Agebitashi (Deep-fried Vegetables in Soy and Mirin Broth)

Sometimes, when we're too busy or tired to go all-out on a meal, we like to head to a Japanese grocery in Honolulu called Marukai and buy sashimi. Once we return home it's easy to whip up a pot of miso soup, some boiled spinach, and of course rice. Easy, quick, and healthy. But today, once we found ourselves at Marukai, we decided we wanted a lot of vegetables. Japanese vegetables. And we wanted them so that we could make agebitashi, which we haven't had in a long time.

Agebitashi is simple to make, and the ingredients for the dish are hardly exotic. If you can find Mirin, dashi, daikon, and Japanese eggplant, you'll have no problem making this dish. And the daikon, while nice to use, isn't what I'd call essential.

Here's what you need to make agebitashi:

1 cup Mirin

1 cup soy sauce

3 cups water

2 teaspoons dashi

Vegetable oil for frying

4 Japanese eggplants, halved and sliced lengthwise

2 zucchinis, cut diagonally into 1-inch wedges

4 sweet peppers, quartered and seeds removed

1 lb or more of green beans, the ends snipped

1/2 daikon, grated

Got all of it? Good. Now here's what to do with it:

For the broth

1. Pour Mirin into pot or pan and bring to a boil.

2. Add soy sauce, water, and dashi. Stir to mix and let sit on high heat for about 5 minutes (don't let it reach a boil).

3. Pour broth into a large container and leave until your deep frying is completed.

For the veggies

1. Put a sufficient amount of vegetable oil into a deep pan for deep frying and heat on high.

2. After cutting all your vegetables as described above, pat dry with a towel. (This cuts down on hot oil popping when you introduce your washed veggies.)

Halve the eggplants and then cut lengthwise

Cut the zucchini diagonally into 1-inch wedges

Quarter your sweet peppers and snip the ends off your green beans

And make sure to pat your veggies dry after washing and cutting them

3. When oil is hot enough, add veggies a handful at a time. Make sure to turn them over halfway through.

4. Whenever a batch is done, drain on newspaper or paper towels.
5. After draining, add veggies to the container holding your broth.

6. After ladling your agebitashi into serving bowls, top with a generous pinch of grated daikon and mix it.

Grate half a daikon

Agebitashi is best served with rice. Regular steamed rice goes nicely, but if you want to add some nutrition to your normal rice, try making it into takikomi gohan (one version of Japanese "mixed rice") like this:

1. Into a pot of uncooked rice and water add chopped aburage (packaged slices of fried tofu), konnyaku (a gelatinous substance derived from a type of sweet potato), and chopped carrots.

2. Add a mixture of 1 teaspoon of dashi with 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 tablespoons of Mirin.

3. Add the chopped leaves (about 1 cup) from one daikon radish.

4. Cook as you would normal rice.

Before cooking it, the takikomi gohan should look something like this:


And when cooked, you can expect this:


When all of this was done we included miso soup and simmered Japanese pumpkin (kabocha no nimono).

Miso soup with aburage, konnyaku, sliced daikon, and homemade red-and-white miso paste

Simmered Japanese pumpkin (kabocha no nimono)

And then it was time to eat. We broke open some Tiger beer and stuffed ourselves full to bursting.

Note: Agebitashi is delicious when served hot, but I guarantee that it'll knock your socks off after you've refrigerated it long enough (i.e., overnight) to let all the flavors of the broth absorb into your vegetables.