Home cooking in Japan is usually a lot different than what you find in restaurants there. Using market-fresh vegetables and meats to make healthy Japanese recipes from scratch, home cooking is often not just simpler, cheaper and cleaner, but just as delicious. In authentic Japanese food traditions, the sauté is one of the most popular ways to prepare a meal. Although this recipe uses shiitake and chicken, you can use a large variety of ingredients as substitution. Here we have a traditional shiitake and chicken based saute recipe and video for you to make at home and impress your guests and family. But first, let’s explore some of its basic elements.
Butter + Soy Sauce = Sauté Perfection
What do you do when you don’t know what to make for dinner? You might fry up some vegetables and meat in oil, salt and pepper. For Japanese people, it’s butter and soy sauce. You can never go wrong with seasoning something with butter and soy sauce. It’s an easy way to add Japanese flair and give a wide range of sauté ingredients some serious flavor! This recipe also adds lemon, which gives this dish a kick, as well as sake for some added punch. You can also do a vegetarian version that replaces the chicken with fresh produce just as easily.
Cooking with Japanese Mushrooms
Japanese food culture quite possibly uses more mushrooms (called kinoko) than any other on earth. You can easily substitute any type of mushroom for the shiitake in this sauté and come up with amazing results. Just remember that cooking time varies for different types of mushrooms, so do your homework first. From meaty maitakes to tiny shimeji mushrooms, here is our guide to Japanese kinoko to get you started.
