Grilled shitake mushrooms

I like to watch chef Nariyoshi Nakamura at work. His hands move like lightning, as he deftly chops a piece of grilled chicken into small bite-size pieces with a sharp knife. He slices vegetables into thin slivers. And when he mixes them together and places them neatly on a plate, he is like an artiste who has just signed his work.

For me, the 60-year-old chef from Tokyo has always been special. I developed a taste for Japanese food mainly because of him. I met him years ago, when he first came to India and started a Japanese restaurant called Sakura in what was then The Nikko in Delhi. I met him again recently, but this time at the Pan Asian restaurant in WelcomHotel Sheraton New Delhi. The chef, who joined the hotel a year ago, is its senior Japanese chef, and has come up with a delicious yakitori menu.

Yakitori, as many of us would know, is a combination of two words — yaki, which means roasting, and tori, which stands for fowl. Of course, now the word — with the way of cooking — is used for everything from meat (such as the chef’s grilled asparagus spheres wrapped with bacon) to vegetables and fungi (such as shitake mushrooms). You can even grill pimentos stuffed with minced meat, as chef Nakamura does, or have something called niniku, which mean garlic in Japanese — a dish of elephant garlic cloves, skewered and grilled.

Pimentos stuffed with minced meat

In the age of low-fat, high-protein diets (the new Duchess of Cambridge, I learnt recently, turned into a stick figure by focusing all her energies on protein), yakitori is just what the doctor ordered. It’s not only low in fat and high in nutrients — it’s delicious to eat as well.

And, of course, like everything Japanese, it sounds so simple, once you know how it’s done. But the chefs undergo hard training just to, for instance, get the right cuts of the fowl being grilled. And chef Nakamura has been honing his skills ever since he joined the French National restaurant in Ropongi, Japan, as a trainee after leaving school. He also trained under a master chef who was a member of the Japanese royal family — and then moved on from various hotels to various countries, cooking all kinds of Japanese delights. And now at the Pan Asian, he has been focusing, among other things, on yakitori.

So what makes the perfect yakitori, I ask him. The ingredients have to be fresh, he replies. You need a charcoal fired grill with high quality charcoal. The teriyaki sauce has to be just right, and sweetened with natural agents. For a good grill, the temperature should be 180°C to begin with, and end with 210 °C. But the trick, he concedes, really lies in the quality of the food being cooked. “The fresher the ingredients, the better the yakitori taste,” he says.

Yakitori, he points out, is a popular item in bars and pubs in Japan. It’s generally served on skewers, often in pairs, and may be sprinkled with shichimi, a Japanese spice mix. It’s easy-to-eat food, and goes well with drinks. Yakitori is getting to be rather popular in India these days too, with quite a few Japanese and multi-cuisine restaurants serving different kinds of yakitori. Sauces and spices are also easy to source, with special departmental stores importing them for the growing section of Indians who have taken to healthy Japanese food.

Variations of yakitori are served in main meals as well. The yakitori donburi, for instance, is grilled chicken served with steamed rice and teriyaki sauce. The yaki onigiri is a dish of grilled rice balls with soy sauce and miso. I enjoyed my yakitori donburi, which is a meal in itself. It came in a bowl which had teriyaki sauce at the bottom, rice on top, and then layered with grilled chicken dipped in teriyaki sauce, and crunchy green beans.

Of course, it goes without saying that yakitori is different from its grilled counterparts in the west. And it’s not just the sauces that are different, but the way of cooking is diverse as well. “Yakitori involves cooking of small chunks that are skewered and grilled over a charcoal fire,” says the chef. Western grills, on the other hand, usually translate into large chunks of meat or fish that have been cooked in grills which can be charcoal fired or gas fired, he says.

Japanese cuisine, I believe, is among the best in the world. I doff my cap to it as Japan goes through a series of catastrophes, knowing it will bounce back, along with its resilient people. I wish them happy kitchens.        

Lamb chop skewers (serves 1)

Ingredients: • 2 New Zealand lamb chops • a pinch of salt • pinch of shichimi • togarashi (seven-spice powder) l2 bamboo skewers

For the teriyaki sauce: • 1 litre Kikkoman soya sauce • 900ml mirin • 500ml sake • 500g sugar • 100g chopped onions • 100ml apple juice • 1 litre water • corn flour for thickening

Method: For the teriyaki sauce: Put all the ingredients in a vessel. Bring to a boil and reduce to half. Thicken the sauce by adding the corn flour.

For the lamb: Take the chops and cut them into 1-in cubes. Now skewer the cubes (three pieces on each skewer). Grill on a yakitori (or a barbecue) till the meat is done. Finish by dipping the meat in teriyaki sauce.

Chicken mince balls (serves 1)

Ingredients: • 100g chicken mince • 10g leeks • 10g chopped carrot • 5g sesame seed • 1 tsp sesame oil • 1 tbs beaten egg • 1 tsp corn flour • salt to taste • 1 tsp Kikkoman soya sauce

Method: Mix everything together, keeping some sesame seeds for later use. Hand roll the mixture into one-inch balls and place on a perforated tray. Steam for around 10 minutes and then set aside to cool. Then place three balls on a skewer and grill. While grilling, occasionally dip it in the teriyaki sauce (see above recipe). Finish by sprinkling some sesame seeds on it.

Photographs by Jagan Negi