Kanako's Kitchen

A massively oversized radish, daikon is a popular Japanese winter root vegetable. Less spicy than Western radishes, daikon features in a lot of seasonal cooking, and boiling brings out its natural sweetness wonderfully. Today’s dish is a simple but deeply satisfying side: basically slow cooked radish with a bit of pork in a classic Japanese sauce.

Wait, pork? In a vegetable side dish? Actually yes, just a bit. Makes everything much tastier.

This is a basic (if under-appreciated) principle of Japanese cooking: almost every dish has some kind of meat or seafood in it, even the vegetable side-dishes. Usually, it’s a very small amount: more to flavor the dish than anything else. On the other hand, very few dishes are centered around a big piece of meat or fish, like they so often are in the West.

In other words, in traditional Japanese cooking we eat food, not too much, mostly plants.

Ingredients (for four)

• Daikon – one full radish
• Pork – 100 grams

For the sauce

• Water – four cups
• Dashi – 1-teaspoon
• Ginger – a small piece
• Sugar – 4 tablespoons
• Sake – 2 tablespoons
• Salt – 1/2 a teaspoon
• Soy sauce – 5 tablespoons
• Mirin – 3 tablespoons

Preparation

• Take one whole daikon and slice it into 8-10 cm. long segments. Peel each segment
• Peel the ginger and slice it thinly
• Slice the pork into small pieces

click to enlarge

Cooking

1. Put the daikon pieces in a large pot and add just enough cold water to cover it. Set the pot on a high flame until it boils
2. Allow the daikon to boil for 30 minutes until they offer a chopstick very little resistence when you poke them
3. Drain the hot water, cool the daikon with cold water, then take them out of the pot
4. Wash the pot with soap and water, rinse
5. Return daikon to the pot and add the ingredients for sauce (four cups of water, ginger slices, pork, dashi, mirin, sake, sugar, salt and soy sauce)
6. Bring everything to a boil over a medium flame
7. Cook, covered, over a medium-low flame, for fifteen minutes. Every five minutes or so, uncover the pot, skim off the yucky scum that rises to the top as it cooks with a slotted spoon, then cover again
8. Here comes the trick: cover the simmering daikon with two layers of paper kitchen towels, making a little dome. This allows the daikon to absorb the sauce better.
9. Keep cooking under paper towels like this for another 40-45 minutes.
10. When serving, do not add the ginger slices onto the plate – those are just for flavoring

click to enlarge

For best results, you want to turn off the heat, let it cool, and then reheat a few hours later. So think about making this at lunch time to eat at dinner.

Usually, you would serve this as a side-dish in 1-soup 3-dish. However, we love this dish so much that we ate it as the main dish in 1-soup, 1-dish.