Part 3 of our new Japanese baby food cooking show!
Tomoko & her baby Taiga show us how to cook shirasu (whitebait) and tofu dish flavoured with Japanese dash soup. This recipe can be made with just hot water and a microwave – perfect for summer as you won’t need to cook over a hot stove! This is a wonderful dish full of protein and calcium for our growing babies, and is super simple to make in just 5 easy steps. It can even be done one-handed as you hold your baby, just like Tomoko does in the video!! Thank you Tomoko & Taiga!
What you need:
- Shirasu (whitebait), boiled (not dried)
- Tofu, silky soft
- Katsuo-bushi (dried bonito flakes)
- Hot water
- 2 x small bowls
- Suribachi bowl and Surikogi stick for grinding
- Tea strainer
- Spoon
- Microwave
How to make:
- Place tea strainer on top of small bowl. Add spoonful of shirasu into strainer, and pour hot water over the top from the kettle. Soak for 1-2 minutes. After soaking, strain whitebait and move to the Suribachi bowl for grinding later.
- Similar to step 1, place one sachet of katsuo-bushi in the tea strainer sitting over the small bowl, and pour hot water over the top. Soak for 1 minute. The resulting soup from the katsuo-bushi is called ‘dashi’.
- Place spoonful tofu into small bowl, add 3 tablespoons of dashi from (2).
- Place lid on bowl from (3), and cook in microwave for 1.5 minutes.
- Grind shirasu in the Suribachi bowl. Add the tofu/dashi mix and mash together with the shirasu.
Note – This recipe makes enough for 1-2 meals. Grind to finer puree for 5-6 month old babies. You can also cook a larger volume and puree with a hand-held blender, and refrigerate (or freeze) for later.
Japanese terms to look for at the supermarket:
- Shirasu（しらす）
- Silky soft tofu – called “Kinu” tofu（絹、きぬ）- don’t get the hard tofu（木綿、もめん）
- Katsuo-bushi（かつおぶし）
- Bowl and stick for grinding is called Suribachi （すりばち）and Surikogi（すりこぎ）. Suribachi is the bowl. Bachi (hachi) means bowl in Japanese. Suru (or suri) means grinding.
Happy Cooking Everyone!
please please please, post more videos about how to make baby food.. I am a new foreigner mom in japan and this kind of videos help me a lot ! Thank you !
Hi Grace, Thanks for your message! We’ll try and make more cooking videos soon! 🙂 Kate
Your site has been very helpful to me a first time mum in Japan. I was just wondering how much water did Tomoko add to the packet katsuo-bushi? Looking forward to more videos (helpful when you can’t read Japanese cookbooks).
Hi Dora! Thank you for your message. Tomoko will get back to you with the details of the recipe:)!
Hi Dora!
Thank you for your comment, and sorry for taking time to get back to you.
I put about 150ml hot water for this time.
660 ml hot water per 12g katsuo-bushi is recommended in my book. Katsuo-bushi pack I used in the video is about 3g/package, so that about 150ml is good enough to make Dashi soup.
Enjoy cooking!
Tomoko
please, post more videos about how to make baby food.. I am a new foreigner mom in japan and this kind of videos help me a lot ! Thank you !
Thank you for the video and recipes! About how old are babies that are eating this recipe?
HI Maru! Our babies were 8 months old when we took this video 🙂