Next entry in the cooking saga: takoyaki. Nothing fancy; just the standard complement of konbu dashi, egg, all-purpose flour, pickled ginger, octopus, green onion, sakura ebi, bonito flakes and so forth.
Motivation: I discovered that a takoyaki grill attachment exists for my multi-cooker gadget. I picked one up at Mitsuwa. New toy syndrome dictates I use it. You get the idea.
No picture because my efforts were consumed before I could get out my camera and lighting gear. Besides, my three attempts really sucked, at least visually. Now that I’m more familiar with my equipment and the grilling technique, my future attempts should be marginally better.
Some notes:
I cheated on the konbu dashi, and I feel quite disgraced at doing so. Instead of preparing the stock from kelp, I purchased konbu dashi soup base. Making dashi isn’t hard (seriously, just like most any stock it comes down to “boil, reduce, repeat”), but in my contemporary contempt for contemplative decocting I took the easy way out. I was also very hungry and was cooking after work.
Not sure if I’d detect a difference in the taste of the final product, but damnit, it’s the principle of the thing. Just need to make time to do it right…
The takoyaki grill attachment illustrates the heat gradient of the multi-cooker gadget painfully well. Learning to work around the hot spots will be an interesting challenge. One solution is to toss all the fancy electric gear and go with the tried-and-true gas-fired setup, but that’s not practical in an apartment setting. A griddle mounted atop our existing gas range might do better, but it is not as convenient as an electric multi-cooker, nor is it as easy to clean.
Next on my reading list: this book. Sure, it’s all about French cooking, but it’s supposedly a classic, and French cooking technique is hardly dead. If nothing else, it’ll be a nice change of pace from this.
