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It is no secret that many Japanese dishes offer considerable depth of flavour and deliciousness, and the important role played by dashi cannot be underestimated.
What is dashi?
Dashi lies at the very heart of Japanese cookery. The ingredient, which forms the basis of countless Japanese dishes, is the equivalent of stock or bouillon in Western cooking or tang in Chinese cuisine, but as shown in the chart below, it differs subtly from these in a number of ways. It is made by boiling and soaking certain animal or vegetable products in water, generally for a short time, to extract the flavour enhancing properties present in the foods, so that not only does the dashi itself taste delicious, but it draws out and balances the flavours of other ingredients. The most popular dashi ingredients include konbu (kelp), katsuobushi (shaved bonito flakes), niboshi (small, crunchy dried sardines) and shiitake mushrooms.
How did dashi develop?
Boiling has been used as a cooking method in Japan since the Neolithic Jomon period (10,000-3,000 BC), when broth obtained from boiling seafood and animals was used to flavour other dishes. The concept of dashi emerged later, when people began to make stock using ingredients such as dried fish or mountain birds, and by the seventh century, konbu kelp and katsuobushi dried bonito were being used, as they are to this day, while improvements to cooking techniques and transport links during the Edo period (1603-1867) ensured that dashi became an integral part of cooking.
What makes dashi unique?
Despite similarities to Western boullion or fond and Chinese tang, dashi has a number of characteristics that make it uniquely effective. The most fundamental of these is that it works by bringing out the flavour of other ingredients in the dish, with its own flavour fading in to the background as it subtly enhances the taste of the dish, whereas in Western and Chinese cooking the flavour of the stock is more prominent, and is added to other flavours in the dish, effectively layering one taste upon another. Another key difference is that by using animal based dashi with vegetable ingredients and vegetable based dashi with animal ingredients, the flavour of each dish is enhanced and harmonized, whereas in the West and China meat sauces are added to meat dishes and fish sauces to fish, to emphasise the taste.
Dashi Chart- Click the image to enlarge
