Homemade ganmodoki

For dinner tonight, I had planned a vegetarian oden. I had been looking for ready-to-use (or frozen) ganmodoki in the stores, but had found none. This cookbook, however (I presume this is the English version), had a recipe for making ganmodoki at home.

These were the ingredients we used:

200 g firm (momen) tofu. We used this sort:

 It is really firm (it won't disintegrate when simmered in broth) and rather dry (it's not sold swimming in liquid), and we chose not to try to squeeze out more water (in contrast to what the recipe said).

2 pieces of Hidaka kombu, about 2 inches square in total
2 dried shiitake mushrooms
half a liter of warm water

1 medium-sized carrot (about 50 g)
1 tablespoon of grated ginger
1 egg white, beaten stiff

1 teaspoon light-colored soy sauce (usukuchi shoyu)
1 teaspoon mirin

Salt (to taste - I simply forgot to add it!)

Vegetable oil for deep-frying

Directions:

Soak the kombu and the shiitake in the water for half an hour.

 I wanted to use the soaking liquid as stock for the oden later, so I removed the shiitake and the kombu and strained the liquid through a paper coffee filter.

And I decided to coarsely grate the carrot (instead of finely chopping it).

 

I chopped the kombu and the shiitake, though.

Contrary to the original recipe, we crumbled the tofu into a rather high plastic jar, added the carrot, the shiitake, the kombu, the grated ginger, the soy sauce and the mirin (and I should have added some salt - I forgot the salt!) and blended everything together using a hand-held blender. Only then did we fold the beaten egg white into the resulting mixture.

Deep-frying was Ben's job.

 

I asked him: "Aren't they a bit dark?"

 

And he simply said: "No!"

I asked if I might try one, and he said: "Only over my dead body!" He was only joking, of course. When he wasn't looking, I ate one of them. It had done them no big harm that I had forgotten the salt. But I told Ben to fry them at a lower temperature and for a longer time the next time.