Side dish
Smaller dishes served beside rice or a main: blanched and dressed vegetables, pickles, braised bites and mashes. Many depend on when the vegetable is blanched and when it is salted. Basics to read first: Blanching: Keeping Vegetables Green
Tsukudani (Kombu Simmered Down in Soy and Mirin)
A Japanese relish of kombu, small fish, shellfish or vegetables simmered in soy, mirin and sugar until the liquid is gone. The name comes from Tsukudajima in Edo, where fishermen boiled their catch down salty to eat on bad-weather days and at sea. This recipe uses the kombu left over from making dashi. A spoonful does a bowl of rice.
Olan (Ash Gourd and Cowpeas in Coconut Milk)
A mild Kerala stew of thinly sliced ash gourd and red cowpeas in coconut milk. There is no mustard-seed tempering, no chilli powder and no turmeric: raw coconut oil and fresh curry leaves are stirred in after the heat is off. It is one of the side dishes of the sadhya, the feast served at Onam.
Noppe (Taro and Root Vegetables Simmered Until Thickened)
A Niigata dish for New Year and celebrations: taro with carrot, burdock, lotus root, chicken, aburaage, fish cake and shiitake, cut small and simmered in a clear broth. No starch is added; the taro alone thickens it, and it is eaten warm or cold.
Koya-dofu (Freeze-Dried Tofu Simmered in Dashi)
Tofu frozen, aged in the cold and then dried, a staple of the Japanese dried-goods shelf. Soaked, squeezed and put straight into salted dashi with kabocha, it soaks up the broth like a sponge. Most sold today has been treated to cook soft, and in plain water it falls apart.
Kiriboshi Daikon (Sun-Dried Radish Strips Simmered with Carrot)
Daikon cut into thin strips and dried hard in the sun, one of the staples of the Japanese dried-goods shelf. Soaked briefly and simmered in dashi with carrot and fried tofu, it is an everyday side dish. Cut thin before drying, it comes back in minutes and swells to about four times its weight.
Karashi Renkon (Lotus Root Filled with Mustard Miso and Fried)
A Kumamoto dish: lotus root with every hole packed with mustard miso, coated in a turmeric-yellow batter and fried. Sliced 5-10mm thick, each round shows the filling set in the holes like a flower.
Amala (Yam Flour Swallow)
The Yoruba staple of Nigeria: flour ground from dried yam (elubo), cooked by beating it into boiling water. The yam is dried so it will keep, and the drying is what turns its white flesh brown, so amala's colour belongs to the flour, not to the cooking. Stirred rather than pounded, it is soft rather than stretchy. Pinched off hot, dipped in soup and swallowed.
Uphuthu (Crumbly Maize Porridge)
South Africa's crumbly maize porridge: white maize meal cooked in very little water and broken up with a fork, so it comes to the table as dry, separate crumbs rather than one mass. Given plenty of water the same meal becomes the pap you tear off by hand; cut the water and you get this. Tipping the meal in all at once without stirring, keeping the lid on for the first few minutes, and breaking rather than pressing are the whole method.
Laverbread (Laver Seaweed Boiled Down to a Purée)
Laver gathered on the Welsh coast and boiled for hours until every frond has come apart into a glossy black purée. Despite the name it is not a bread: it is spread on toast, or mixed with fine oatmeal and fried in bacon fat for breakfast. Laver is the seaweed Korea and Japan press into thin sheets and dry, and gimbap counts a softened sheet as a failure. Laverbread goes to the other end — cooked in water until the seaweed is no longer a sheet at all.
Dangke (Fresh Milk Curd Set with Papaya)
A fresh cheese from Enrekang in South Sulawesi. Milk from the same day, buffalo or cow, is heated with unripe papaya or its leaves, and the papaya's enzyme sets it. It is the same kind of enzyme that softens meat in a pear-based marinade, here made to curdle milk. The curd is shaped in half coconut shells and eaten as it is, tofu-like, or grilled and fried.
Pommes Duchesse (Piped Potato Rosettes Baked with Egg Yolk)
A French potato side: boiled potato riced fine, bound with nothing but egg yolk and butter, piped into rosettes and baked. Where mashed potato is loosened with milk, this mixture has to hold a shape through the oven, so there is no milk at all and the potato is dried harder. What holds the shape is not the potato starch turned to glue but yolk setting in the heat, and the thin ridges brown first.
Kkomak-jjim (Boiled Blood Cockles with Soy Seasoning)
Boiled blood cockles with the top shell lifted off and a spoonful of soy seasoning on each; Beolgyo in South Jeolla is the famous source. The whole technique is one reversal. Most shellfish are done when they open, and a cockle is not allowed to open in the pot: the moment the first few gape, everything comes out, the rest are opened by hand, and the red juice stays in the shell to be eaten.
Janssons Frestelse (Potato and Sprat Gratin)
Sweden's potato gratin: matchstick potatoes and onions softened in butter, layered with Swedish ansjovis, covered in cream and baked under breadcrumbs. The ansjovis on the label is not an anchovy but sprat in a cure of sugar and spice, so the seasoning of the whole dish comes out of one tin rather than a salt cellar — salt, sweetness and spice at once.
Hasselback Potatoes (Accordion-Cut Roast Potatoes)
Potatoes cut into close slices that stop short of the base, then roasted: a Swedish dish first made in 1953 at the Hasselbacken restaurant in Stockholm. The cuts fan open in the oven, so the thin tops go crisp like crisps while the uncut base cooks soft like a baked potato. There are two kinds of cooking in one potato, and the depth of the cut decides how much of each you get.
Daun Ubi Tumbuk (Pounded Cassava Leaves in Coconut Milk)
An Indonesian vegetable dish: cassava leaves pounded in a mortar, boiled, then simmered with a spice paste and coconut milk. Cassava leaves carry the same cyanogenic compounds as the root, and the "tumbuk" (pound) in the name is the step that deals with them: pounding breaks the cells and lets the poison out as a gas, and an uncovered boil drives it off. Never eaten raw.
Spanakorizo (Spinach and Rice Cooked in the Spinach Water)
A Greek rice dish in which the spinach is wilted first and its own liquid cooks the rice. Dill goes in by the handful, the olive oil is not rationed, and the lemon is squeezed over after the heat is off. The liquid is not poured in and measured; it comes out of the vegetable, so the rice goes in after you can see how much there is. Eaten warm or at room temperature, with feta alongside.
Pa amb Tomàquet (Bread Rubbed with Tomato)
Bread toasted, then a halved ripe tomato rubbed over it until only the skin is left in your hand, finished with olive oil and salt — the everyday bread of Catalonia. The tomato is never sliced or chopped: the rough face of the crust does the grating. With no knife in it there is no dice to sit and shed water, which is the question its neighbours all answer some other way.
Nanbanzuke (Fried Fish Steeped in Hot Vinegar Marinade)
Small fish given a thin dusting of starch, fried, and then dropped straight into a hot sweet-sour marinade with onion, carrot and pepper — a Japanese side dish kept in the fridge. Where the rest of the fried repertoire works to keep a crust dry, this one is built to soak it: the channels that make a fried starch shell porous are the mechanism here rather than the problem. It is left for hours and is better the next day.
Goma-ae (Spinach Dressed in Ground Toasted Sesame)
A Japanese side of blanched spinach dressed in toasted sesame ground coarse, with nothing but soy and sugar added. The fat arrives inside a ground solid rather than as an oil, which is why the greens have to be wrung out harder than usual before they are dressed.
Carciofi alla Romana (Braised Roman Artichokes)
Artichokes pared back to the tender heart, set stem up in a pan with oil and water and cooked under a lid — the Roman spring side dish. It is a subtraction rather than an addition: more than half of each artichoke is thrown away and what is left is the part you can eat. Trimming takes minutes and every cut face starts browning while you work, which is why the bowl of lemon water is a working condition here rather than a finishing touch.
Mushy Peas (Marrowfat Peas Collapsed with Soda)
The British side: marrowfat peas, matured and dried on the plant, soaked overnight in water with bicarbonate of soda, rinsed, and boiled until they collapse inside their own skins. The soda is not dissolving the skin — it dissolves the pectin gluing the cells of the pea together, so it goes from the inside. Without it they stay gritty however long they boil.
Uroe-jangajji (Melon Pickled in Sake Lees)
A Gunsan pickle: melon salted hard to drive the water out, then buried in sake lees for months. Nothing is heated, so the eight per cent or so of alcohol left in the lees stays at full strength and preserves the melon alongside the salt. Enzymes the koji made during brewing, still in the lees, soften and sweeten it.
Umeboshi (Salted and Sun-Dried Ume Plums)
The Japanese cure in which ume plums spend a month under salt, three days in the sun, and then go back into their own liquid. Dried persimmons are finished by their drying; in umeboshi the drying sits in the middle, and the fruit returns afterwards to the brine it made.
Tempeh (Fermented Soybean Cake)
The Indonesian ferment in which boiled soybeans, given a mould and a day or two, become a firm cake you can slice. Mouldy food is usually thrown away because the hyphae run deep; tempeh wants them to. The white hyphae of Rhizopus grow between the beans and knit a mat, and that living mat is the food's structure.
Attiéké (Steamed Fermented Cassava Granules)
One of Côte d'Ivoire's national dishes: fermented cassava granules. The ferment starts by mixing fresh grated cassava with some already fermented, so the starter is part of the last batch. The mash is then pressed, sieved, and steamed rather than boiled, which is the only reason it arrives as separate granules.
Papas Arrugadas (Wrinkled Potatoes in Salt Crust)
Canary Islands potatoes boiled in their skins in water as salty as the sea, then drained and dried in the pan until the skins wrinkle and salt crystallises on them. Blanching water takes about 10g of salt a litre; this is fifteen times that, strong enough that salt draws water out through the skin.
Miso (Fermented Soybean Paste)
The Japanese paste made by growing koji mould on rice, mixing it with cooked soybeans and salt, and leaving it for months. Pickles usually keep mould out under brine; miso starts by growing one on purpose, in air. The mould does not ferment anything itself: it makes enzymes, and they work for months.
Onsen Tamago (Slow-Set Egg)
The Japanese egg with a set yolk inside a white that still runs — the exact reverse of a boiled egg, and the only reason is that there is no temperature gradient. A boiled egg sets its white first because the outside is at 100°C while the middle is still cold, not because the white is the quicker protein. The bulk of the white needs close to 80°C to firm up and the yolk is done by about 70, so hold the whole egg at 68-70°C and the order reverses. What this recipe has is not a timing but a temperature to hold.
Jangjorim (Soy-Braised Beef Strands)
The Korean side dish that keeps for weeks in the fridge, and the whole of it is one question of order: the beef is simmered in plain water until it is completely tender, and only then does the soy go in. Soy sauce is concentrated salt, and added at the start it tightens the muscle fibres before the collagen has had a chance to let go — two hours later it is still tough. Cook first, shred, then feed it the soy.
Natto (Soybeans Fermented with Bacillus subtilis)
Japan's fermented soybeans: boiled beans inoculated with Bacillus subtilis natto and kept at 40°C for a day. Slimy, stringy, unsalted, warm and aired, it looks like a failed ferment. Most ferments are safe because acidity drops fast; natto's pH climbs to about 8, and it is kept safe by a pure culture on sterilised beans.
Aligot (Mashed Potato Beaten with Fresh Tomme)
A potato dish from the Aubrac in southern France: mash beaten hard for ten minutes with a fresh, day-old cheese until a spoonful lifts out in a ribbon. Overworked mash turns gluey, and Aligot spends ten minutes making exactly that gluiness on purpose. Beaten hot, potato amylose and young casein knit into one stretchy mass.
Bugak (Kelp and Vegetables in Dried Rice Paste, Fried)
A dry banchan from Korean temple kitchens: kelp, laver, perilla leaves or lotus root painted with a cooked glutinous rice paste, dried hard, and kept until someone wants to fry it. What fries is not the vegetable but the film of starch set on top of it. The starch was cooked and then dried, so the moment it meets oil the little water left inside it turns to steam all at once and blows the film into a foam. That is why the frying is measured in seconds rather than minutes, and why something this thin comes out without absorbing oil.
Paocai (Sichuan Brine Pickles from a Perpetual Jar)
Sichuan's salt-brine pickle, where what matters is the brine left in the jar. Vegetables come out, new ones go in, salt is topped up, and the brine runs for years. An old jar ferments faster and more reliably because its lactic bacteria are established, so the first batch is the worst. You are keeping a culture.
Horta (Boiled Wild Greens with Lemon and Oil)
Wild leafy greens boiled and dressed with nothing but lemon juice and olive oil. It breaks the usual blanching rules: twenty minutes, not twenty seconds, the cooking water kept and drunk, no ice bath, no squeezing, oil on while hot. These are tough wild greens, and the aim is bitterness talked down.
Takuan (Rice-Bran-Fermented Daikon)
Daikon buried in rice bran and salt and left to ferment, with no brine. The water pressed out of the radish wets the bran into a paste that shuts out air. That works because the daikon is first hung for two to four weeks until it bends double, losing about two-thirds of its water, so the crock never floods.
Kinpira Gobo (Stir-Fried Burdock and Carrot)
The Japanese side dish of burdock and carrot cut fine, fried in sesame oil and glazed with soy and mirin cooked away to nothing. Burdock is fibrous and stays chewy long after other roots would have softened, so the strategy is not to cook it soft but to cut it thin enough that it does not need to be. And cut burdock turns brown within a minute. That is a third kind of browning, neither Maillard nor caramelisation, and it happens with no heat at all, which is why the first step is a bowl of water.
Caponata (Sweet-and-Sour Aubergine)
A Sicilian vegetable dish in which aubergine, celery and onion are cooked separately and then finished by pouring vinegar and sugar over them and boiling it down onto them. The sweet-sour axis is the same as sweet and sour pork, but the construction is the opposite: there a sauce is made separately and poured over, here no sauce is made at all — it is reduced away in the pan. What is left is a gloss rather than a liquid, and it is better the day after.
Bindae-tteok (Mung Bean Pancake)
A jeon made from soaked mung beans, skinned and ground, and fried exactly as they are. Unlike every other Korean pancake there is not a spoonful of flour in it: the batter is the bean. That changes how it is cooked, too — not a thin film of oil but a generous pool of it, so the edges fry rather than griddle, which is the only way something this thick cooks through while the outside stays brittle.
Dotori-muk (Acorn Starch Jelly)
Acorn starch whisked into water, boiled and left to set. With only two ingredients the ratio is the recipe, and almost every failure is undercooking: it thickens and looks finished, but it needs another ten minutes after that or the set jelly weeps water. And once made it does not go in the fridge, which is the instruction people most often get the wrong way round.
Oi-sobagi (Cucumber Kimchi Stuffed with Chives)
A summer kimchi: cucumbers cut into a cross and stuffed with a garlic-chive filling — sobagi means to pack a filling in. Unlike kkakdugi or cabbage kimchi this is not made to ripen; it is eaten from the next day and finished within a week, so the goal is different — crunch rather than fermentation. One trick, brining the cucumbers in hot rather than cold salt water, buys several days of that crunch.
Kkakdugi (Cubed Radish Kimchi)
Kimchi made from radish cut into cubes. Far quicker and easier than cabbage kimchi, because nothing has to be brined whole and rinsed. There is one hard part: radish is over 90% water by weight, and if that water is not salted out first, by the next day the seasoning has been diluted into a thin pink liquid. The crunch of the kkakdugi served with seolleongtang comes down to that single step.
Gratin Dauphinois (Potatoes Baked Slowly in Cream)
Thinly sliced potatoes baked for over an hour in cream, from the Dauphiné region of France. The ingredients are potatoes, cream, garlic, salt and nutmeg — no cheese, no flour. The only thing thickening it is the starch that comes out of the potatoes, which is why rinsing the slices washes that starch away and leaves the cream to separate into layers. The most important step in this dish is a step you do not take.
Pad Pak Boong Fai Daeng (Fire-Charred Morning Glory Stir-Fry)
Water spinach thrown into a wok hot enough to smoke and finished inside a minute. "Fai daeng" means red fire, and that is the whole recipe: heat. The stems are hollow, so how thoroughly you dried them is what decides whether this sears or steams.
Ganjang-gejang (Raw Blue Crab Cured in Soy Sauce)
Live blue crab cured — not cooked — in a soy brine that has been boiled and then chilled completely. The brine goes on cold and is re-boiled once the next day, and only marine blue crab is used, never freshwater crab. Read the safety notes first.
Rösti
A Swiss potato cake of coarsely grated potato pressed into a pan and fried golden and crisp. Golden and crunchy outside, tender and comforting within. Once a Swiss farmhouse breakfast, it becomes a full meal with eggs, bacon, or sausage.
German Potato Salad
A southern-German potato salad (Kartoffelsalat) dressed while warm with vinegar, mustard, and bacon instead of mayo. The tangy, savory dressing soaks right into the potatoes. A hearty side that pairs beautifully with sausages and schnitzel.
Kongnamul Muchim (Seasoned Soybean Sprouts)
A staple Korean side dish — crunchy soybean sprouts quickly blanched and tossed with sesame oil, garlic, and salt. Ten minutes and a few ingredients, it works as a rice side and as the topping for bibimbap and gukbap alike.
Mashed Potatoes
Fluffy boiled potatoes mashed smooth with butter and milk into a creamy side. A perfect partner for steak, chicken, and gravy, and a Thanksgiving table staple. A handful of ingredients, and almost impossible to get wrong.
Elote (Street Corn)
Mexico's beloved street snack: grilled corn slathered with mayo and crema, rolled in crumbly cotija cheese, and dusted with chili powder and lime. Creamy, salty, tangy, and spicy in every bite — served on a stick to eat by hand.
Patatas Bravas
Crisp-edged, fluffy-centered potatoes drizzled with a spicy brava sauce and garlic aioli — Spain's signature tapa. The bar snack you'd order with a beer, easy to make at home in the oven or air fryer.
Gamja Jorim (Soy-Braised Potatoes)
Cubed potatoes braised down in a sweet-savory soy sauce — a classic Korean side. Glossy on the outside, fluffy within, and just salty-sweet enough to make a bowl of rice disappear. Shishito peppers add color and aroma.
Myeolchi-bokkeum (Stir-fried Anchovies)
A classic Korean side dish of small dried anchovies tossed in a soy-and-syrup glaze. Dry-toast them first and add the syrup off the heat, and you get a savory-sweet banchan that stays crisp when cooled.
Sigeumchi-namul (Seasoned Spinach)
A classic Korean seasoned-vegetable side of lightly blanched spinach tossed with garlic, soy sauce, and sesame oil. A healthy 5-minute dish — great as a side or a bibimbap topping.
Dubu-jorim (Braised Tofu)
A classic Korean side dish of pan-fried tofu braised in a sweet-and-spicy soy sauce. Made from everyday ingredients in one pan in 20 minutes — the saucy bits are great over rice.
Eomuk-bokkeum (Stir-fried Fish Cake)
A classic Korean side dish of fish cake stir-fried with vegetables in a sweet soy sauce. Made from everyday ingredients in one pan in 10 minutes, and just as good cold for lunchboxes.
Gyeranjjim (Steamed Egg)
Korean steamed egg — beaten egg blended with stock and gently steamed in an earthenware pot until soft and puffed. Served bubbling at the table, it's a universally loved everyday side.
Kimchi (Napa Cabbage Kimchi)
Korea's iconic fermented dish — napa cabbage salted, then layered with a paste of gochugaru, garlic, ginger, and fermented seafood, and left to ferment. Crisp when fresh, deep and tangy when aged; the foundation of Korean cooking.
Gyeranmari (Rolled Omelette)
Korean rolled omelette — beaten egg mixed with carrot and scallion, poured in stages over low heat and rolled into a thick log. A lunchbox and side-dish staple: simple, but all about the technique.
Japchae (Glass Noodle Stir-fry)
Chewy sweet-potato glass noodles tossed with colorful vegetables and beef in a sweet-savory soy seasoning — Korea's classic celebration dish, a fixture at holidays and birthday tables.