MasterChef winner Tim Anderson: How to ‘level up all your cooking’ using these Japanese ingredients

MasterChef winner Tim Anderson says everyone can “level up all (their) cooking” using just five Japanese ingredients, taking their food to “flavour town”.

What’s more, the father-of-two, who lives in London, says these ingredients are readily available from most supermarkets now – and they won’t break the bank.

“Japanese food has just been in this perpetual motion machine of popularity – the more people learn about it, the more they like it,” says Anderson, who won the BBC cookery show in 2011.

“So, things are different now. More people are cooking it, which is great, and more people have the ingredients on hand.

“It’s actually amazing how available they are. In fact, I was just doing my normal weekly shop the other day and noticed that there are even more brands of ponzu available, for example.

“Japanese seasonings are a shortcut to flavour town”.

Born and raised in Wisconsin, the 41-year-old has been studying Japanese food culture for more than two decades.

However, he says he did not “come across” Japanese food until his teens – and his curiosity for it was sparked when he started watching a cooking show called Iron Chef.

Growing up, he says he mainly ate meals such as pasta, meat and vegetables, casseroles, chicken pot pie, Wisconsin specialties like “beer bratwurst” and pizza, with the “most exotic” being Mexican food.

In high school, he says his “image of Japanese food” was limited, mainly focusing on “the classics” such as sushi and Yakitori (grilled chicken skewers).

“I don’t think I had any Japanese food at all until I was a teenager,” he says. “There wasn’t a single Japanese restaurant in my hometown.

“There were a few here and there in Milwaukee, but I didn’t know about it until I was a teenager, and that’s when I started watching Iron Chef – and that’s what set it all off.

“So after that, I started going to these limited restaurants in Wisconsin and Chicago – I grew up not far from Chicago – and trying the odd recipe at home.

“Then I went to school in LA, I went to college there, partly because I knew that there was more Japanese food to experience and learn about.”

Anderson says venturing to LA “expanded [his] horizons”, but it was not until he moved to Japan and lived there that he truly fell in love with the cuisine.

He says trying ramen changed his life – and even now, ramen would form part of his ‘death row meal’.

He continues: “It was ramen after I moved to LA that really became my obsession, especially with tonkotsu ramen, which is why I wanted to move to Kyushu after I graduated because that’s the home of ramen.

“I tried, for years, to make ramen and that’s what my restaurant was based on, but while I was in Kyushu, that’s when I got to understand the local food culture in Japan.

“Everywhere you go, every prefecture, every city, every little town, they all have not just one but multiple local specialties to try.”

Anderson says Japanese food is “not very easy to even define or contain”, but this means “there is just no end” to his recipe ideas.

He has already published nine cookbooks, but his latest, JapanEasy Kitchen, features simple recipes, centred on a core selection of go-to Japanese ingredients.

Anderson says the top five ingredients that everyone should have in their cupboard are Japanese soy sauce; Japanese or short grain rice; dashi powder, which is a stock; mirin, a rice wine; and miso.

While these ingredients are affordable, he recommends spending more on a hon mirin, which translates to “true mirin”, where possible.

“For this book, for JapanEasy Kitchen, I wanted to make it as easy as possible, so I set a no deep frying rule,” he says.

“Plus, lots of people have these ingredients already, so my thought was, let’s get people using them.

“It’s not so much about getting people to use the specific recipes – obviously that’s the point of any cookbook – but to get people to build their confidence using them as a matter of routine.

“So, goal one is get people using Japanese ingredients and cooking Japanese food on a regular basis, and goal two is improve all your cooking by familiarity with Japanese seasonings.

“It’s about how to improve all your cooking, level up all your cooking, using the power of Japanese ingredients.”

With his book, Anderson says people will learn to cook recipes such as katsu curry parmo and no-churn soy sauce caramel ice cream, along with other dishes with a Japanese twist, and many are vegan or vegetarian.

For a complete beginner, Anderson suggests trying the scampi rice bowl as it is “simple, delicious and a crowd-pleaser”, and it uses four out of those five key ingredients – dashi, soy sauce, mirin and rice.

There are more than 100 recipes in the book, but he says the recipe he is “most proud of” is a tofumisu, which is a vegan tiramisu.

He hopes others enjoy experimenting with Japanese ingredients in their cooking as much as he does.

“I started off with a much larger shortlist of recipes, because the brief is limitless,” he says. “But as long as it’s using Japanese ingredients, I could do anything, really.

“Everybody’s got a dish, eating Japanese food, or multiple dishes that they want to learn, so I’d say focus on those and then you will learn about other things along the way.”

JapanEasy Kitchen by Tim Anderson, is published in hardback by Quadrille, priced £26. Photography by Patricia Niven. Available now.