Serves: 3-4
Cost: n/a
Preparation time: ~20 minutes
Calories: n/a

Hi again everyone, I hope you’ve been enjoying the guest posts from Eva, Helene and Sissi so far. Today I have another wonderful post from Nami, over at Just One Cookbook. I’m honoured to have Nami’s beautiful recipe and photographs here. The amount of effort she puts into her posts and presentation is enormous and the dishes she posts never cease to entice and amaze me. In addition to her wonderful food she recently took a trip back to her home country, Japan, and posted some great photos of her trip! I’m sure many of my readers will be familiar with Nami, but in case you’re not, do go and check out her wonderful site.

Nami concentrates on, as she says below, “quick and easy Japanese home cooking” and you’ll always be able to get some great ideas from her. Over the months that I’ve been reading Nami’s blog I’ve learnt techniques, tips and ingredients which not only I’ve never tried before, but some of them I’d never heard of – maybe I’ve been living under a rock, but I’d never heard of matcha until I started reading Nami’s site.

I hope you enjoy the beautiful post today, I’ll be back in a few days with an announcement, and then after that another great guest post! Thanks everyone!

Find Nami on: JustOneCookbook | Facebook | Twitter | Pinterest | Google+

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Greetings everyone! My name is Nami and I share quick and easy Japanese home cooking at my blog, Just One Cookbook. I’m here today to blog sit FiveEuroFood while Charles is busy with his commitments away from his site. I’m honored to be here and share my recipe with you, and I hope you will enjoy my post.

I prepared a very refreshing salad using Japanese radish called daikon. Daikon is a mild flavored, very large, white radish, and it’s often used as garnishing of sashimi or grated and served with agedashi tofu or tempura. For this salad, I shredded daikon into long thin strips so that it gives a nice crunchy texture while you eat. Daikon is widely available at Asian markets and sometimes even in Western supermarkets in the US. To pick a good daikon, just make sure the inside looks juicy and not dry. If you are also able to get organic daikon, I highly recommend it since the flavor is much better than conventional ones.

As for the salad dressing, I used my favorite dressing base – ponzu sesame vinaigrette, and this time I added umeboshi. Umeboshi are salted pickled Japanese ume (plums). They are a common ingredient for onigiri (rice ball) and you might have also seen a single umeboshi placed in the center of the rice inside a bento (Japanese lunchbox). The salty sour flavor from umeboshi adds a nice kick to the dressing. If you cannot find umeboshi, don’t worry, you can still use this ponzu sesame vinaigrette for the recipe. Ponzu is a citrus-based soy sauce and it’s used as a dip for Shabu Shabu and sashimi, or used as a dressing.

I hope you enjoy this post and will give this salad a try one day. Thank you Charles for allowing me to share my recipe with your readers. Now let’s start cooking!

Daikon Salad with Japanese Plum Dressing

Ingredients

For the Daikon Salad

3 inches (7.5cm) of daikon (Japanese radish)
3 bunches of mizuna (optional. You can use cucumber or micro greens etc)
3 shiso leaves (perilla) (optional)
2tbsp. katsuobushi (bonito flakes) for garnish (optional)
2tbsp. ikura (salmon roe) for garnish (optional)

For the Japanese Plum Dressing

1 umeboshi (Japanese pickled plum – see photo below)
3tbsp. ponzu
1tbsp. sesame oil
1tbsp. rice vinegar
1/2 tbsp. soy sauce
1/8 tsp. sugar

Instructions

With a mandolin slicer, shred daikon to thread pieces.
Soak shredded daikon in cold water for 5-10 minutes to get the crunchy texture and get rid of the bitter flavor.
Cut mizuna into 3 inch lengths.
Chiffonade shiso leaves.
Combine all the salad ingredients in a bowl and toss it all together.
Remove the seed from umeboshi and chop into small pieces.
Combine all the dressing ingredients in a small bowl and whisk all together.
Serve chilled. Sprinkle katsuobushi (bonito flakes) and ikura (salmon roe) if you like. Pour the dressing when you are ready to serve. Enjoy!