I’m really obsessed with home style Japanese cooking these days, and I have a very strong feeling that my health condition will improve if I master it.
I watch a lot of YT videos, but it’s not the same as having a cooking teacher by my side to demonstrate cutting techniques, etc.
My city and various volunteer groups offer low-cost cookery classes a few times a year, but they tend to focus on things like wagashi (Japanese sweets) and various forms of sushi, neither of which are consumed on a regular basis in most Japanese households. I want to get to grips with really basic stuff, such as miso soup, egg roll, and hotpot dishes.
How did you do it?
29 comments
I used the recipes from JustOneCookbook and sometimes modified it to my tastes. The more I cooked and practiced, the better I got at it!
Are those cookery classes aimed specifically at foreigners by any chance?
There are plenty of cooking classes that teach everyday staple dishes but they’re in Japanese.
Google 料理教室 + your area and you should find some options.
But you don’t really need to attend a class to learn how to make basic homecooking style food. It’s generally pretty simple and easy. Just look up some recipes online and try them out. If it doesn’t turn out great the first time, reflect on what went wrong and practice it again.
The website [JustOneCookbook](https://www.justonecookbook.com/)is a fantastic English language recipe site. As well as easy recipes, she also has pages detailing the basics like what pantry staples and tools to have, basic knife skills, cooking techniques etc.
I have a Japanese cook who does it for me.
I buy pre-packaged receipees from Muji or alike – add water, put in some fresh veggies. meanwhile rice is cooking from the rice cooker.
In addition to the justonecookbook I also learned lots from http://www.justhungry.com and http://www.justbento.com.
Your favourite translation app may also help with recipes on packages. Quite a few raw ingredients come with one or two.
On a side note,
> and I have a very strong feeling that my health condition will improve if I master it.
is rather a dangerous assumption to make if you don’t ensure your diet is well-balanced, regardless of whether it is Japanese or not.
If you can read Japanese (or can use some sort of translation app), I use cookpad all the time. It’s basically a place for Japanese home cooks / housewives to share their recipes so it’s usually easy to make home cooking. The search function is pretty good too, you can plug in what veggies you have for example and it’ll show you a recipe with those keywords.
I just… read recipes on cookpad and went from there. First I follow them to the T, then I start experimenting by deviating from them.
I’ve learned a lot from my wife who learned from her mom. I make the tamagoyaki most of the time, these days, and make miso soup for the family, too. The last couple of years my wife has been trying a lot of new recipes and techniques that she gets from a popular YouTube channel called Koh Kentetsu Kitchen. He kinda modernizes some of the techniques for classic Japanese home cooking and a lot of his recipes have become staples in our house. If you can understand Japanese it’s pretty good and he has a lot of subs so I am assuming a lot of households are watching him.
If u know any japanese maybe u can sign up for abc cooking class which may be available nearby you.
I got lots of ideas from watching imamu room. She makes bentos for her husband and each food she makes is a small portion and quickly made in the morning. I would just skip all the ones that involve deep or shallow frying bc dealing with all the battering and oil just is a pain.
As for cutting techniques… just take your time and cut carefully. No need to be fast or make beautiful tiny pieces just give it a try. The important thing is making something you can taste, and at that point you will know what you need to improve for next time.
As for miso soup, boil water, add dashi powder and a couple spoons of miso paste then turn off the heat and stir until dissolved. That is already a miso soup. I like sprinkling dried wakame from the supermarket for the iodine and flavor. If you’re feeling up to it then adding tofu while boiling the water will get you some protein as well.
Egg roll is kind of difficult and i recommend learning how to fry eggs and boil them the way you like them first. Once you’ve mastered them try scrambling and omelets, and then finally rolling.
For hotpots they sell bags of the soup in various flavors and bags of prepped veggies at the supermarket, just throw them in a pot with your favorite meat and some tofu and you’ve got a hotpot.
It’s awesome that you have decided to try cooking, now all thats left is buying some ingredients and throwing it in a pot. So don’t let anything stop you!
In my case, by starting with easy cookbooks like [https://www.amazon.co.jp/めんどうなことしないうまさ極みレシピ-激烈美味しいストレスなし103品-ジョーさん%E3%80%82/dp/4046047429](https://www.amazon.co.jp/めんどうなことしないうまさ極みレシピ-激烈美味しいストレスなし103品-ジョーさん%E3%80%82/dp/4046047429) and then replacing ingredients by their “real version” little by little
Cooking with dog, bless their heart
@CHEFSLABO
On YouTube, he makes many Japanese recipes!
Just YouTube? I didn’t have much of a problem and asked a Japanese person if I made a mistake
I can’t cook Japanese food. But I did get some great feedback from my Japanese friends when I cooked for them. Apparently, nabe does not use a standard garden salad as a base. Lettuce and cucumbers etc, are generally a nono for example.
I highly recommend a book called The Encyclopedia of Japanese cooking by Katsuyo Kobayashi. As far as I know, it’s only in Japanese, but it has something like 2000 recipes in it. It’s basically the Julia Childs Joy of Cooking for Japanese food.
I’m sure you can use the Google translate app on your phone if you get a copy. Her recipes are pretty easy to follow. For things like tamagoyaki, though, I think that just takes a lot of practice to make a nice one.
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Edit: The Japanese title if you want to search for it:
# 小林カツ代料理の辞典
If you’re in the Tokyo metro area, there are a couple of large English language bookstores. The Kinoukuniya in Shinjuku has an absolutely massive selection of cookbooks, with big chunk of them being for home Japanese cooking.
Also at various bookstores, you can find a Japanese learning section. While most of it is JLPT stuff, there are usually a few dual-language books about culture available, and I’ve seen cookbooks among them from time to time. I actually bought my first dual-language Japanese cookbook this way.
I just learn from youtube because it’s free and easy. If your problem is that you’re lacking very basic cooking skills in the first place, you can start building your confidence by making easy ones first. Miso soup should be quite easy – it’s just boiling water and adding ingredients. Nametake (enoki mushroom in shoyu and mirin), stir fries, ramen eggs (boiled eggs marinated in shoyu mix) are also not hard to make. Egg rolls require some skill and patience – I still mess it up since I’m impatient lol.
NHK has a great collection of recipes and how to.
Your city as in your 区？You might want to look up the workshops offered by neighbouring cities and areas, they usually welcome anyone who signs up and pays the fee. I used to live in a city with a population of 20 000 people and our city hall offered amazing classes on all kinds of food, traditional Japanese, Korean etc., and they also let us register and run a cooking club 🙂
I like the Chef’s Labo YouTube channel, he explains everything really well and answers questions in the comments. My partner is Japanese but used to stick to a few favourite recipes when cooking at home, so we’ve been trying to learn a new recipe from the channel each week. My favourites are Hayashi rice and curry from scratch!
It sounds like you’re kind of hung up on doing it exactly right instead of just doing it.
The best way to learn is to fail over and over and learn from your mistakes.
Books and japanese apps
Strangely enough, I used to go to a kid’s house to teach English once or twice a week. She was half, but her dad split and left for America (he was a total idiot, got kicked out the military for stealing a car… like wtf dude). Anyway, I was hired by mum and grandma in an effort to maintain the kid’s English.
Her mum was an unbelievably skilled nail technician and also happened to be an AMAZING cook. She would make me dinner every time I went and would also do my nails lol. She taught me so much about cooking (and life in Japan in general tbh), and you’re right, having a hands-on person to show you what they cook on a daily basis makes a huge, huge difference.
I don’t know how viable it is for you, but perhaps there is a friend/acquaintance/friend of a friend who would appreciate English lessons in exchange for cooking lessons? Just a thought!
When I first got here and knew barely 3 words in Japanese, I bought 2 recipe books with traditional Japanese home style dishes. It had Japanese and English side to side for study purposes, so not only was I learning to make the food, but also learning to read and spell the ingredients and instructions that would come in handy for future Japanese only recipes. Back then, Cooking With Dog was the best channel on YT, and I still return to their gyoza recipe whenever I make it. My husband says it’s the best gyoza he’s ever tasted. Currently I love Orange Page and Croissant recipe books, but I usually search things up online now. There are a lot of great websites full of recipes. I think the one I end up going to most is sirogohan.com. Lots of great basic recipes and a nice, clean format (not cluttered all to shit like cookpad has become).
Since we live with my husband’s mom, she was my first instructor in Japanese cooking for me. The first year she was still the main cook in our kitchen with me being her apprentice, but I’ve gradually assumed her position and now I only ask her to make salads or to assist me if I can’t make it home in time to cook (we only eat dinner together, otherwise we eat whatever and whenever we want separately). Nowadays I usually check Kurashiru or Delish Kitchen apps for some inspirations and basic how-to’s, and just improvise the rest.
I lived in the countryside where I couldn’t buy non-Japanese groceries, and bought a bilingual book (some of which is reproduced on [this website](http://www.shejapan.com/stnsp/stnspmenu.html))
If you have basic cooking skills, you can cook anything from any country as long as you have the right recipe. I learned just from watching my parents and people online cook, then trying to cook for myself. I’m a third culture kid and my mum in particular likes to cook anything without a recipe, so you pick up the thoughts behind techniques and flavors real quick. For Japanese recipes in particular, I use Cookpad and have a few Japanese recipe books for additional ideas.
Kurashiru and Delish Kitchen.
buy sugar, sake, mirin, and syoyu and you can cook just about anything provided you have the veggies, noodles, and meat. How is your cooking aside from Japanese food?
Can you cook by “ear”? The best way is to get invited to people’s homes for a meal. The host would probably love to show some pointers.