Popularized by a restaurant called Ootoya, this colorful take on sweet and sour is loaded with a rainbow of colorful vegetables and tender, juicy chunks of chicken marinated in soy sauce and ginger. The sweet and sour sauce combines black vinegar, soy sauce, and sugar to create a sweet, sour, savory glaze that looks beautiful and is lip-smackingly delicious. Why This Recipe Works? The chicken in this recipe is karaage (Japanese fried chicken), so this can be made with leftovers....

Why This Recipe Works? Instead of making the batter separately and mixing it together, I toss the vegetables in flour and then add the liquid. This one-step process prevents overmixing. Using cold club soda aerates the batter while limiting the development of gluten. This gives the Kakiage a light crispy texture. Shaping the fritters on a spatula prevents the batter from pooling and creates a delicate lattice of lightly coated vegetables....

My version smoothes over the daikon’s funky smell with the fresh zing of citrus zest, and the addition of konbu adds a ton of umami to this easy salad. Why This Recipe Works? By salting the carrots and daikon before adding the other seasoning, it draws out excess water from the vegetables. This gives them a nice crunchy texture while preventing them from getting watery Bringing the vinegar mixture to a boil with the konbu adds umami to the brine and mellows the vinegar’s tartness, keeping the acidity in the Namasu from being too harsh....

Unlike most ramen noodle soups which can take hours or even days to prepare, this spicy ramen dish can be put together in about fifteen minutes. Why This Recipe Works? Because there is no soup, the flavors of the caramelized aromatics and spices are not diluted. Grinding the katsuobushi into a powder provides boatloads of umami and the wonderful smoky flavor of dashi without having to make the stock. Making an aromatic-infused chili oil and using it to stir-fry the pork creates a ridiculous amount of umami while saving time....

It’s a modern take on a classic Japanese dessert called Daifuku, which is classically made by wrapping a ball of sweet red bean paste in a thin layer of chewy rice cake, or mochi. During the 1980s, some genius discovered that you could stuff Daifuku with a fresh strawberry, and the staid world of Japanese sweets hasn’t been the same since. These days you can find mochi stuffed with just about anything, from chestnuts in autumn to mango in summer, yet Ichigo Daifuku still reigns over them all....

This mashup between a Western steak and a Chinese stir-fry cuts back on the amount of meat you use. Still, the bite-sized pieces of steak are caramelized and savory on the outside and tender and juicy on the inside. It’s precisely the kind of dish I crave when I have the occasional itch for steak. (I also have a version of this dish starring my favorite protein: Black Pepper Chicken....

I’m not a fudge fan. There… I came clean and said it… It’s like eating a huge lump of cloyingly-sweet chocolate flavored frosting. There is one type of fudge though that has a special place in my heart: hot fudge. I’m usually a minimalist when it comes to ice cream, but a good caramel or hot fudge over a bowl of plain vanilla ice cream is a sublime pleasure that words can’t describe....

The Eggplant For eggplant curry, I like using small seedless eggplants for this, such as Japanese eggplants, because the seeds are almost non-existent. This makes them sweeter and more fleshy without any bitterness. If you can’t find them near you, any small variety of eggplant should work. Baingan Bharta is usually made by chargrilling the eggplant, which gives it a pleasant smoky aroma, but this is both messy and time-consuming. I wanted to see if I could replicate the sweet, smoky flavor of the chargrilled eggplant without the effort, or cleanup....

While green papaya is eaten in salads across Southeast Asia, each region has it’s own version. In Thailand green papaya salad is called Som Tam and is made with a giant mortar and pestle. Garlic and chilies are first crushed to release their flavors. Then, long beans, dried shrimp and peanuts are added and crushed. This not only tenderizes them, but it also helps them absorb more dressing. Finally the tomatoes, shredded papaya and dressing go in and get mixed together....

Why This Recipe Works? The pork is first seared in a pan. This not only cooks the pork through, but it also evaporates moisture around the surface of the pork, which helps the sauce to adhere to it. By cooking the sauce to a temperature of 230 degrees F (110 C), most of the water has burned off, and the sugars have started to caramelize. This makes the glaze thick enough to coat the pork in a thick layer in one go, so you don’t have to baste it repeatedly....

Why This Recipe Works? A small amount of sugar mellows out the salty soy sauce. By infusing the soy sauce with konbu and katsuobushi, you’re adding umami to the soy sauce along with the marvelous flavor of dashi. Bringing the soy sauce to a boil with the other ingredients has the upside of eliminating the naturally occurring alcohol in the soy sauce, but it can also extract some undesirable flavors from the katsuobushi and konbu....

Although they can be made with any meat, seafood or vegetable, one of my favorites is katsudon. The “katsu” is short for tonkatsu (a pork cutlet coated in breadcrumbs and deep fried) and “don” (pronounced like “don’t” without the “t”) is an abbreviation for donburi. It’s a popular lunchtime meal in Japan and the best part is that this katsudon recipe can be made with leftover tonkatsu from the night before....

Please excuse the braggadocio, but these are the best sunny side up eggs I’ve ever had. With fully cooked whites that are tender from top to bottom, and a thick yolk that flows like warm ganache, it takes the best parts of a poached egg and combines them with the ease and beauty pageant good looks of eggs sunny side up. I’ve covered my techniques for the perfect boiled egg, perfect poached egg, and perfect scrambled eggs before, but a technique to cook eggs cooked sunny side up has been notably absent....

The most important thing is to squeeze out as much water from the bean sprouts as you can. That’s because bean sprouts are composed of mostly water. If you don’t squeeze enough water out of them after blanching, they will leach out a ton of liquid once they’re tossed with the dressing, watering the whole thing down. Giving them a thorough wring also transforms the texture of the bean sprouts from subtly crisp to audibly crunchy....