Goma-ae

Goma-ae belongs to the broad family of aemono — Japanese dishes in which cooked or raw ingredients are dressed in a seasoning paste — and its name combines goma (sesame) with ae, from the verb aeru, 'to dress.' Dressing vegetables in ground sesame is a long-established everyday preparation in Japanese home and temple cooking rather than the invention of any one place or cook, so no single origin can be attributed; sesame itself has been cultivated and used in Japan since antiquity. The dish is closely tied to shojin ryori (Buddhist temple cuisine), which leaned heavily on sesame as a source of richness and protein in the absence of meat, and to the everyday washoku table, where a small dressed-vegetable dish rounds out a rice-based meal.

Cool and lightly dressed, the greens taste cleanly of themselves under a coat of toasty, faintly sweet sesame. The texture is the point: the spinach is tender but not waterlogged, while the ground sesame is slightly gritty and oily, releasing a roasted nuttiness as you chew. A good goma-ae clings lightly without pooling liquid in the bowl; if the greens were not squeezed dry, the dressing turns thin and watery and the sesame flavor washes out.

The flavor is built almost entirely on the sesame. Toasting drives off moisture and triggers Maillard browning and the formation of roasted aroma compounds, and grinding the warm seeds in a suribachi ruptures the cell walls to release their oils, turning whole seeds — which would mostly pass through whole and taste flat — into a fragrant, semi-coarse paste that coats the greens. Soy sauce adds salt and savory amino acids while a little sugar rounds the edges, so the dressing reads sweet-nutty rather than sharp. The greens are blanched only briefly and shocked in cold water to set their color and stop the cooking, then wrung out hard: squeezing removes the water that would otherwise dilute the dressing and make the dish watery, which is the single most common failure. Because the seeds are highest in aroma right after grinding, goma-ae is best dressed shortly before serving.