Autumn Kaiseki

Back in April (…yes, my blog posts are VERY late), we celebrated the season of Autumn with a kaiseki at Ueda Sōko Ryū.  Many hands made light work of this wonderful little feast.

We started off with the requisite and perfectly cooked ichimonji (plain white rice), combined miso with grilled chestnut and mustard, and sashimi.

The miso was extraordinary, having being started the day before by soaking konbu and shitake mushrooms in water.  While this was happening, boil some daikon in water for one and a half hours and keep the broth.  Then on the next day, remove the shitake and put the konbu on the heat to extract the first dashi, and mix this with the broth from the daikon.  Then comes the skillful bit – mixing the right amounts of red and white miso for the season – a perfect earthy heady hit of umami.  We then popped in a grilled chestnut and topped with a dollop of hot Japanese mustard.  Perfection in a bowl.

We were lucky that our sashimi was prepared by Aka Tombo in Prahran – lovely slices of salmon, salmon roe and a fine chiffonade of seaweed.  A halved gingko nut and a little wedge of wasabi highlighted the dish.

These little momiji musubi are maple leaf shaped glutinous rice cakes, grilled in a cast iron mould that Adam brought back from Miyajima in Japan. You can actually see these moulds in action making beautiful little cakes at my post on Miyajima here. The rice cakes were brushed with tare sauce, a sweetened shoyu sauce, which is used for grilling. The cast iron heats up so much, that the outside of the cakes are crunchy and golden like the autumn leaves, while the inside remain delicious soft and sticky.

We then moved to an azukebachi, a cold salad of lightly poached prawns and boiled, sliced lotus root with grated cucumber and shredded nori. The dressing was a mixture of orange and lemon juice, rice vinegar, umeboshi paste, mirin and usuguchi (light) soy sauce.  I will be making this one again as it was wonderful!

The nimonowan (simmered dish) was a clear sumashi broth with a slice of sea-bream/egg/edamame loaf, kampyo (gourd) knot, snow peas and garnished with a few peels of Josephine pear.  A little nama-fu (wheat gluten) maple leaf also paid homage to the season.

I really enjoyed this little block of baked tofu, which was spiked with burdock, carrot, konbu and shimeji mushrooms. It was seasoned with white miso, mirin, usuguchi soy, sugar and sake and baked for 25 minutes. This would be a nice vegan alternative to a frittata!  If anyone is interested in the recipe, let me know and I’ll post it.

We also had this with karasumi daikon; salted mullet roe sandwiched by crisp raw daikon slices. As a frame of reference, karasumi is similar to Italian Bottarga. I found the flavours quite unusual and intense – a balance of bitterness, salt and fish.

I’m just loving Japanese pickles, and in this instance we had a home made eggplant pickle (to the right), daikon and cucumber pickles, and a really unusual type of pickled gourd.

The wagashi (sweet) was also momiji (Japanese Maple) shaped, in this instance a tooled free f0rm shiro koshi-an (white bean)  sweet with a centre of koshi-an (red bean) paste.  I just love how smooth these little sweets are in the mouth, and they go so wonderfully well with green tea.

You can read some of my other Ueda Sōko Ryū experiences here.