Homemade Dashi Stock
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Dashi is a flavouring stock used in Japanese cuisine, giving that quintessential Japanese flavour to your favourite foods. It all starts with something called “umami”, which when translated from Japanese to English, “savoury” is probably the closest word. Umami was discovered as one of the five senses to accompany sweet, sour, bitter and salty and is a more friendly name for the taste of glutamates. One of the main combinations that make up umami is the perfect harmony of konbu seaweed and katsuobushi bonito flakes strained together to make dashi, essentially a liquid form of umami!

Dashi is used in so many Japanese dishes that it is impossible to name them all. Everything from noodle soups to mixing with egg for an omelette, all of these dishes have dashi in, and that is why they all taste so good!

Even though instant dashi stock is available in powdered form, making your own dashi is much more healthy, tastes better and is much easier than you might expect.

If you want to read more about dashi, check out our blog article What is Dashi Stock and How to Make it.

Group 1 person  Time 30 minutes  Hourglass 5 minutes  Money_pound save

Ingredients

How to prepare

  • Start by opening up your pack of konbu kelp and wiping it down with a damp cloth to remove any impurities from the surface.

  • Add a piece of konbu kelp approximately the size of a postcard with the water into a large pot and let it soak for about 20- 30 minutes in the cold water.

  • Turn on the heat and allow the water to boil slowly.

  • Just before the water boils, remove the heat and add your katsuobushi to the pan.

  • Without letting the water fully boil over, allow the katsuobushi to simmer in the water for 1 minute.

  • Remove the konbu and katsuobushi from the pan and strain through a fine sieve into a clean jug or pot.

Tips and information

    - To make vegetarian version of this classic Japanese dashi stock, simply substitute the katsuobushi bonito flakes for dried shiitake mushrooms and allow the flavour of the konbu kelp and shiitake mushrooms to infuse with the water. Allow the ingredients to soak in cold water for a few hours before heating and straining like the katsuobushi recipe. You can then use the shiitake for any number of Japanese dishes afterwards too.

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Comment

  • 8cb460587bc823bf4409ae7e7ad09144
    jay Mar 15, 2012

    How much ml of water and how many grams of konbu to make this dashi.. it just says add a postcard size to the water.. but how much water?

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