This Japanese food is both exotic and familiar. It’s both home-cooked-satisfying and party-pretty.
Steamed Chicken Breast with Golden Kimizu Sauce
Tori now Sakamushi Kimizu-zoe
serves 2, generously (see note at the end)
page 425
- two 5″ square kombu (kelp seaweed—the sort you make dashi with)
- 2 boned chicken breast halves, with skin attached
- salt
- 1/4 cup sake
- 1 lemon, sliced thin
- Kimizu sauce
- a few drops of tamari
- a dozen spears of asparagus, cut away the dry ends, peel off the tough skin on the bottom end, and cut them to fit your steaming dish
Cover the bottom of a metal or glass dish which will fit into your steamer with the kombu. Sprinkle with a little water.
Place the breast halves on the kombu. Pierce the skins with sharp bamboo skewer or a knife point. I’ve made this dish with skinless boneless breasts and it is much better and moister when you leave the skin on; remember, you are not adding butter or oil to cook with and you can always take the skin off when you serve.
Sprinkle with salt and rub it into the chicken. Let this sit for about 15 minutes.
Sprinkle the chicken with the sake. Cover the chicken with the lemon slices.
Get your steamer up to high steam production and start your rice and miso soup going.
Put the chicken into the steamer and cook over high heat for about 10 to 15 minutes—check that the chicken is cooked with a meat thermometer.
Remove the chicken and asparagus from the steamer. Arrange on plates—it’s easier to eat if you slice the breasts, but they should be tender enough to eat with only chopsticks…
Garnish with the kimizu sauce.
Note: In the U.S. plates, bowls, drinking glasses, coffee mugs and chickens seem to be “super-sized!” The 2 chicken breasts I bought were huge! They easily filled a 9″ cake dish! A whole pound!!! Obviously, that is more than a normal person would want to eat in one meal—8 oz. per person is very generous: remember, these have not bones, so “serves 2″ means that there will indeed be leftovers. Luckily, this recipe is easily adapted to leftovers (or as I would say: cooking that you plan ahead).
Recently, I wanted to update my 20 year old cheap dishware and now find that standard dinner plates are 11″ or 12″ in diameter. My old ones are 10″ across. The latest salad plates are 9” across!!! My regular drinking glasses used to be 12 ounces, but I’ve been replacing them and frankly, I need more cupboard space for the 16 ounce too large oversized ones… end of rant!!!
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Tess's Japanese Kitchen 
Hi Tess, This looks so lovely and delicious! It must have such a perfect ‘spring’ fresh taste with the asparagus and lemon in there. I’m going to give it a shot one nite this week! In your meal picture what do you have above the miso soup? Those umeboshi are making my mouth water : ) yum.
Thanks for the inspiration!
Eileen
Eileen,
Thanks. I could have been a bit more artistic with the sauce. By the way, you can make the sauce a day ahead so you can concentrate on making just the chicken.
The miso soup was made with nibon dashi, a mixture of light miso and red miso, and has Chinese chives, pink kamaboko, and something I’m not sure what it’s called. It says on the package that it’s wheat gluten, but in the past I’ve used fu which is dried wheat gluten. This was white, sort of like fresh pasta, and slices were shaped like flowers–the dried fu is usually shaped and colored and it floats. Unfortunately, the “fu” and the fish sank out of sight and the darker miso made them almost invisible.
Oh, those are not umeboshi. They are just some cherry tomatoes that needed using, with pepper. In the other corner are some carrot tseukemono, but my picture was blurred so I haven’t posted about it yet.
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