE KITCHEN
Bang your gong for dorayaki, Doraemon's favorite snack
Friday, Oct. 26, 2012 The Japan Times
By MAKIKO ITOH
Traditional Japanese confections, or wagashi, can take a little getting used to for Western palates: The sticky-gooey texture of mochi (pounded rice) and the sweet an (bean paste) filling that are often used are quite different from most European-style cakes and cookies. But one snack that may suit the wagashi beginner is dorayaki.
A dorayaki is a palm-size treat comprising a sweet filling sandwiched between two round cakes that are similar to American pancakes.
Out of favor for some years like all wagashi, dorayaki have become quite trendy again as part of an overall wave of nostalgia for foods from the Showa Era (1926-1989). Manga and anime fans may know it best as the favorite snack of Doraemon, the blue robotic cat with the magical pocket.
The name "dorayaki" comes from the Japanese word for "gong": dora. This is usually believed to be simply due to its resemblance to the circular metal percussive disk, albeit in miniature. (The yaki part of the name means "cooked on dry heat.") But there is another, more romantic theory for its origin that involves a legendary hero called Saito no Musashibo Benkei, sidekick of Minamoto no Yoshitsune.
The story goes that once when he was seriously injured, Benkei was taken care of by an elderly couple who served him a little round cake cooked on the surface of a gong, thus creating the first dorayaki.
Although the origins of the dorayaki are believed to be ancient, it only took its current form in the early part of the 20th century. During the Edo Period (1603-1867) a dorayaki was a folded-up cake, like an omelette or pasty rather than a round sandwich, and the dough was much thinner.
It was first made as a sandwich using fluffy cakelike pancakes in 1914 by a confectionery in Ueno, Tokyo, called Usagiya (Rabbit House), whose owner took the idea from another confection that has its roots in Europe, the kasutera or castella cake. Like kasutera, the batter used to make a dorayaki pancake has some very Japanese ingredients in it, such as mirin (sweet rice wine) and even a touch of soy sauce. The main sweetening ingredient is usually honey, although sugar is used sometimes too.
While the usual dorayaki filling is tsubu-an (sweetened and mashed adzuki bean), in recent years all kinds of different fillings have become popular. One of these alternatives is called a nama (fresh or raw) dorayaki, referring to the use of fresh cream — in this case, whipped cream with some tsubu-an mixed in. Other fillings include chocolate cream, sweet potato cream and chestnut cream — the type that comes on top of a Mont Blanc cake, another only-in-Japan confection.
Making your own dorayaki with the filling of your choice is quite easy, especially if you use one of the instant pancake mixes that are so popular in Japan. Just add a couple of tablespoons of honey, a tablespoon of mirin and a drop of soy sauce to the batter. Cook on a nonstick surface such as an electric griddle, and fill when cooked with any sweet, spreadable filling. My favorite is Nutella with sliced strawberries, for an intriguing East-meets-West snack.
Makiko Itoh is the author of "The Just Bento Cookbook" (Kodansha USA). She writes about bentō lunches at www.justbento.com and about Japanese cooking and more at www.justhungry.com.
