Sometimes I feel like the Western world doesn’t value Japanese starters as much they should. Whenever I go out to eat sushi, I never skip the starters – may it be wakame (seaweed salad), summer rolls, gomaae or edamame. I will show you how to do the last two in the following recipes. You can easily add them to your sushi or Japanese rice or noodle dish as a starter.
Ingredients for the horenso gomaae:
250g leaf spinach
3 tbsp tahini
1-2 tbsp light soy sauce
1 tsp sugar (healthier alternative: agave syrup)
2-3 tbsp water
3 tbsp sesame seeds, roasted
Ingredients for the edamame:
800-900g green soybeans
coarse salt
Stew the spinach, then put it in a strainer and squeeze thoroughly. Put it aside to cool down.
Mix together the tahini, soy sauce, sugar, water and 2 tbsp of the sesame seeds until you get a smooth sauce.
Cut the spinach in streaks of about 10cm.
To serve, put the spinach into 2 little bowls, pour the sauce over it and garnish with the remaining sesame seeds.
For the edamame, boil the (mostly) deep-frozen soybeans for 5 minutes. After draining, rinse them with hot water.
Put the soybeans in a bowl and dredge with coarse salt to your like. They taste best hot, but you can also serve them cold.
