When I eat my standard Japanese steamed rice at home I usually have my jurokkokumai (十六穀米) which means rice with 16 grains. I have a huge stock of small packets with these 16 grain mixes I get from the supermarket. These individual packets have a long list of grains including foxtail millet, germinated brown rice, black rice, black soybean, amaranthus, sorghum, quinoa, azuki bean, black sesame, white sesame, adlay, red rice, proso millet, barley, corn, and Japanese barnyard millet, and I mixed them into my white rice. Apparently the grains have lots of fiber and is very good for you but I honestly just like it because it tastes good.

However, there are days when I do a little something different. Today my husband felt like takikomi gohan so I made this dashi and soy sauce based rice dish in my rice cooker. All I needed to do was make the base flavor for the rice with soy sauce, mirin (sweet rice wine), dashi stock, and salt, and today’s ingredients happen to be chicken thighs, aburaage (deep fried tofu), carrots, shimeji mushrooms, and gobo (burdock) which I cut up into small pieces and placed over the rice to cook.

If you look around for takikomi gohan recipes on the internet, there are ones that use other types of mushrooms, use konnyaku, hijiki sea vegetables, among other ingredients but today I felt like having chicken thighs, aburaage, and gobo for sure so the above was just what I used. I normally like hijiki but if you buy good hijiki the flavor is quite strong so on a day when I wanted to really taste the chicken I decided not to put it in. I also see a few recipes that use sugar or some other sweetener but I usually like a more subtle sweetness so I replaced it with mirin. Lastly it was already past 8PM when I started cooking so I chose a shortcut and used granulated instant dashi instead of making homemade dashi.

When you make this dish, make sure you can find gobo where you live because the earthy taste that comes from this root is very distinct yet nice. Plus preparing it is fun since you use the sasagaki cutting style which literally means to cut something as fine as a bamboo leaf but basically you are cutting the burdock like you are sharpening a pencil with a knife. You can also find instructions on the internet on how to do this so give it a try!

Alisa Sanada, (@asanada) co-organizer for Nagomi Kitchen, is a former Texan currently residing in Kawasaki. She went from craving fresh jalapenos while working 7 years in the web industry in Tokyo and Osaka to craving fresh tofu while traveling across the globe for a year in 2011 as a full time nomad. Alisa joined Nagomi Kitchen wanting to bring together her passions, the web, travel, and food.

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