If you are into Japanese knives and cuisine, you are going to enjoy Chef Hiromitsu Nozaki’s new book called Japanese Kitchen Knives. Filled with everything you want to know about how Japanese knives are made, how they are to be used and how to use them plus delicious recipes showing you how to make dishes using the techniques including this recipe for Deep Fried Fluke.

Chef Nozaki starts by providing the important basics to Japanese knives including cutting posture, knife anatomy and knife control. He then looks at the three main knives used in Japanese cooking - the usuba, the deba and the yanagiba. Each knife is used for different cuts and he explains in detail with gorgeous photos of how they should be accomplished.

He shows you how to make paper thin cuts with Usuba by using a rotary peeling technique as well as filleting a flute into five pieces with the Deba knive as he does in this recipe. At the end of the book he explains sharpening, maintenance, how to purchase and movement of the blade.

Deep Fried Hirame Nuggets
Serves 2

This recipe calls for the fluke to already be filleted and that’s most likely how you will find it in your supermarket or fish market. But let’s say you are down at the beach and you catch some fluke or you have the opportunity to buy whole fish rather than already filleted.  Chef Nozaki’s book, Japanese Kitchen Knives will show you in detail exactly how to remove the head, scales and organs, remove the fillets and then the belly bones.

Ingredients:

2 medium fluke fillets
4 tablespoons soy sauce
1 teaspoon grated ginger
Potato starch or corn starch
Vegetable oil for deep frying
4 asparagus spears

How to Prepare at Home

Preheat the vegetable oil to 340℉ in a deep fryer or big pot.

Cut the fillets into 1 ounce pieces. Combine the soy sauce and grated ginger in a small bowl and place the fish pieces into the bowl and douse with the soy-ginger mixture.

Dredge the fish nuggets in the potato starch and deep fry for about 4 minutes until crisp and golden brown. Transfer to a plate lined with paper towels to drain any excess oil.

Deep fry the asparagus without flouring for 30 seconds and drain.

Serve immediately.

Related Topics

Novice2Pro Interview with Chef Hiromitsu Nozaki

Rigatoni with Sausage and Fresh Mozzarella Recipe

Last night my wife took my youngest to knitting class so my 11 year old and I decided to prepare a delicious pasta dinner together. I didn’t want to go to the grocery store and wanted to finish up some leftovers like the link of cooked Italian sweet sausage from Sunday and that 1/2 egg of fresh mozzarella cheese.

We came up with this simple pasta dish on the fly.  In the time it took us to cook the pasta, we were able to prep and prepare a simply delicious sauce. My daughter picked out the mezzi rigatoni from the pantry but a penne pasta would have worked just as well. I wouldn’t use spaghetti or linguini for this dish because of the sauce.  Heartier pastas work well with heartier sauces, and this was definitely a hearty sauce.

Sausage - we used some leftover sausage that I pan roasted in our wood burning oven but I think you could use fresh sausage too. In fact, if I had not already cooked the sausage, I would have used fresh but removed it from the casing and browned it up a bit.

Brown Stock - brown stock, also called Glace de Viande, is a combination of beef and veal stock that is used by professional chefs for making soups, stews and sauces. It’s one of the first things culinary students learn to make in culinary school. I always have on hand a commercial brown stock reduction called Glace de Viande Gold that comes in a highly concentrated reduction. I used approximately 1/2 ounce of this product with 1/2 cup of pasta water but you could use a homemade or commercial beef stock or even chicken stock if that’s all you have in your pantry.

Mezzi Rigatoni - Mezzi means half-sized so mezzi rigatoni is a half-sized rigatoni pasta. Rigatoni, one of the most popular forms of pasta in Italy, is a tube shaped pasta, larger that penne but without the angled cut on the ends. The translation for riga is lined and rigati is translated as ridged so I guess you can say rigatoni is lined with ridges.

Ingredients

1/2 box (1/2 pound)  of mezzi rigatoni (or hearty pasta shape of your choice)
2 tablespoons of extra virgin olive oil
1 large shallot or 1 small onion
2 cloves of garlic
1 link of Italian sweet sausage (see note)
10 pitted kalamata olives
1/2 large egg fresh mozzarella
salt & pepper
1/2 cup brown stock - glace de viande

How to Prepare

Start by heating up a pot of salted water for the pasta. Be sure to check out my pasta cooking tips.  When the water is at a boil, add the pasta and cook until al dente.

Next, get all your ingredients ready. This is called mise en place. Start by finely chopping the shallot or onion, mincing the garlic, slicing the sausage and slicing the kalamata olives.  Cut the fresh mozzarella into small pieces.

Heat up a small sauce pan and when hot, add the olive oil. When the olive oil is hot but not smoking, add the onion and cook on medium-high heat for a couple of minutes.

Add the garlic, being careful not to let it burn. I will shake the pan or use a wooden spoon to prevent this from happening. I let that cook for about a minute and then added the cooked sausage and kalamata olives.

I let this cook for a minute or two and then add the beef or brown stock. Let this reduce by about half.  I also like to add a little of the water the pasta is cooking in because it has some starch in it from the pasta.  It doesn’t take much—maybe 1/4 to 1/2 cup. This starch combined with the cheese and olive oil will help form an emulsion to thicken the sauce and help make sure that the sauce sticks to the pasta. Taste the sauce, and season with salt and pepper.

When the pasta is perfectly cooked “to the tooth,” drain it and add it to a serving bowl. Add the cut up mozzarella cheese and then the sauce. The heat from the pasta and the sauce should melt the fresh mozzarella.

Serve immediately in warmed bowls.

My 11 year old daughter enjoyed this dish so much she went back for a fourth helping. Simple to prepare with ingredients we already had on hand.  I encourage you to look in your refrigerator, see what’s leftover, and make your own quick pasta sauce.

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Baking Questions You Want Answered

I get lots of baking questions from you guys so I decided to answer a few of them in bunches again. Some of them are straightforward, but like sometimes you get a really “interesting” question like one of the inquiries in this batch. I try to answer these as best I can, usually with the help of Pastry Chef Jenni Field, a graduate of a top baking and pastry school.  Jenni is one of the most knowledgeable people I know when it comes to baking and pastries and has a wonderful web site at www.pastrychefonline.com.

As much as I try to give helpful responses to your questions, I am always interested in what you have to say and often, you have better answers than I do and I appreciate your help. In fact, the last question in this post is a correction about my key lime pie recipe that I will be fixing.

Can Kitchen Smells Get Into a Cake

Robin contacted me and asked,

Can a potent/hot aroma alter the taste of a cake being prepared?  For example, if chilies are cooking (they are  so potent I have the leave the kitchen!) in the same kitchen where a cake is being mixed together (at the same time), can the cake batter absorb any of the aroma?  Could the aroma possibly alter the taste of the cake?

I’ve never experienced such a thing, but that could be because I’ve never been roasting hot peppers while mixing cake batter.  As most of you who have been reading my blog or visited my site, I’m not much of a baker. My 11 year old daughter is getting interested in baking so you will see more recipes posted based on what she is making in the future.

Having said that, smells are physical properties. We smell tiny airborne molecules of whatever is giving off the scent.  From that standpoint, it stands to reason that some of the volatile components of peppers and other “hot” foods could waft about in a kitchen and settle on/in your cake batter.

I think it would further depend on the type of cake you’re mixing.  Fats readily absorb flavors, so a butter-heavy cake would most likely pick up more flavors than a leaner cake, such as angel food.  I can say that all sorts of scents waft around in commercial kitchens - roasting lobster shells being a particularly pervasive and pungent one and pastry chefs continue with dessert production in spite of it.  If you have any concerns about flavor transfer, I would recommend that you don’t do both tasks at the same time.  Hope this helps.

Help With Coconut Macaroon Recipe

Resi wrote:

Hi RG!
I have a coconut macaroon recipe that I’ve been having troubles with.  I’ve been cooking it for years but have never really perfected it. Usually I get different results every time i cook it. What I would like to achieve is a layer of chewy baked macaroon top with the bottom, a layer of custard not unlike flan or crème brulee.

I bake them in really small paper patty pans and they come out like this : Sometimes I get the result I would like to achieve, other times the macaroon is dry and the custard layer would not be there and it is hollow at the bottom.

These are the ingredients I generally use:desiccated coconut, eggs, condensed milk, vanilla, butter, molasses.

Combined, I bake them in a pre-heated 180 degreess oven for 15 minutes.

Are there ingredients in my list that I should exclude? Help, where do I go wrong?

I asked Chef Jenni for help with this one. Here is what she had to say:

This is strictly speculation since I’ve never made macaroons with these specific ingredients.  Since Robin doesn’t give the amounts for any of the ingredients, I’m going to assume that these guys are mostly dessicated coconut and egg with the other ingredients there for body and additional flavor/richness.  If so, there are a few variables.

One would be the weather.  When working with an egg-heavy recipe, the amount of humidity will certainly affect the final product.  Low humidity will equal a crisp outcome and high humidity equals chewy.  So, that’s something to think about.

Another variable that the baker has more control over is mixing time.  I would suggest that over mixing yielded the hollow-bottomed result.  Next time, keep track of how long and how quickly - you’re mixing and write it down.  If the results are hollow bottomed, dry macaroons, decrease the mixing time.

Eventually, you’ll hit the magic speed/time combination. Then, assuming that humidity isn’t the deciding factor, you’ll always get your desired results by mixing for that specified amount of time..  My gut is, if you’re looking for chewy/custardy macaroons, you’d want to mix on no more than medium speed for a fairly minimal time.

I will be interested to hear how things turn out and would also really like to see the full recipe and the procedure sometime.

As to the last question Resi asks, if she she should exclude any ingredients to get the results she is after, I wouldn’t alter/omit any of the ingredients.  I would look to the mixing speed/time first and then to oven temperature.  And, for my part, I’d probably add a very healthy pinch of salt into the mix!

How Many Key Limes Does It Take For 1/2 Cup of Lime Juice?

Susan wrote and said:

I absolutely love your key lime pie recipe.  I only have one comment…  For 1/2 Cup of KEY lime juice, it requires 12-15 KEY limes.  I can’t help but think your suggestion of 3-4 limes refers to regular limes, hardly the same thing.  There is NO SUBSTITUTE for key limes, they are quite unique.  And, now, I must go make my pie!

Yes, Susan is absolutely right.  Key limes are very small, about the size of a pecan in the shell.  It would take quite a few to yield 1/2 cup of juice so I’m guessing 12 - 15 looks right.

Key limes generally are generally only grown in Mexico now, and they can be pretty hard to find in the States.  I  used Nellie and Joe’s Key Lime Juice rather than trying to juice a ton of hard-to-find key limes.  For folks who can’t find key limes or key lime juice, in a pinch you can substitute Persian (”regular”) limes, but the flavor won’t be as sharp.  If you have some citric acid, you can add a pinch of that, and it might get you closer to an actual key lime flavor.