Pumpkin Nimono (かぼちゃの煮物)

Pumpkin Nimono (かぼちゃの煮物)

Published on 30/10/2015 | In By
    • Prep Time
    • Minutes
    • Cook Time
    • Minutes

pumpkin nimono The condiments are normally soy sauce, sake, mirin (sweet cooking-sake) and dashi (Japanese soup stock). You adjust these to suit the kind of food you are cooking. I don’t use sake and dashi for pumpkin because it already has a strong, deep taste. I think soy sauce and mirin are enough.cooking the pumpkin
In the autumn you can get a great many different kinds of pumpkin.

There is such a variety of colours, shapes and tastes to delight our eyes and taste buds! Still, I was shocked to find that all the pumpkin flavours we get here are totally different to the kinds I was used to eating in Japan!

Nowadays you can buy the Japanese kinds (kabocha) in supermarkets, so when they arrive, I always buy several and stock them at home. They have names like Green Delicious, Hokkaido, Kabocha, Ebisu … Their taste is sweet, like a chestnut, the shell is green and the inside is a deep orange colour.kabochani

Kabocha is very, very hard to cut! The first cut in particular is not easy. Use a big strong knife, and cut slowly. However, it’s easy to break into pieces once it’s cooking. You can take the skin off, but we normally cook with the skin and eat that as well.

Ingredients

  • Kabocha (or a similar kind of pumpkin)
  • Water
  • 2 tbsp mirin
  • 1 tbsp soy sauce
  • Sheet of cooking paper

Instructions

  1. Cut pumpkin into 2-3cm pieces, and trim the edges (you can skip this process if you prefer).
  2. Use right size pot for the number of pumpkin pieces. Place the pumpkins skin down in the pot. Pour water just cover the pumpkins, cook medium heat.
  3. When the water boil, add Mirin. Cut cooking paper exactly the pot size, and make a hole in the centre. Put the paper on the pumpkins, and lid on, cook 5 minutes medium heat. Add soy sauce, then cook until the liquid almost reduced down and soaked through pumpkins.