Nicholas Gavin is the Culinary Creative Director of ChefSteps, where he develops recipes and is responsible for making all the food look beautiful. Nick has worked at ChefSteps for over a decade; he and ChefSteps co-founder Grant Crilly worked together at Modernist Cuisine. Nick has worked in professional kitchens both in the United States and abroad, most notably at Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain.

Nicholas Gavin

Dashi is the foundational stock in Japanese cuisine. Packed with umami, it’s used in a wide variety of applications, like sauces, soups, custards, and braises. While you can make a dashi out of any ingredient—it just means “cooking broth”—it typically refers to a broth made with kombu, or dried kelp. Dashi that has been made with a combination of kombu and katsuobushi—shavings of boiled, smoked, and dried skipjack tuna loin—is commonly referred to as “ichiban dashi” (“first” or “number one” dashi), as it is the most widely used version of dashi in both restaurant and home kitchens.Ichiban dashi is an umami powerhouse, as kombu contains a high concentration of salts of glutamic acid (or glutamates) and katsuobushi contains a high concentration of salts of inosinic acid (or inosinates), and the two amino acids have been found to have a synergistic relationship when eaten in combination. Simply put, when we eat the two ingredients together, they seem to be far more savory than when either is eaten in isolation. Dashi can also be made with dried shiitake mushrooms and other dried fish products, like the niboshi, or dried infant sardines, we recommend using in this recipe.In classical Japanese cooking, there are many best practices associated with cooking with kombu and katsuobushi, particularly when using these ingredients to make dashi, with ideal temperature ranges and times that strike a balance between flavor extraction and clarity. For the “cleanest” dashi flavor, simmering kombu at [f 140] for an hour will maximize flavor extraction without creating off flavors or odors and without muddying the clarity of the broth. Similarly, when extracting flavor from thinly shaved katsuobushi, it’s best to steep it in water that’s been brought to [f 185] for no more than 15 to 30 seconds. The importance of temperature control, particularly for extracting flavor from kombu, makes dashi a perfect candidate for sous vide cooking.

Sous Vide Dashi