Japanese food has to be one of my all time favourite cuisines to eat. Its simplicity of fresh ingredients and fusion of flavours that can be found in anyone’s cupboard makes it a breeze to cook Japanese food at home.
So when Yutaka invited me down for a Japanese cooking class with none other than Yuki Gomi I said yes straight away. I already use Yutaka products at home, picking them up at my local supermarket in the Asian world food section.
Yutaka takes pride in bringing authentic Japanese products to your home, sourcing specialist ingredients, to noodle soups. Yutaka is the Japanese meaning for “good harvest”.
Yuki Gomi showed us how easy it was to achieve delicious home cooked food from her book “Sushi At Home”.
The MD from Yutaka talked us through the brand then we got cracking making the first dish of the night. We were put into teams of three, and I had my familiar friend bloggers Travel for Taste and Heidi in my team.
First up we starting cutting up vegetables for our Hoto noodles, potatoes, peeled carrots, daikon, pumpkin, shiitake mushrooms went into the bubbling pot of broth. The broth was made up from dried kelp and white miso paste was used to flavour the soup.
Next was a familiar dish I watched onecookbook make a baked korokke on her youtube channel. I always wondered how croquettes were made and the Japanese baked korokke is easy to make.
The panko crumbs are toasted in a frying pan to give it that golden colour, the filling of sweet potato is roasted into a creamy texture we added grated sesame seeds, salt, onions and mushrooms for the filling. We then started making tiny round patties and coating them with the toasted panko crumbs to be baked in the oven. We made the Worchester style sauce from scratch that can be found in Japanese restaurants.
The next two starters dishes were green beans with black sesame sauce and salmon ceviche. It may look really simple but the flavours of the dressing really made the dishes stand out. Once we finished waiting for the sweet korokke was cooked we sat around the table and ate together the 4-course meal we made together. Yuki taught us well and I look forward to recreating the dishes at home.
