Takikomi Gohan (Rice Cooked with Seasoned Dashi, Chicken and Vegetables)

Variations

• Matsutake gohan: the one in the photograph. In autumn, thick slices of matsutake go on top with ginkgo nuts, aburaage and carrot cut into flowers, and the seasoning is lighter. The point is not to bury the mushroom's scent in soy.
• Takenoko gohan: the spring version, with bamboo shoots boiled to take away their bitterness, finished with sansho leaves.
• Kuri gohan: chestnut rice, seasoned with only salt and sake — a white takikomi gohan. Without soy its colour and its crust are close to plain rice's.
• Kamameshi: cooked in a small single-serving iron pot and served in it. A small pot has more bottom for its volume, so there is more crust.
• Kayaku gohan: the Kansai name for the same rice. With five ingredients it is also called gomoku gohan.
• As rice balls: cold leftovers pressed into onigiri make a packed lunch. The rice is already seasoned, so no salt on the hands.

Tips

• Soak in plain water; season just before the heat. Cooking rice explains soaking this way: "Thirty minutes closes the moisture gap between the outside and the centre of each grain." And what happens without it: "Skip it and you get grains that are blown out at the surface and firm in the middle." Water with soy and salt in it slows how fast the grain drinks. Thirty minutes in the seasoned liquid is thirty minutes spent for half a soak, and the result is the failure that guide describes: soft outside, firm inside. So the rice is soaked in plain water and drained, and the seasoning is poured in just before the heat goes on.
• Why it is the opposite of beans. Soaking overturns the old rule about salt for beans: "beans soaked in salted water (1 tsp per litre) soften better. The reason is pectin in the skins." What the salt acts on there is the pectin in the skin of the bean. A polished rice grain has no such skin. On rice, salt does one thing: it slows the water getting in. The same salt makes opposite rules for beans and for rice because it is acting on different things.
• The soy counts towards the water line. Cooking rice says of rice cooked in liquids other than water that "a cup of the liquid is not a cup of water." Here it runs the other way: soy, mirin and sake are mostly water, so adding them after the water is measured makes the rice that much wetter. That is why the seasonings go in first and the dashi makes up the line. And one more line from the same guide holds here as written: "Soaked rice needs less water in the pot — subtract what it already drank."
• The ingredients sit on top, unstirred. Mixed in, the heavy things sink, the rice around them cooks unevenly, and the chicken and mushrooms stick on the bottom. On top they steam in the rising vapour and their juices run down between the grains. The mixing comes after it is cooked.
• The crust comes sooner than plain rice's. Paella says of its bottom crust: "The socarrat is made by unstirred starch, not by the final blast of heat." Takikomi gohan is not stirred either, so the same crust forms, but here the sugars of the mirin and soy sit on the bottom and it browns faster than plain rice does. In Japan this crust, okoge, is welcome. So keep to the twelve minutes on the lowest heat; on a higher one it burns.
• Take the oil off the aburaage. Left on, it forms a film over the rice and the grains take up less of the seasoning. A single douse of boiling water is enough.