Editor’s note: In the Taste of Life series, cooking experts, chefs and others involved in the field of food introduce their special recipes intertwined with their paths in life.

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Cooking expert Ai Hosokawa moved from Tokyo to Kumamoto, where she continues to create dishes that make full use of the ingredients.

Hosokawa says she realized how good water can taste after moving to the area.

The rain that falls on the mountains of Aso seeps into the earth and turns into groundwater, which absorbs the underground minerals over time and becomes spring water that is then used as tap water in Kumamoto.

Hosokawa says she is “most fortunate” to be able to drink such water each day and use it in cooking and when making tea.

Hosokawa also met farmers who grow chemical-free tea that opened her eyes to the joys of the tea grown in Kumamoto.

She says her encounter with Xie Xiaoman, who runs Xiaoman, a tea house offering Chinese tea in Taiwan, then drew her even closer to tea. They have held “tea and cooking” events in various places around the world, including Japan, Taiwan and India.

Great-tasting water and tea also greatly widened her scope of cooking. Both trying to set off the fine taste of water while cooking and the pleasure of utilizing tea in cooking are challenges she would not have known had she not lived in Kumamoto.

She hit upon the idea of this week’s “chabitashi,” or boiled vegetables steeped in green tea-based sauce, during the season of newly picked tea leaves. She loves the dish and has made it many times ever since.

Many soft leafy green vegetables go on sale at markets in Kumamoto in the fall. It is the season Hosokawa eagerly awaits, and she makes the dish using a variety of greens.

Yet any vegetable can be used, be they rapeseed blossoms in the spring, beans and asparagus in early summer or okra and jute mallow (known as “moroheiya” in Japan) in the summer.

When making this week’s dish, it is crucial to use particularly nice green tea and add a few drops of fish sauce as a finishing touch.

Even when no stock is used, the umami of the vegetables, aroma of green tea and hidden flavor of the fish sauce turn it into an amazingly delicious “ohitashi” that is normally a dish of boiled greens immersed in stock-based sauce.

Although Hosokawa’s dishes sometimes elicit the question, “Which country is this from?” they are not from anywhere in particular.

“I want to make dishes that taste the best at each moment they are consumed by making full use of the ingredients rooted in the place and being unrestrained by recipes,” she says.

Ai Hosokawa is a cooking expert born in Okayama Prefecture in 1972. She studied cooking in Italy. She moved to Kumamoto city in 2009 and, among other activities, offers cooking classes at an atelier she set up in one of the buildings of former Taishoji temple, an officially designated historical site.

BASIC COOKING METHOD

Main Ingredients (Serves 2)

1 bunch of leafy green vegetables of your choice, about 200 ml cold brewed green tea, 2 grams salt, dash of fish sauce

1.Make green tea by infusing it in water. Immerse 4 to 6 grams of tea leaves in 200 ml water overnight. Since the way the aroma emerges varies depending on the tea leaves used, adjust the amount to taste. Strain into a flat container and mix with salt.

2.Immerse vegetables in cold water, remove hard parts.

3.Bring water to a boil, add pinch of salt (not listed above) and cook greens until the color turns a bright green. Remove so a light texture remains and soak straight in (1). Add the water used for boiling so the greens are completely immersed and leave for about an hour. If vegetables with a higher oxalate content such as spinach are used, do not use the water used for boiling but add salt water with the salinity of clear soup.

4.Cut greens into appropriate length and serve. Add a few drops of fish sauce to the green tea liquid, mix and check the taste. Generously pour on the greens. Sprinkle with coarse salt to taste.

Add only a few drops of fish sauce since an excessive amount will add too much fish flavor.

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From The Asahi Shimbun’s Jinsei Reshipi (Life Recipe) column