Recipe Sat Feb 21 2009

Winter Cabbage Salad with Yuzu

Winter is usually not considered a salad season, but when the radiator's cranking out too much heat and there's too little moisture in the air, a bowl of salad is a welcome thing. And when tender greens and ripe tomatoes are off vacationing in Florida, good old cabbage is always around for us chilly Chicagoans.

This salad takes two winter produce: cabbage and yuzu. Yuzu is a Japanese citrus fruit that I've been obsessed with for the past few years. (I hated their unique aroma when I was a child--children have no taste!) It being a citrus fruit, yuzu's season is winter. Cabbage is around all year, but they survive well into the cold season. Winter cabbage is on the tough side, perhaps more adapted to soups and stews, so in this recipe, the cabbage is blanched. Blanching gives it a slightly different texture to the cabbage from, say, salted-and-squeezed variety, and it's also a good way to incorporate a large amount of veggies into your diet.

If you have a bottle of Japanese soup base ("tsuyu") lying around, by no means use that. As an incorrigibly lazy Japanese cook, I always have one at hand. If you don't, you can make your own dashi (stock), the traditional way, and mix it with soy sauce and sugar or mirin--something along the lines of ten parts dashi, two parts soy sauce and one part sugar or mirin. The following should serve two to three people.

• 3-4 cups roughly shredded cabbage (about 3/1 inches in width)
• 2 teaspoons yuzu juice (fresh would be nice, but bottled would do)
• 1 tablespoon tsuyu (Japanese soup base)
• 1 tablespoon dashi
• 1 teaspoon sesame seeds
• freshly ground black pepper to taste

1. Blanch the shredded cabbage in boiling water until translucency just creeps in. Don't overcook it; crunchyness is a big part of the charm.
2. Drain and cool in a bowl.
3. Mix yuzu juice and Japanese broth base and pour over the cabbage. Refrigerate for
4. 30 minutes (or until chilled).
5. Sprinkle with sesame seeds and ground black pepper. Enjoy!

I could eat a whole bowl of rice with just this salad!

— Yu Kizawa / Comments (0)