Dashi

Recipe by: Sonoko Sakai
Adaptation and headnote by: Leslie Brenner

Adapted from Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors by Sonoko Sakai, the recipe for bonito-and-kombu dashi — the broth that’s the basis for much of Japanese cooking — varies little from cook to cook. The ingredients are always the same: kombu (a type of dried seaweed), katsuobushi (bonito flakes) and water. What not every recipe tells you is that after you strain the kombu and bonito flakes out of the broth, you can use them again for a secondary dashi; Sakai provides instructions for both. In Japanese, Sakai tells us in her headnote, primary dashi is ichiban dashi, literally “number one dashi.” The recipe for the secondary dashi (niban dashi) follows the first.

I love keeping dashi around; if you also have miso (which lasts for eons in the fridge), you can make miso soup in a flash. Just heat the dashi and whisk in miso. The Ichiban Dashi k…