-Shop cute Japanese products and cool products from Japan. This cute blog is about Japanese kawaii, kawaii Japan, kawaii fashion, Japanese pop culture and more. It's a kawaii blog from Japan, Japan blog in English by a Japanese girl.

My friend Chika mainly contributes to Japanese foods posts by sharing photos she took.
Dashi means soup stock in Japanese. It’s useful as a base of most of Japanese dishes. There are some ways and combination of ingredients but I think using dried bonito flakes (“katsuobushi” in Japanese) and kelp (“konbu” in Japanese) is most orthodox and popular in Japan.

1: First, prepare 1 litter of water, 7g of kelp, 40g of dried bonito flakes (rough one especially designed for dashi base, but not the fine one we eat on top of tofu for example, as garnish.)

2: Wipe the surface of the kelp roughly. Don’t wash in water!! That will lose taste!

3: Put water and the kelp into a deep pot and leave it overnight. If you don’t have much time allowance, then 2-3 hours maybe OK.

4: The kelp is going to be swollen by absorbing water.

5: Simmer the pot over low heat.

6: Take out the kelp before the water starts boiling. (Otherwise, gooey material will come out of the kelp and that is left in the water.)

7: Add dried bonito flakes.

8: Simmer again and turn off the heat when the water starts boiling.

9: Place kitchen paper or kitchen towel over strainer and strain the dashi.

10: Done!!

Dashi can be used for miso soup, Japanese styled stew, takikomi gohan (ingredients like mushroom, meat or fish and vegetables steamed with rice) or tamagoyaki and etc. In other words, most of Japanese dishes cannot be fixed without dashi. However do you think all of the Japanese nowadays take all these steps to make dashi from scratch after we come back from work? The answer is NO. Of course, dashi made from scratch tastes better but many people (like me!) want to short-cut the process by making use of dashi powder (dashi stock) instead just like the one in the following picture. ^ ^;

Or some people make use of dashi pack, which is just like a tea bag. We can put kelp and dried bonito flakes inside, simmer them, and just take it out. I don’t know if such is available in supermarkets or dollar shop in your area, though… ^ ^;

Next, we’ll show you how to make Tamagoyaki using dashi!!
Stay tuned.