Oden is a Japanese hot-pot dish in which an assortment of fish-cakes and dumplings are cooked in dashi, kombu stock, and/or chicken stock, with other ingredients including daikon, konyaku, hard-boiled eggs, and potatoes. The delicacies you might choose for your oden hot-pot include hanpen, atsuma-age, iwashi tsumire, chikua, shrimp balls, kagosei ika maki, sankaku ganmo ichimasa, tako bei, konnyaku, shirataki, kamaboko…
Autumnal weather means hot food is once again inviting. My daughter and I went shopping for ingredients to make a Japanese hot pot on the evening before she returned to California. The hot-pot dish is called “oden” in which an assortment of fish-cakes and dumplings are cooked in dashi, kombu stock, or chicken stock, with other ingredients including daikon, konyaku, and potatoes. It was great fun to see the variety of fish and seafood cakes or dumplings; we couldn’t resist buying too many because they looked so interesting.https://1tess.wordpress.com https://1tess.wordpress.com https://1tess.wordpress.com Hanpen: simmered or boiled fish cake. Ingredients: Pollack, water, egg white, potato starch, sugar, salt, rice wine, and some chemical stabilizers. This is a soft and fluffy snow white cake of puréed fish mixed with grated mountain yam (in this case: potato starch) and whipped to add air bubbles. The mixture is…
Today my daughter and I went to a local Japanese/Asian store to find ingredients to make our oden. There were packages of pre-selected ingredients assembled for making oden (including a powder to make the broth). But using the recipe below as a quide, we choose some interesting-looking things: konnyaku, fried fish balls, sardine dumplings (iwashi tsumire), chikuwa, and narutomaki. Mr. Tess kindly went to another store to find hanpen which is described so charmingly in the book.
Shopping for oden ingredients was fun! My daughter and I chose some interesting things to try.
Tess's Japanese Kitchen 