Dashi

Dashi (Japanese 出汁) is a Japanese fish stock. Instant products, like those found in Asian stores in Europe, have a permanent place in most Japanese households.

The basic dashi is made from bonito flakes (skipjack: a type of tuna, katsuo) and brown seaweed (kombu). The bonito flakes (鰹節 katsuobushi) are also supplemented or replaced by the following ingredients, depending on the area of application and region: Tuna flakes (鮪節 magurobushi), mackerel flakes (鯖節 sababushi), herring flakes (鰯節 nishinbushi), dried sardines (煮干し niboshi), dried flying fish (あご煮干 agoniboshi, also previously grilled as あご焼煮干 agoyakiniboshi), dried wood mackerel (鯵煮干 ajiniboshi), dried baby sea bream (鯛煮干 tainiboshi).

Among other things, dashi serves as the basis for suimono and miso soup. While freshly prepared dashi (ichiban dashi) tends to be used for the former as a clear soup, the ingredients used in the first production process can also be used again to make a second batch (niban dashi) for the cloudier miso soup.

Vegetarian variants consist mainly of kombu, but are also often supplemented with dried shiitake mushrooms. Other ingredients may include dried strips of Kampyō squash, roasted soybeans, and roasted rice, as are common in the cuisine of the vegetarian-eating schools of Buddhism.

In 1909, the Japanese researcher Ikeda Kikunae described for the first time the umami taste, which is now recognized as one of the (now) five basic tastes beyond the then known perceptions of sweet, sour, bitter and salty. Ikeda had succeeded in isolating glutamic acid from the seaweed that is the main ingredient in dashi and identifying it as the flavor-defining ingredient in dashi. It was not until after the Second World War that this product, which quickly became known as a flavor enhancer, found its way into European cuisine as the sodium salt of glutamic acid (sodium glutamate).