Ingredient Guide

Browse

Families

• 
  Dashi ingredientsDried, and flavorful for exactly that reason.7 varieties
• 
  FurikakeThe sprinkle that turns rice into a meal.7 varieties
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  Green teaThe family where the leaf is never allowed to oxidize.11 varieties
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  MisoSoybeans, salt and time.6 varieties
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  Seaweed and kelpUmami grown in the sea.7 varieties
• 
  SpicesThe heat is not in the same place.6 varieties

Reference

Concepts

The processes and the words: what explains why the food tastes the way it does.

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  DashiThe broth that sits under almost everything.
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  KojiThe mold the whole pantry rests on.
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  UmamiThe fifth basic taste, and the reason Japanese food satisfies.
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  Umami synergyOne plus one makes eight.

Places

Regions

The places where the ingredients grow, and what altitude, mist and soil do to flavor.

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  UmegashimaThe village where the fog hides the tea.

Overview

The map

The whole archive

The index

55 entries in the archive.

Entry points

Flavor lexicon

The words used to describe flavor across the archive, and what they mean. To see which ingredients carry a flavor, select it in the map above.

Umami

The fifth basic taste, alongside sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. It reads as fullness and satisfaction rather than a distinct flavor, and comes from glutamate, inosinate, and guanylate. Kombu, katsuobushi, and dried shiitake are the pantry's three sources, and together they grow stronger than any of them alone.

Grass

The green, freshly cut tone of young leaves. Strongest in shaded teas and in the first harvest of the year, and the first thing to disappear when a leaf is roasted.

Sweetness

Natural sweetness, not added sugar. In tea it comes from amino acids built up in the shade; in miso, from rice that koji has broken down into sugar. A young shiro-miso is the sweetest in the family.

Roast

What happens in a hot pan or drum: nuts, bread, and caramel. Hojicha and gomashio are the archive's two extremes, one a roasted leaf and the other roasted sesame.

Ocean

The scent and taste of the coast: seaweed, sea breeze, and salt water. Much of it comes from dimethyl sulfide, the compound that makes dried seaweed smell of the ocean the second it meets moisture.

Salinity

Pure salt, distinct from ocean notes. A gomashio is decidedly salty without tasting of the sea, and an aonori can taste of the sea without being particularly salty.

Acidity

What makes the mouth water. In Japanese food it comes more often from fermentation or ume vinegar than from lemon, which makes it rounder than a sharp fruit acid.

Citrus

The aromatic tone of the peel rather than the acidity of the flesh. Yuzu, sudachi, and sansho live here, and these are aromas that vanish with boiling.

Ferment

The depth only time can give: mold, lactic acid bacteria, and yeast that have broken the raw material down into something new. The longer a miso has aged, the more of it there is.

Smoke

Smoke from wood, not the tone that comes from roasting. Katsuobushi is smoked in rounds over oak for up to a month and carries the clearest smokiness in the archive.

Heat

The kind that burns. Chili's capsaicin sits on the tongue and lingers, while the allyl isothiocyanate in wasabi and mustard rushes up into the nose and is gone within seconds. One word, two different sensations.

Tingle

Sansho's vibrating, almost electric sensation on the lips and tongue. The compound is called sanshool and it activates touch receptors instead of the heat receptors chili takes, so it is not heat but something of its own.

Bitterness

The astringent grip of strongly brewed tea and long-aged miso. In tea it comes from catechins and rises with the water's temperature; in miso it is the edge the years add.

Mineral

The stony, almost metallic tone that comes from the salts in seaweed and dried mushrooms. It shows most clearly in the aftertaste, once everything else has settled.

Texture

Mouthfeel rather than taste: crisp, slippery, chewy, or silky. It is often the texture, not the flavor, that decides whether an ingredient suits a dish, and mozuku's slickness and gomashio's crunch are its two extremes.