This professional technique
Usui pea in a light kuzu broth, shrimp shinjo, baby greens, carrot, udo, mochi
COOKING INGREDIENTS
This professional technique
FREE
Ingredients
- Shrimp shinjo
Raw fish paste
150 g
Kuruma prawn (30g)
15 whole
Egg-yolk emulsion with shrimp oil
60 g
Yamato yam
50 g
Usui pea paste
100 g
First dashi
1 shō (1.8 L)
Mochi
5 pieces
How to make Usui pea in a light kuzu broth, shrimp shinjo, baby greens, carrot, udo, mochi
How to make Usui pea in a light kuzu broth, shrimp shinjo, baby greens, carrot, udo, mochi
① Remove the back vein from the kuruma shrimp, blanch it just enough to bring out its color, and drop it into ice water; separate the head from the body. Heat the heads together with grapeseed oil to make shrimp oil, and let it cool.
② Peel the shrimp bodies completely, cut them, chop them coarsely with a knife, put them in the mortar (atari-bachi), and salt them.
③ Grind raw shrimp flesh in the mortar, add the egg-yolk-and-oil emulsion made with the shrimp oil and grated Yamato yam, combine it with the shrimp from before, shape into balls, and steam.
④ Boil the usui peas (a light-green pea cultivar) in salted water, peel off their skins, add primary dashi (ichiban dashi), blend to a purée, and pass it through a fine sieve.
⑤ Arrange the shrimp shinjo, vegetables, and mochi in the bowl.
⑥ Add the usui pea purée to the primary dashi, season with salt and light soy sauce, thicken it with kuzu starch dissolved in dashi, and pour it into the bowl.
Want to check the seasoning blend before you cook?
COMMENT
For a clear-soup course, it is important that the dashi is properly drawn. At our restaurant, for first-extraction dashi, we add aged rishiri kombu and ma-kombu to water, let it soak for six hours or more, and then heat it. Once it boils, we add a splash of cold water to lower the temperature to around 90°C, add bonito flakes, then strain it — that is our first-extraction dashi.
Usu-kuzu-jitate refers to a clear-soup course finished by adding kuzu starch dissolved in water at the end, to give it a light thickening; because Yoshino in Nara was a famous production area for kuzu, it is also called yoshino-jitate.
We added usui-pea paste to the first-extraction dashi to finish it in a warbler-green color, serving it as spring-appropriate work.
When making the egg-yolk-and-oil emulsion base, salad oil is normally used, but this time we used shrimp oil instead, made by sautéing shrimp heads. By using about 150 ml of shrimp oil per egg yolk, the shrimp flavor is firmly added to the emulsion, and it also gains richness.