Product Description
MOUTH-WATERING RECIPES BY A LEADING AUTHORITY ON JAPANESE GOURMET COOKINGUmami: The Fifth TasteUmami is a special word used to define the unique taste of Japanese dishes. This taste is neither salty nor sweet; neither bitter nor sour. The best English equivalent is 'beautiful taste', but to understand it, you have to experience it.Why do tomato sauce and Parmesan cheese make such a delicious combination?It is because tomatoes and Parmesan cheese are rich in natural substances that bring out the Umami in the foods they are used with.But the natural food ingredients used to make the dressings and sauces in Japanese cuisine are twice as strong as Parmesan cheese and nine times as strong as tomato sauce in bringing out the Umami in foods.In this lavishly illustrated book, a leading expert in Japanese cooking shows you how to prepare delectable Japanese dishes in an easy-to-understand format. Try the recipes presented in this book, and treat yourself, your family, and your friends to a new world of gastronomic delight. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Good book if you can get it
This is not a flashy, modern fusion cuisine book. This is part of it's charm. Almost a photo book, with descriptions of the dishes taking a secondary role. There is some insight to the planning of the menus and how they relate to seasons/ special occasions. Beautiful print pages. A valuable collector's item worth the price for the serious student of kaiseki Ryori. Long out of print, worth the price if you can find it.

The food is the most beautiful part of the tea ceremony
This book features beautiful photographs of multi-course kaiseki meals (seasonal meals accompanying the Japanese tea ceremony) and antique plates, bowls, sake servers, and cups spanning the centuries.Each meal isintroduced by a brief description of the season and occasion on which it isserved, and each photo accompanied by a detailed description of the food,method of preparation, and serving dishes.The major omission is aglossary of the various types of unfamiliar foods, and a timeline of thevarious dynasties and periods from which the dishes date.It's not acookbook, but if you ever have the pleasure of eating a kaiseki dinner(often $70-100 per person in the U.S., maybe $50 in Japan), you will haveenormous insight into the selection, preparation, and significance of thecourses.Or you could throw a great party! ... Read more

Product Description
Japanese cooking, it is often said, is to be eaten with the eyes. Compelling are the food arrangements that the diner experiencing a traditional meal for the first time often finds that his or her impressions of the presentation often overshadow the taste of the food. This guide illustrates in detail the aesthetic delights of Japanese food presentation. The text demonstrates how beauty, colour, form and flavour are married within one presentation, and each section is introduced by food arrangements appropriate to the Japanese seasons. There is a full list of captions to the photographs at the back of the book, which details the utensil or vessel shown, with dimensions and materials as well as the meal being served. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

If only it's all colored and with more samples
I cook Japanese food at home and wanted to have
a better understanding of it's arrangement, called moritsuke.
The general rules and ideas..
This book is more an introduction to different types of dinnerware
than about actual arrangement technique.
The first section, very small portion of it was dedicated to the
arrangement technique, and the rest just introduces
different types of dinnerware. What's more, not all pictures
are colored. About half the pictures were black and white.
It's a beautiful book but I found it not too useful.

for lover's of japanese pottery
As a person who loves to prepare japanese food items, I was overjoyed to see so many photographs of beautiful examples of japanese ceramics.Of course I expected the food arrangement to be explained but above and beyond this are color photos of various types of serving ware.In addition to food preparation I find the presentation aspect of eating to be a bonus that only heightens the experience.

Stunning!
I saw this in a bookstore and it was so beautiful I just HAD to have it! The title explains the book perfectly. It has interesting historical information and many large, impressive photos of food which is stunningly arranged. This is not so much a cookbook (there are no actual recipes but foods and methods of preperation are listed) This is a fabulous coffee table/art book. Even for people who can't afford the antique museum quality ceramics and laquerware pictured, there are great ideas for methods of arranging foods that are sure to make any meal look more beautiful. There is also information about seasonal foods, the color of foods, the importance of giving flavors and shapes contrast. I have found these things to make a huge difference in the success of a meal. This is a great book for anyone who is a big fan of Japanese food. The book gave me a lot of great ideas and I now find it much easier to plan and arrange a meal, be it French food, American food, or Asian food.

A reprint of a classic
We bought this fabulous volume in hard cover in Osaka in 1986.At a much higher price.Not only are the food arrangements gorgeous but the utensils are major museum pieces.The best of Japanese ceramics,lacquer, bamboo, beautifully photographed.

(We are neither Japanese nor potters--just people who findbeauty an important renewal in our troublesome.) ... Read more

Product Description
Twenty recipes for popular Japanese dishes printed in both English and Japanese. Japanese Cookery: The Japanese appreciate simplicity, and this is the keynote of Japanese cooking. great care must be taken with garnishings. In season rape blossoms, green wheat, and chrysanthemums are used. Also, the choice of bowls, trays, etc. is important. As can be seen from the photographs, Japanese food is a delight to the eye as well as the palate. The recipes in this book are a selection of the most popular Japanese dishes, if they are followed faithfully, success in Japanese cooking is assured. ... Read more

Product Description
Japanese cuisine is considered one of the healthiest diets in the world. The simplicity, purity and unique aesthetic of Japanese cuisine means that it is as beautiful as it tastes. "Japanese Cooking at Home" brings a fresh approach to Japanese food, with easy to prepare recipes to make in your own kitchen. It features traditional Japanese dishes including tempura on rice, teriyaki beef, sushi, sashimi, miso soup and daikon salad - all with simple step-by-step photographs. ... Read more

Product Description
These are recipes which are all accessible to the Western cook, whether served individually or in combination as a complete Japanese meal. ... Read more

Product Description
Japanese cuisine is appreciated worldwide for its healthiness and its beauty in both appearance and flavour. The characteristic 'savoury-ness' (umami) is achieved despite minimum use of oil, salt and flavourings. Dashi ('stock') and the resulting umami are said to be the reason Japanese-cuisine is special. But what are they? How do they work? And why? This beautifully illustrated book reveals these secrets through both explanation and superb recipes introduced by Japan's top chefs. It is not only an essential read for people in the food industry, it is also a godsend to anyone who cares about what they eat. The body of the book is in 3 parts. "Discovering Japanese Cuisine" introduces the background and essence - nature and the four seasons, ingredients, philosophy, and history and development in the art of dashi by Japan's four finest the top chefs. Each introduce a dashi-based recipe for spring, summer, autumn and winter. It is a practical guide to dashi and umami explains what dashi is, what the ingredients are, how it is made and used in the kitchen - also the nature of umami and how and why it was discovered.A concluding section Umami - the science of dashi - introduces the principal natural elements that constitute or combine to produce umami: glutamate (from konbu), inosinate (from katsuobushi), guanylate (from dried shiitake). The endmatter includes a Glossary, Index, Conversion Tables and Bibliography. This title includes: the true secrets behind the healthiness and deliciousness of Japanese cuisine revealed for the first time in a sumptuously illustrated book backed by the biggest world chefs; hundreds of colour photos, recipes by the 4 leading chefs of Japan, and lucid explanations and nutritional/scientific explanations that combine to offer a full understanding of umami & dashi. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

The Most Accurate Information on Umami in English
The book traces the discovery of umami by professor Kikunae Ikeda and the creation of monosodium glutamate, but that is only a tiny bit of Dashi and Umami.

This book includes the contributions of many star chefs, including Takashi Tamura (of Tsukiji Tamura), Eiichi Takahashi (Hyotei), Kunio Tokuoka (Kyoto Kitcho) and Yoshihiro Murata (Kikunoi). Photos of their kaiseki cuisine make this a handsome coffee table book, and students of Japanese cuisine will be impressed with the depth of information on umami-rich ingredients like kombu, katsuobushi, niboshi, and shiitake, all of which are essential in making dashi. Even water around the world is ranked from soft to hard--a hot topic for kaiseki chefs who have traveled the globe.

Umami has been covered in many other books, and not always well, but this work captures the essence and explains it without missing any details. The tutorials on dashi may change the way you make this staple at home. The end of the book includes simple home recipes that are easy to incorporate into your repertoire.

A hidden facet of Japanese cuisine
I lived in Japan for a few years in the early sixties. I was a kid and my father was teaching at a university there. Food then was very traditional, few western foods were available, even in Tokyo. What is now thought of as Japanese food: tempura, sukiyaki and sashimi, were rarely prepared in home kitchens and were only found in restaurants. In homes, in ryokan and country-side restaurants the cuisine was very different, more seasonal and with less meat. Dishes had few ingredients but very specific, painstaking cooking techniques. Dashi and Umami nearly perfectly describes this cuisine and, in the process, strips Japanese food to its bare essentials. If the heart of French cuisine is its sauces and the basis of chinese food lies in the principal of ying-yang, dashi, the ubiquitous kelp broth, is the essence of Japanese cooking.
This wonderful book is a great corollary for its subject: simple yet deep. Graphically it is warm, yet minimal. The beautiful photographs tell exactly what you need to know but no more. Though it has only thirty-odd recipes, they are organized seasonally, precisely chosen to illustrate the concept of umami. A couple of the recipes I cook often. They remind me of my grandmother, who ran a restaurant in the Japanese ghetto of downtown Honolulu before WW2. She was from Wakayama and cooked in a regional, provincial style. Like this book, her food was odd, slightly exotic but ultimately hearty, satisfying and full of umami.

an in depht look into umaminess and dashi
I absolutely (please excuse my spelling, i'm spanish) loved this book, not only the content, the book in itself is a beautyful object, printed with care, and the pictures are incredibly beautyful.
The 1st part has 4 different subchapters where 4 chefs of great japanese restaurants explain how they make dashi and produce recepies with dashi for each of the 4 seasons of the year.
after that there is a comprehensive explanation on each of the ingredients used for dashi and on umami's taste perception.

to make a long story short, beautiful and perfect in content. and for a passionate lover of japanese cuisine.

hope you find this interesting
regards,
[...]
... Read more

Product Description
Absolutely a fabulous book for those who are just starting in Japanese cooking or for those who just love gorgeous pictures. The first section of the book is comprised of a short cultural history to help you get the feel of why Japanese food is how it is-this includes a little section on regional foods and their differences-and goes from there to a short menu ideas section that divides the menus into the four seasons. After that, there is page after page of color photos and descriptive text that introduces you to not only foreign foods, but equipment, utensils, crockery and cutlery, drinking vessels, and much more. The next section is comprised of the popular ingredients used in Japanese cooking-rice/rice products, sauces, pickles, tea, tofu, mushrooms, seaweeds, herbs/spices...this section in it of itself is worth the price of the book. For those of us who cannot read Japanese, the pictures are detailed and beautiful-a boon in the Asian grocery. Lastly, the recipes are well written and tasty covering everything from sushi to soups and noodles to desserts and cakes. Inluded at the end there's also a shopping index for Japanese resources. This book is well rounded and a definate jewel to add to your collection. My only complaint would be that the recipes themselves use the Japanese names for the ingredients without a corresponding English name in parentheses. Although there is a glossary included, it's kind of a pain to keep flipping back and forth. All in all, that's such a minor part of a fab book. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (6)

Good book
My friend bought this book for me a few years back at a store and it was on the sale table. It has been one of the most informative books I have ever read about Japanese cooking. It even explains traditions and such. I Love this book... It will never be far from my sight.

Why isn't this still in print?
I found this book on the remainder table at a local bookstore. There's no excuse for that! Seriously, this book is far better than it has any right to be at that price. The first half is the most detailed and helpful explanation I've ever seen of how to select, store, and prepare a wide assortment of Japanese ingredients that can be unfamiliar to Western cooks. The second half is full of good-looking, tasty, unintimidating recipes. When I went through marking the pages with recipes I wanted to discuss in my classes, this book ended up with far and away the most stickies. (Full disclosure: I've semiprofessionally taught Japanese cooking classes.)

The author is wonderful too - Emi Kazuko is referenced in the acknowledgements of several of my other English-language Japanese and Asian cookbooks, and she was on the editorial staff behind some of the Japanese-language cookbooks too. I don't know whether she's bilingual or has a translator, but either way, it doesn't get any more authentic these days. She's written a lot of other cookbooks in both languages that I'd love to find somewhere that I can browse through them...

Great cook book
This is a great cook book.I have made many of the dishes in it, and everyone rants about how good the food is.The miso soup recipe in particular is fantastic, and I'm regularly asked to make it for the people in my house.I would definitely buy this book again.

Adequate, but omits important details in places
[Review written in May 2005]

I read this book several years ago, when I first bought it. I remember liking it at the time, although I wasn't overly impressed with it's breadth and depth on any given area or topic.

In any case, this book came to mind because this past weekend I grabbed a dozen oysters and 2 lbs of littleneck clams on a whim from a local book store. The oysters I just shucked and ate with a squeeze of lemon and a dash of CPEVO. As for the clams ... rather than making my usual pasta with fresh white clam sauce, I decided to cruise around in my library for different things to do with them. While browsing, I happened upon a recipe by Kazuko ... which is essentially a cold salad of baby clams (steamed 5 mins & de-shelled), seaweed and wilted scallions, and dressed with a lightly sweetened sauce of white miso paste, English mustard, sake, a touch of sugar, and rice vinegar (I can post specifics for anyone who's interested). I had everything I needed already on hand, so I went for it. Although the recipe itself wasn't laid out in the clearest and most efficient/logical manner, the end result was outstanding, and will doubtless become part of my semi-regular repitoire (because clams are in my blood and are a local specialty).

I'll revise my review next time with more details on the book, but for now I'll give it the thumbs up. There's a lot of crap out there, and this appears to be one of the ones that's somewhat better than most. Hardly stellar, but still decent.

One thing I do recall the book being anemic on is sashimi and sushi techniques ... and buying/handling/serving raw fish in particular. There's a LOT more to safety, regarding sushi, than 99% of people realize, and this book seems (if I recall) to take a rather lax attitude to all the fine points and techniques required to select, prepare and serve raw fish safely and correctly ... he just jumps right into how to prepare sushi rice and slice fish. WRONG ! There is LOTS and LOTS more information you need to know before you even get to that stage ... that's why sushi chefs train for YEARS to learn their craft, and that's why you should avoid faux sushi prepared by the local non-japanese goomba at your local supermarket.

Nice book
I love this book, and still use recipes from/based on it from time to time.The best things about this book are how it will introduce various base ingredients and even some Japanese food cluture.Using this book you can make more things from scratch, and that's always better than something from a bottle or can imported or not.The color photos are so beautiful it makes a great coffee table book if you give this to someone that doesn't cook as well.;) ... Read more

Customer Reviews (4)

One of My Favorite Japanese Cookbooks
A great introduction and "Go To" book for various aspects of Japanese cooking including some of the unique/foreign ingredients along with cookware and utensils you may come across or be interested in.A real asset.This section is followed with well described recipes that even the uncertain should feel confident in pulling off.The full color photos are very helpful and add to the value of this book.This is easily one of my favorite Japanese cookbooks.If you are interested in Japanese food, you should own this one.I *LOVE* it.

An excellent introductory cookbook for the non-Japanese
We have a large collection of cookbooks, and this little book is one of the standouts.It is VERY hard to find a good cookbook on the basics of a national style, and this one just nails it.Fully one third of this book is devoted to ingredients, techniques, crockery, cookware and cutlery, regional information, and more - fully illustrated and in color.The information in this portion of the book is comprehensive - you aren't going to find it in Larousse (Larousse Gastronomique).I don't know of another source as good for an introduction to Japanese cooking and cuisine generally, for that matter.This section alone is worth buying the book if you can find it.

Pages 124-247 are recipes, and every last entry is also pictured in color, usually with an additional picture or two on some relevant preparation technique.There is a reasonable, representative selection of dishes across the cuisine

great guide to Japanese cooking
This is the first Japanese cook book I ever purchased and it is still my favorite. The second half of the book is full of delicious easy to follow recipes. but its the first half that really makes this book shine. it has invaluable information on Japanese cookware and Japanese ingredients. This book is great for anyone interested in cooking Japanese food, from the beginner to the more advanced cook.

Fantastic Cookbook
My family just moved to Japan about a year ago and we have tried to replicate a lot of the dishes we get at restaurants at home.It has been tough!Well, this cookbook is awesome--it explains everything to you about the ingredients, Japanese cooking lifestyle, and cooking techniques.I absolutely love this cookbook!!!! ... Read more

Product Description
The famed New York food columnist and cookbook author and translator has immersed herself in Japanese culture to produce a collection of original Japanese recipes that redefines an ancient cuisine. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

NOT Japanese Cuisine
I was very excited to receive this book as a gift, being I recently made friends with two Japanese families near where I live.

Unfortunately, not having heard of Colette Rossant, I did not realize that this is HER version of Japanese food, not a book of Japanese recipes.

I was hoping that she would explain Japanese food to American readers so we could understand their food easier.

Instead, I found a book utilizing Japanese ingredients in a French manner.

Maybe this will be of interest to some of you, but I found the title of the book to be misleading, as I was looking for a Japanese cookbook. ... Read more

Amazon.com Review
The appeal of Japanese cuisine is no longer a sophisticatedsecret; Japanese restaurants thrive in cities and towns around theworld. But while most people feel comfortable ordering a selection ofsushi or a plate of tempura from an English menu, few know thepleasures of soba, tonkatsu, and kamameshi, andfewer still are at ease shopping for daikon, burdock, and bonitoflakes for their own kitchens. The Bellemes wrote their guide toJapanese ingredients in order to make udon and azuki lessintimidating and to introduce Western cooks to the healthy benefits ofthe Japanese diet. But their guide is a boon to travelers aswell. Japan can be an overwhelming experience, especially if you don'tspeak the language or read the kanji characters, and visitors oftenstick to the safety of Western-style restaurants or the few Japanesenoodle shops and sushi bars that cater to tourists, eschewing the boldplunge into alien-looking yakitori joints and nabemononooks. But the incredible diversity of Japanese cuisine is one of thefundamental pleasures of touring Japan, and it's a shame to miss out.Getting familiar with Japanese foods--the ingredients, how to cookthem, the range of dishes from summer picnic fare to hearty winterstews--is as important a preparation as seeing that your passport's inorder and making flight reservations--and a whole lot moreenjoyable. The pictures you take in Tokyo will end up in an albumgathering dust on a shelf, but the foods you fall in love with areforever. It's nice to have a recipe book to return home to, withinstructions on how to prepare the dishes that invoke Japan. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

So-So/ Ma\ma
Devotion to natural elements and authentic Japanese processes makes thisan interesting read.But not a great cookbook.The ingredients are hardto find (even in Japan), and the level of cooking is mediocre.(The sameingredients are recommended over and over.) Plus, with very fewillustrations, and presentation as important as flavor, this is a cookbookbest for information about Japanese foods, not cooking. ... Read more

Product Description
This comprehensive and beautiful guide won the World Cookbook prize as the best book on an Asian subject when first published in hardback in 2001. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Kitchen Handbook: Japanese Cooking
This is probably THE most useful book you can have on your self if you are new to Japanese cooking. Highly recommended for those unfamiliar with Japanese ingredients, utensils and cooking methods. ... Read more