YOU would think that chefs trained in French technique, in which slowly simmered stocks are the carefully concocted foundations of almost every dish, would find it laughable to rely on a quickly steeped broth of kelp and dried fish.
Gabriel Bremer uses dashi in dishes like pan-roasted fluke with cockles, above.
But that Japanese broth, dashi, is finding a place in the kitchens of many Western chefs.
“It’s basically water, but fantastically perfumed water,” said Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin. He complements Kumamoto oysters with dashi gelée, finishes mushrooms with the stock, and brushes it on raw fish before layering on olive oil and citrus. “The dashi is invisible,” he said, “but it brings more depth.”
At Per Se, its chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno, weds the stock to preparations of Japanese fish, like a grilled hamachi belly canapé with dashi poured tableside. Jean-Georges Vongerichten adds dashi to a light mayonnaise at Perry St., and at Jean Georges he accents caramelized sirloin, grilled foie gras and slow-cooked snapper with it. “I realized its umami flavor can go anywhere,” Mr. Vongerichten said.
Kelp and bonito are loaded with umami, the taste of mouthwatering savoriness.
Dashi, which simply means “stock” in Japanese, is prepared from many ingredients. But dashi made from kelp and bonito holds pride of place. For much of Japan’s history, eating meat was taboo. So instead of animal fats and butter, which flavor Western cooking, dashi evolved to infuse umami-rich taste.
Kelp, called kombu in Japan, grows for up to two years before being dried into cardboard-thick green-black ribbons. Japanese bonito (skipjack tuna) is filleted, boiled, smoked, covered in mold and sun-dried to the hardness of oak — a technique dating from the 1600s — then shaved into translucent flakes.
Combining them in dashi synergizes their rich umami compounds — glutamates in the kombu and inosinates in the bonito — creating an umami impact greater than the sum of its parts, explained Dr. Sue Kinnamon, a Colorado State University biomedical professor who studies the mechanisms of taste. It’s an effect not lost on Japanese chefs.
At Kyo Ya in the East Village, Chikara Sono prepares his dashi daily. It is a careful process of extraction and infusion. He chooses among two varieties of kombu and three kinds of bonito he keeps handy, adjusting proportions to vary taste. Mr. Sono gently heats kombu in water to tease out its essence, removing the kombu before the water boils. Then he adds bonito flakes to simmer gently or steep in the liquid, like tea. When the dashi reaches “koku” — a sublime density of flavor — it is ready to strain.
The result is a lively, satisfying savoriness, a clean taste and an alluring smoky fragrance.
But how does it compare with a classic French chicken or veal stock, also naturally rich in umami? Chefs familiar with both Japanese and Western cooking say it’s simpler. With only kombu and bonito, dashi yields a lighter, less complex flavor than a stock produced from bones, mirepoix and bouquet garni. So it magnifies rather than masks the taste of other ingredients.
“To us, it’s an element of flavor as opposed to an element of tradition,” said Café Boulud’s Gavin Kaysen. This approach is taking dashi in new directions.
For David Kinch, chef at Manresa, in Los Gatos, Calif., dashi is applied as a seasoning or it serves as a versatile blank slate, delicately infusing soups and vegetable dishes. “It imparts that savoriness in anything it touches,” he said, “even in small, negligible amounts.”
Laurent Gras of L2O in Chicago, who coaxes his dashi with the aid of a high-tech Gastrovac vacuum cooker, metamorphoses a chicken bouillon into intense chicken dashi bouillon. “You can take chicken and bring it to a meat level” of taste, he explained.
Dashi’s smoky nose is what appeals to Gabriel Bremer, the chef at Salts, in Cambridge, Mass. He suffuses a light cream sauce with dashi to subtly mimic the smokiness of bacon, applying the emulsion in a deconstructed New England fish chowder.
At Cyrus, in Healdsburg, Calif., Douglas Keane prepares a broth of dashi and citrus (sudachi) to serve as an “umami canapé,” balancing the savoriness with the acid. “Your palate actually wakes up and goes, man, that’s good,” he said.
Linton Hopkins of Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta contrasts the stock’s lightness with rich French butter to glaze root vegetables, sharpening and coating the ingredients at the same time (recipe at nytimes.com/dining).
“It adds a new and exciting dimension to your cooking,” said David Myers of Sona in Los Angeles, an aficionado of Japan who has traveled there four times this year. For Japanese chefs, he explained, cooking with dashi is an art. “For us, it’s an exploration.”
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