kombu
kombu
Japanese
“A seaweed from Hokkaido's cold waters built the flavor of an entire cuisine.”
Kombu is the dried frond of Saccharina japonica and related kelp species harvested from the cold northern seas of Japan. The word appears in Japanese texts by the fifteenth century at the latest, though its exact origin is debated. One line of evidence connects it to the Ainu word kompu, the language of Hokkaido's indigenous people, who harvested kelp from northern coasts long before Japanese settlers arrived from the south. Another connects it to the Chinese compound 昆布 (kūnbù), which named seaweed in texts as early as the third century CE.
Hokkaido's cool, nutrient-rich waters produce the highest-grade kombu, and Hokkaido remained outside Japanese political control until the Meiji government formally annexed it in 1869. Before annexation, the Matsumae domain controlled trade with the Ainu and ran a maritime route, the kitamaebune (北前船), that carried dried kombu south from Hokkaido through the Sea of Japan to Osaka and Kyoto. This route was operating by the seventeenth century. Osaka merchants then re-exported kombu westward along the Ryukyu trade route, reaching Okinawa and, through Okinawa, the Chinese market.
The key discovery about kombu is not culinary but chemical. The Japanese chemist Kikunae Ikeda, working at Tokyo Imperial University in 1908, identified glutamic acid as the compound responsible for the distinctive savory taste of kombu dashi. He named this taste umami and filed a patent for monosodium glutamate derived from seaweed. Kombu is among the richest natural sources of glutamate: a single four-inch piece can measurably raise the glutamate concentration of cold water in thirty minutes.
Varieties of kombu carry names tied to their harvest location: Ma-kombu from Hakodate, Rishiri-kombu from the island of Rishiri off Hokkaido's northwest coast, Rausu-kombu from the Shiretoko Peninsula. Each produces a dashi of different character. Rishiri gives a clear, delicate stock favored in Kyoto kaiseki; Rausu gives a richer, darker broth better suited to Osaka cooking. The distinctions have been maintained by kombu brokers in Osaka's Konbu Tonya district since the Edo period.
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Today
Kombu is placed in cold water, not hot. This is the rule. The glutamates leach out slowly as the temperature climbs, and if the water reaches a full boil the frond releases compounds that make the dashi bitter and murky. Most home cooks in Japan learned this from a parent; the rule is older than any recipe card. A four-inch square of dried kelp costing about forty yen is the starting point for a bowl of soup in a three-Michelin-star restaurant and in a Sunday-morning kitchen in Sapporo.
Kikunae Ikeda's 1908 discovery gave a name to what Japanese cooks had known in practice for centuries: some foods make other foods taste more completely like themselves. Kombu does this work without announcing itself. "The best flavor in the pot is the one you cannot identify."
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