Carrots cooked kinpira style
| Cuisine of Japan
Kinpira is a Japanese cooking term that roughly translates to sauté and simmer. The aim is to cook root vegetables such as carrots and burdock root in a minimum amount of water so that they end up tenderly cooked and with none of their flavour or nutritional value lost into discarded cooking water.
Ingredients
- 250g (½lb) carrots, julienne
- 1 Tbs vegetable oil, preferably sesame oil
- water
- Tamari or shoyu soy sauce, to taste
Procedure
- cut the carrots into thin matchstick pieces (sen-giri, or julienne)
- pour a small amount of oil into a saucepan and sauté the carrot pieces for two to three minutes
- add only enough water to half-cover the carrot pieces
- place the lid on the pot and let the carrots simmer on medium-low heat
- towards the end of the cooking process when most of the cooking liquid has been absorbed, add a little tamari or shoyu to enhance flavour
