Cooking With Sake
As much as sake is a delight to drink, it is even more perfect as an ingredient in cooking.
Sake flows like a stream of rejuvenating crystalline water through every aspect of life in Japan. A symbol of purity, it is ritualistically presented as a sacred offering to the gods at Shinto shrines and customarily used as a toast at weddings, banquets, and other commemorative events. A liquor with a generous alcohol content, it enlivens seasonal spring cherry-blossom-viewing picnics, summer fireworks displays, autumn harvest festivals, and winter new year celebrations. A subtly rich-tasting drink, it is the perfect culinarily companion to Japan’s light, yet deeply satisfying cuisine, enjoyed alongside refined multi-course kaiseki meals, with small plates of food at izakaya pubs, and between simple licks of salt (which cleanse the palate and enable continuous drinking) at stand-up yatai stalls.
Sake also flows in the Japanese kitchen. Not imbibed behind a closed pantry door, but as one of the essential ingredients in Japanese cooking because, in practical terms, it is, essentially, a form of enriched water.
Technically, sake is an alcoholic liquid made by fermenting rice. Its ingredients are water, rice, koji, and yeast. Koji is a portion of rice that has been prepared in advance by cultivating it with the mold Aspergillus oryzae. This creates a base of enzymes that are needed to break down the starch in the rice into sugars, which, in turn, are fermented by the yeast into alcohol. This two-step brewing process occurs simultaneously and can be completed in one to three months.
Fresh, delicious water is the most important ingredient in making sake, and brewers use copious amounts from streams, springs, and deep wells to wash, rinse, soak, and steam the rice and then to fill the tanks in which the mash of rice, koji, and yeast ferments. Water is added two more times to the tanks during brewing and again at the end of the process to dilute the sake to keep its alcohol content between 15% and 20%.
The final product is 80% water; water that has been fortified with alcohol, enriched with umami, and enhanced with a delicate sweetness. Yet, like water, sake is nearly odorless, colorless, and pleasantly neutral in flavor. Together these attributes make it a powerful cooking agent, able to perform water’s principal roles in cooking better than ordinary water. It is better at cleansing foods, infusing and extracting the flavors of foods, and also cooking foods as a medium. A particular advantage is that sake also seasons foods, and is an important ingredient in building and layering umami in dishes. Like water, sake can be used in every step of the cooking process, with every type of cooking technique, for all types of foods—vegetables, seafood, fish, meats, and starches, such as rice, potatoes, and flour—and in every kind of dish, including savory, sweet, Japanese, and non-Japanese.
Sake Means “Pure Food” in Japanese
Sake’s fundamental benefit is its alcohol content. Alcohol is important in cooking because of the way it purifies the flavors of food by cleansing foods and conserving and clarifying their flavor. Sake does this better than other alcohols like wine and beer because of its higher alcohol content (see a comparison of the alcohol by volume, or ABV, of sake, wine, and beer in the sidebar) and also because it lacks strong and off-flavors like wine’s fruitiness and astringency and beer’s graininess and bitterness. In addition, sake’s mild taste disappears quickly. It can even be used “as is” without a need to boil it first to remove its alcoholic taste.
Splashed on seafood, fish, meats, and vegetables before cooking, sake kills bacteria and takes away any bad smells. Similarly, a splash in a bag of meats destined for the freezer prevents freezer smell from developing. It also prevents freezer burn because sake’s alcohol helps foods retain their juices and texture and seal in their flavors. This quality makes sake an important addition to marinades. Other common ways of using sake are to add a splash when blanching, sauteing, and sweating vegetables and boiling starches like rice, potatoes, and pasta.
Sake also acts as a mild preservative, and alone or in combination with other seasonings like salt, soy sauce, citrus juice or vinegar, sake helps capture a food’s fresh flavor at a moment in time. It can be used to make quick vegetable pickles and cured fish dishes like Japanese zuke maguro (marinated tuna), Peruvian ceviche, and Hawaiian ahi poke. It can also be used to prep Italian seafood carpaccio as well as French steak tartare.
A benefit of using sake in these ways is that less salt is needed to prep and cook foods. For example, a cup of sake in two to three cups of water to make a brine for chicken or pork means you can use about half the salt usually required.
Umami Punch
At the same time as sake is helping the flavors of foods shine, it is also subtly working to boost their flavors and add depth and complexity to dishes. Sake is rich with umami—the fifth flavor of deliciousness. Among cooking alcohols, sake has much more umami than beer and wine, and infinitely more than distilled spirits, which have practically no umami at all. (For a comparison of the umami-producing amino acids in sake, wine, and beer, see the sidebar.) Sake’s umami comes from the amino acids and peptides created during its unique brewing process.
Sake’s umami ranks it among Japan’s top four umami-laden seasonings, which include dashi stock, soy sauce, and miso. Sake’s advantage over them is both its neutral taste and convenient suspension in a clear watery liquid, which is why sake is used to build umami in almost every dish served in Japan. Even Kyoto chefs add a drop or two of sake in the final stage of making dashi soup, which of the four seasonings has the most umami. Sake provides just the right additional layer of depth to their soup.
There are many ways, separately and in combination, that sake is used in cooking to add and build umami. Sake provides an initial infusion of umami when used to rinse foods and prep them in a marinade. Or it can add a finishing touch of umami when used in a dressing or sauce or as a seasoning. In cooking, sake is a good way to heighten the umami of dishes when light cooking methods that do not generate any umami are used, such as blanching, poaching, steaming, and boiling foods. Sake is particularly helpful when cooking light foods like poaching fish, especially tender white fish, because sake also helps the foods retain their texture.
Sake is equally valuable for deepening and enriching the flavor of more complex and longer-cooked dishes. It can be used to deglaze pans when making sauces and in simmers, braises, stews, stocks, and soups. Sake can even be used as the sole cooking medium for dishes. One example is Hiroshima’s famous nabe hot pot recipe called Bishu Nabe, which is made of sake, meat, and vegetables, seasoned only with salt and pepper. The luscious clear soup that results from this recipe is due to sake’s alcohol content, which makes sake as good at extracting flavors from foods as it is at enriching them. A pot-au-feu made only with sake as its sole stock would be similarly delicious.
Building umami in dishes using sake means that fats and oils are not needed to make them satisfying. Sake is particularly good at achieving a light yet rich flavor because of its creamy mouthfeel. Seventy percent of its flavor is in the mouth (versus 30% for wine), and sake’s light lusciousness is another reason why Kyoto chefs add it to their dashi soup.
“Taste As Close To Water As Possible”
There is an old Japanese saying that sake should taste as close to water as possible. Sake is as delicately sweet as pure, fresh water. (Sake tends to taste sweeter than wine because it has less acidity than wine. For a comparison of the sweetness and acidity of sake, wine, and beer, see the sidebar.)
Sake’s sweetness comes in handy in cooking. For one, it aids browning, and sake in marinades or spritzed on meats or other foods before grilling or roasting helps give them a tasty crust and appetizing aroma. More broadly, small amounts of sake are an excellent way to balance and refine the flavor of sauces, pastes, and dips as it suppresses saltiness and evens out tartness. There is a gamut of Japanese sauces that rely on sake to meld and brighten their flavors, including Tosa sauce and all of its derivatives, miso dengaku, and ponzu sauce. A teaspoon or two is equally effective in Aurora, Romesco, chimichurri, and barbeque sauces, among many others.
Sake’s sweetness also lends sake to being useful when making sweet confections. Sake’s by-product, the lees leftover from sake brewing (sake kasu), is an especially sweet and rich as well as a nutritious paste and adds body as well as flavor to all kinds of desserts. Because sake kasu can stand up to long cooking, it is also good for adding body to savory dishes.
Kanpai!
Lastly, sake has an important role to play at the table. A glass of heated or chilled sake is a perfect way to “finish” a meal as an accompanying drink. Its fresh, clean taste and subtle savoriness is a delight to drink and pairs well with all cuisines.
Story: Tom Schiller
Photos: Tom Schiller
“Meisui Hyakusen” — Japan’s 100 Remarkable Waters
Water is everywhere in Japan. Not just in the seas that surround the archipelago, but also on land. The country’s extensive high mountain ranges capture the heavy snowfalls that Japan experiences in winter and equally heavy rains in summer and cascade it down their slopes, filtering it along the way through volcanic soil and thick forest humus. It emerges pure and sweet in streams, springs, and wells found at Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, towns and villages, and the courtyards of Japan’s traditional food makers. In Japan, water is believed to be a living spirit, and beautiful and delicious natural waters are honored by a Shinto shimenawa (woven lengths of rice straw or hemp) stretched across their source. Water is also considered culturally signficant, and one often finds springs and wells that have a plaque nearby describing the water’s history and importance.
Sponsored by the Environment Ministry, the “Meisui Hyakusen” is a ranking of the country’s most beautiful and delicious waters and also those that have a unique history or benefit from local communities’ efforts to protect and conserve them. There are 100 registered Meisui on the ministry’s list, and they include rivers, streams, irrigation channels, lakes, ponds, springs, and wells. Although only available in Japanese, the list and maps by major region of Meisui provided by the ministry may give you some ideas when planning your trips in Japan’s countryside as the Meisui are typically located in beautiful natural environments and interesting traditional locations.
