Food Blog

Here’s a recipe I want to perfect. It would probably work on chicken too.

Slightly inspired by the Black Cod with Miso from Nobu, I wanted to achieve a lacquered skin, with a nice sweetness. Nobu’s black cod isn’t so much about the miso, as it is about the mirin and sake that it uses in its glaze. Here’s Nobu’s recipe for black cod with miso.

I had just been to Penzey’s, where i got a bunch of stuff, including some allspice and black cardamom. I also got some ground galangal, which is something I hadn’t seen before.

I figured the cardamom and mirin would be a nice match together, and it works well. I didn’t have any sake, but I did add a little maderia, for a little extra liquid. The mirin I bought was rather expensive, otherwise, I would have used the whole bottle. The ingredients for this attempt:

1/2 cup mirin
1/3 cup maderia
1/2 a minched onion (2-3 T)
3 T sugar
2 T honey
3 t cardamom, freshly ground
1 t salt

I threw all of the above into a pot, boiling it for 10 or 20 seconds to melt the sugar and boil off a little alcohol. After a bit of cooling, I poured it over two Cornish game hens, and let them marinate for an hour. The hens were stuffed with some onion and tangerine and went into a 350 F oven for an hour, then I turned the oven up to 450 F and left them in for another 15 minutes. During the cooking, they got a slathering of the reserved marinade once in awhile.

It turned out delicious but I’ll work on this one and make a few corrections. Next time I’ll thicken the sauce with more honey or sugar, and put the hens under the broiler for a bit to really crisp up the skin. I’ll also buy the cheap mirin so I won’t feel bad about using more, and I’ll leave out the Maderia. I might do this sort of thing with just Maderia, but I think the flavor of the mirin and cardamom work well enough by themselves. One thing I have learned about my cooking is that removing an ingredient sometimes makes a better dish. This is because I tend to be an experimental cook, adding things to try to figure out what a dish ‘needs’, when what it really needs is more simplicity.