Japanese cooking lesson in Ningyocho: Gyoza, eggplant, and corn rice

Japanese cooking lesson in Ningyocho: Gyoza, eggplant, and corn rice

The participants for this time were Santy, a Nepali student studying in Japan, and Madoka, a Japanese woman. They both participated in the last lesson as well.

Professional cooking instructor, Chie, created a menu with dishes suitable for August still in the midst of heat. The menu included corn rice, eggplant agebitashi (deep-fried and marinated), and gyoza.

First of all, they started with preparing corn rice, which takes time to cook. After washing rice and putting it in a rice cooker, shave corn from the cob using a knife and add them to the rice cooker. The point is to put the cob into the rice cooker with rice and corn, as the cob releases nice umami while cooking and the rice absorbs the umami to make it more flavorful. Then, start cooking with a regular cooking course.

Next, they prepared eggplant agebitashi. When you cut the eggplant, make some angular slits on the skin so that the eggplant can absorb flavor better and it makes it easier to eat as the skin will be easier to tear with chopsticks or your teeth.

Eggplant agebitashi

After deep-frying the eggplant, put it into a marinade and let it cool down so that it can absorb the flavor.

Eggplant agebitashi

Although eggplant agebitashi is one of the standard Japanese dishes, Santi had never tried it yet, so she was really looking forward to eating it.

The last dish was gyoza. The filling included ground pork, cabbage, nira Chinese chives, and ginger. They worked together to cut them all.

Preparing the filling for gyoza.

Add seasonings and chopped vegetables to ground pork and mix them by hand. In Nepal, there is a similar dish, called “momo.” As Santi frequently makes “momo” with her family and friends, she looked very comfortable making gyoza.

Mixing ground pork by hand

As it takes too long to make gyoza skin from flour, they used commercially-available gyoza skin. First, Chie showed how to create a beautiful piece of gyoza.

Making gyoza

The beautiful piece of gyoza by Chie

Both Santi and Madoka had experience making gyoza, so the three of them started making gyoza pieces.

Making gyoza

They made different shapes of gyoza with different amounts of filling. Comparing the difference among the gyoza, they laughed together, saying “your personality appears in the gyoza you make.”

Gyoza

Gyoza

They all look great.

After baking the gyoza, making cold miso soup, dishing up the corn rice as well as the other dishes, the meal is completed.

The instructions for making the miso cold soup can be found at: https://att-japan.net/en/archives/7112

As they used a whole corn on the cob, the corn rice was very rich in corn, with half rice and half corn.

The crispy texture of the sweet corn was wonderful, making them munch it.

The eggplant agebitashi was very juicy, so it stimulates your appetite even if you feel exhausted from the heat.

They were talking about how the gyoza turned out beautifully and the ones they shaped and cooked themselves were better than those at restaurants, having a great time eating together.

They look very delicious

Santi (left), who participated in this cooking class twice, said that she would love to participate again!

Would you like to join our cooking class?

The next att.Kitchen: November 16 (Sat), 11:00 – 14:00

For details, please access: https://att-japan.net/archives/1358