Washoku: Recipes from the Japanese Home Kitchen

This cookbook is more practical than it first appears. I was afraid it would be more of a coffee-table book than something I could actually use, but it has useful guides to Japanese ingredients, cooking equipment, and techniques. The recipes sounded a bit exotic, but once I started reading my way through them, I saw that Andoh's guides gave all the information necessary and that the recipes weren't all that arcane after all. The major drawback I see, however, is that Andoh assumes that you can get your hands on authentic Japanese ingredients and doesn't offer many tips on substituting if you can't. This is good if you want to create authentic Japanese dishes, but if you just don't have easy access to iriko or Japanese mountain yams, the show more recipes may seem forbidding. show less

The first thing I noticed about this oversized tome was that it has a very lengthy and excellent section on ingredients (pp. 11-64). The ingredients are generally given with both the Japanese and the English names (when there is one), and when appropriate, Andoh covers selection, preparation, storage, varieties, and just about any other piece of information one could imagine (that is, assuming one is not writing a whole book on the topic). I do, however, wish she had mentioned her favorite brands.