Cooking Tokyo: Simmered daikon

Monday, 18 June 2012

Simmered daikon

Daikon is a big white, but mildly flavoured, Japanese radish. It actually looks like a big, white carrot, and Daikon literary means 'big root' in Japanese. We had actually no experience at all cooking with radish, so even though we saw Daikon for sale at all supermarkets we had never bought one. We didn't know what to do with it. Eat it raw? cook, fry or broil? However, we were feeling experimental and wanted to try something new. So we bought a daikon and tried some daikon recipes we heard taste very good. And indeed, we have come to love daikon

One (very big) daikon

This time we want to share a favourite daikon recipe of ours, Japanese Simmered Daikon. This recipe makes for a great side dish, but is also nice to be enjoyed as a warm snack on cold winter days.

Daikon is apparently really healthy, and we heard it is even a great remedy against hangovers! We haven't tried it ourselves, but please let us know if you find this actually works.

Ingredients (2p):

1/2 daikon
1 tbsp dashi powder
1 tbsp mirin
2 tbsp soya sauce

First, peel the skin off the daikon and slice it to pieces of approximately 1 cm thickness. Then, cut these pieces to quarters.


Daikon cut to pieces

Fill a fry pan with approximately 0,75 cm water, and mix the water with the dashi powder (1 tbsp), mirin (1 tbsp) and soya sauce (2 tbsp). Put on the heat, and bring it to boil.
Then, add the daikon pieces to the pan, and divide evenly on the water. Lower the heat, and cover the pan with a lid and let it simmer for about 30 minutes. After 15 minutes you can turn the daikon pieces, so both sides simmer evenly.