Making Japan’s Favorite Comfort Food at Home, Sonoko Sakai Style
By Nancy Matsumoto
Upon arriving in Japan with my family at the age of six, I quickly adopted a favorite dish: kare-raisu, or curry rice. It’s a one-word western-style dish that’s greater than the sum of its parts, like omuraisu (ketchup-and-chicken fried rice wrapped in an omelet), or hanbāgu (Hamburg steak, a rotund, hamburger-meat loaf cross served with a ketchup-Worcestershire sauce). All of these were introduced to Japan around the turn-of-the century, when the mania for all things western was altering traditional Japanese society at a mind-boggling pace.
Imagine the delight of a country that had been closed to the outside world for more than two hundred years when confronted with wanton amounts of red meat, butter, ketchup and foreign spices. Today’s sophisticated palates would tell you that western-obsessed Japanese had it all wrong back then, that the subtle, centuries-old flavor toolkit of katsuobushi dashi, konbu, miso, sake and mirin were equally, if not more, sophisticated ingredients. They were right, of course, but the mania was for the new, and so ketchup and curry won the day.
My childhood memories of kare-raisu involve ordering it in casual, family-style restaurants, where the dish would come with an oversized spoon that was sometimes wrapped tightly in a thin, shiny, white paper napkin, but just as often arrived with the spoon stuck inside a plastic water-filled cup. I imagined the latter style was the equivalent of priming a pump. The water allowed the rice and sauce to slide off the spoon more easily into my mouth and down my throat.
The less reputable the restaurant, the stingier it was with the chunks of chicken that broke the sheen of the emulsified sauce. You knew a joint was truly cheap when the sauce that covered the plate looked more like a smooth Zen rock garden with a few boulders of potato and carrot jutting upwards, a long way from the smaller lumps of meat that lurked in the shadows.
But meat-to-sauce ratio didn’t really matter to me, it was all about the comforting taste and texture of the dish. The mild spice blend — the snuggliest of flavors — the floury cubes of potato and the sweet accents of carrot and melting onion, those were the elements that I cared about. And of course the rice. Sticky, hot white rice was the yang to the curry sauce’s ying, and an indispensable part of the whole. Sometimes the dish would even arrive looking like the yin-yang symbol, half of the rice covered with sauce half of it pristine white, with a slightly wavy line marking the border between the two.
Although some people like katsu-kare, slices of breaded and deep-fried pork cutlet leaning against a hillock of white rice, ankle-deep in curry sauce, that wasn’t for me. As I said, it was not at all about the meat. I did, though, love the small, bright red mound of fukujinzuke pickles tucked in on one side of the dish. The tart morsels of daikon and eggplant provided the crunch and the acidic counterpoint to all that sweet-smooth blandness.
The dish as its made in Japan is hardly an authentic Indian curry. It gained popularity in the early 1900s after the Japanese Navy adopted it from a then-ally, the British Navy, supposedly to help cure Beriberi. Some say it was a way to slip vitamin B1 in to its servicemens’ diet via the flour that thickened the sauce. I’m not sure if this is true; enriched flour was introduced later, during World War II, and the amount of flour in kare-raisu is hardly a lot.
The company S&B Foods helped make kare-raisu the universal comfort food of Japan shortly after it came ashore, jumping on the curry bandwagon by offering a curry spice mix and foil-wrapped curry roux bricks. It was important that no one spice dominated the dish, and that the spice blend always delivered the same soothing experience. My mother could buy these S&B Golden Curry bricks, and with water, a few vegetables, chicken or beef, turn out a quick home meal in under an hour, thereby expanding access to my favorite dish. Years later, I made the dish for my son when he was a child. Kare-raisu is now one of his favorite dishes, too. No matter what city we find ourselves in, S&B or House Foods Vermont (why Vermont?) curry bricks are easy to find.
But now I have a new kare-raisu crush: a DIY make-from-scratch curry brick that’s perfect for our Covid-19, shelter-in-place times. The recipe comes from Los Angeles-based cooking instructor and cookbook writer Sonoko Sakai, and is featured in her latest cookbook, Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors.
Sakai, whom I met when she was last in New York, says that it took her a year to develop the recipe, which included a trip to India to study spices and hang out with home cooks. Not only is her version an order of magnitude more complex and delicious than the store-bought versions, I like it because it dispenses with palm oil (both high in unhealthy saturated fat, and in many parts of the world, an environmentally and socially destructive mono crop). Sakai’s version involves 17 spices, nine of which you toast and pound in a mortar or whir in a spice grinder before adding them to the others. Then you simply bind them into a brick with a mix of chickpea or wheat flour roux and unsalted butter.
It was perhaps Sakai’s outsider Japanese status that allowed her to do the equivalent of deconstructing Kraft Dinner mac & cheese and creating a from-scratch version. Born in Queens, New York to an ex-pat family (her dad was among the first generation of Japan Airlines employees sent to the U.S. after World War II) she spent four years in America, returned to Japan, then accompanied her family on overseas stint in San Francisco, Mexico City and Los Angeles, where she eventually settled.
“At home my parents were very Japanese, and wanted us to speak in Japanese and respect the culture and language,” she says. “And always be prepared to go back.” They were also a family that liked good food and drink. Her ancestors had arrived in Tokyo with the Tokugawa clan during the Edo Period (1603–1868), where they set up as sake merchants before becoming one of the first families to get into the wine trade.
Her mother entertained guests often, and the family thought of themselves as unofficial ambassadors from Japan — in America to represent their culture. Though the family ate Japanese food, on holidays her mother would deftly turn out all-American fare: honey-baked ham, the flakiest apple pie, the works. Regular care packages from her grandmother kept her palate tuned to the fragrances and tastes of Japanese ingredients, Sakai adds. When the family was back in Japan, she spent time with her grandmother at her home in Kamakura, accompanying her on daily shopping rounds in preparation for their evening meal.
While her sister Fuyuko studied in France to become a pastry cook, Sakai took a more roundabout route to food. She began studying for her Ph.D. in education at UCLA, but her parents refused to pay for her education; she was one of five children, and the eldest daughter. Sending her to college was not their priority. Instead, they asked that she return to Japan and settle down in an arranged marriage. She refused, finding work at a film production company in an effort to become financially independent. At the same time, she began working on a cookbook.
Written under her maiden name Sonoko Kondo, The Poetical Pursuit of Food: Japanese Recipes for American Food was released in 1986. It was a collection of healthful, easy-to-prepare dishes she learned from her maternal grandmother, like spinach sesame goma-ae and watercress ohitashi. It took three years to complete the manuscript on her rickety, manual Olivetti typewriter but it failed to sell; western cooks weren’t ready for konbu and katsuobushi.
Sakai worked in film for the next 20 years, first with a Japanese distributor then as an independent producer. In 2008 the global financial meltdown coincided with the release of a film she had worked hard on — an adaption of the José Saramago novel Blindness. She took it as her cue to leave the industry, and turned to cooking and teaching to regain her equilibrium.
This chapter of her life included apprenticing with a master soba maker in Japan, after which she began offering cooking classes, first in Los Angeles, and eventually around the world. Along the way her search for high-quality buckwheat connected her with the emerging heritage grain movement and its leaders, including Stephen Jones at Washington State University, Anson Mills founder Glenn Roberts, and the Tehachapi Heritage Grain Project.
The agricultural and culinary wisdom that Sakai has accumulated on her long and winding journey informs every page of Japanese Home Cooking, and makes it, like kare-raisu itself, an east-west hybrid I can relate to, with recipes for natto (fermented soy beans), tofu, and kōji-marinated salmon alongside mochi waffles and granola made with black sesame seeds and roasted soy beans. “It’s taken me ten years to get here, to find a voice,” she says, yet the international, intergenerational journey that her book reflects has been a far longer and more complex one.
If you’d like to tackle the kare-raisu recipe, you might find it helpful to watch this instructional video that Sakai made in collaboration with Slow Food USA. In it, she explains that she took what is considered a fast food in Japan and turned it into a slow food. One pointer I gleaned from it are the different kinds of dashi you can use in the dish. Since I didn’t have any fresh bonito shavings on hand, I guiltily resorted to powdered dashi stock. But Sakai suggests using a cold-brew konbu and dried shiitake dashi ( chicken stock or vegan broth are other alternatives), a simple fix I’ll use next time. Other hints I picked up in my conversation with her: use green, not black cardamom seeds, and regular, rather than black cumin seeds.
Though I grabbed what I thought was chickpea flour from my cupboard for the roux, it turned out to be Mexican amaranth flour. Because of this, my curry need extra thickening with corn starch at the end. No big deal. Sakai likes to use Sonora heritage wheat flour for her roux, but says that rice, millet or buckwheat are also fine for those with gluten issues. You can also substitute coconut oil for the butter that binds the brick, as long as it’s in solid form.
The vegetables, too, are a variable you can play with. While potato, carrot and onion are classic kare-raisu ingredients, Sakai’s recipe also calls for celery, and she’ll often swap in cauliflower, green and red pepper, kale or eggplant. Other optional additions are a little lemon or orange zest, or a splash of rice vinegar to finish the dish and add some brightness.
If you don’t have time to make the brick from scratch, Sakai sells these convenient curry brick kits. Her version of kare-raisu is a dish that will permanently replace store bought curry for me, and made me wonder if Sakai has any other life-changing recipes in development.
“My curry recipes are evolving,” she says, adding, “ I love spices and furikake. I am exploring the Japanese pantry.” Like everything else she writes, it will be in service of making Japanese food more accessible to westerners while channeling the formative memories of cooking by her grandmother’s side, and their food shopping expeditions: walking to the beach at dawn to buy fish straight out of the fisherman’s net, passing the rice miller writing the haiku of the day on his chalkboard, and the tofu maker cutting his cakes into neat squares.
“Those,” she writes in her book, “were special times.”
Read it on Medium.