Dashi

Traditional European sauces rely on broths, either made in advance as stocks or the result of the cooking process, but Japanese cooks rely almost exclusively on a universal broth called dashi. Dashi is the most fundamental component in Japanese sauce making and, in fact, in most Japanese cooking. Although dashi’s universality may surprise Western-trained cooks, who take great care and time to distill the flavor of a particular food into a broth or jus, most recipes for dashi take only about 15 minutes to make and lend themselves to great subtlety.