Japanese Pantry Essentials: The 7 Things to Buy First

You find a Japanese recipe you want to make, read the ingredient list, and it asks for five bottles you don’t own and can’t confidently tell apart. So you buy nothing, or you buy the wrong thing, and either way the recipe doesn’t happen.

Seven purchases cover the great majority of everyday Japanese home cooking — six seasonings and one thing that isn’t a seasoning at all. Before those, though, it’s worth knowing how Japanese cooks think about seasoning in the first place, because two of the most important ingredients are already in your kitchen.

First, the two you already have

There’s a mnemonic taught in Japanese home economics classes: sa-shi-su-se-so. It’s the order seasonings go into a dish.

	Japanese
sa	satō	sugar
shi	shio	salt
su	su	vinegar
se	shōyu	soy sauce
so	miso	miso

(Soy sauce is the odd one — it earns its se from an older spelling, seuyu.)

The reason usually given for the order is that sugar penetrates food slowly and needs a head start, while the aromatic seasonings at the end lose their fragrance if they’re cooked too long. Whether or not that’s the real chemistry, it’s how the sequence is taught, and it’s a genuinely useful default when a recipe doesn’t specify.

The part worth pausing on is that sugar comes first. Western cooks approaching Japanese food tend to imagine it as clean and savory, and are startled by how much sugar goes into ordinary savory dishes — simmered vegetables, teriyaki, the rolled omelette in a bento box. Sugar isn’t a garnish in this cuisine. It’s structural.

You already own sugar and salt, so the shopping list is shorter than it looks.

The rest of sa-shi-su-se-so

1. Soy sauce

Buy Japanese koikuchi, which is the standard all-purpose type and what a recipe means when it just says “soy sauce.”

It’s worth knowing this isn’t interchangeable with Chinese soy sauce. Japanese soy sauce is brewed with a roughly equal proportion of wheat alongside the soybeans, which makes it lighter, sweeter and more aromatic. Chinese light soy sauce is saltier and more purely savory; dark soy sauce is thicker and often has added sugar or molasses. Swapping them won’t ruin dinner, but it won’t taste like the dish you were aiming for.

Look for “naturally brewed” on the label.

2. Miso

Start with white (shiro) or blended (awase) rather than red. Red miso is fermented longer and is considerably more assertive — excellent once you know what you want, punishing as a first purchase.

Miso is a living fermented food. It goes in the refrigerator once opened, and it should not be boiled hard: add it at the end, off the heat or nearly so, or you flatten the flavor you paid for. There’s a bit more to storing it well, which is covered further down.

3. Rice vinegar

Japanese vinegar is milder and rounder than Western vinegar, which is why recipes rarely substitute cleanly. Use white wine vinegar in a dish that wants rice vinegar and it will taste sharp.

One important note on the bottle, which gets its own section below: buy the unseasoned kind.

I should be honest about how this looks from the Japanese side, though, because English-language writing tends to overstate it. The everyday bottle in a Japanese kitchen is often not rice vinegar at all but kokumotsu-su — generic grain vinegar, made from wheat and corn as well as rice. Rice vinegar is one type within that family, alongside kurozu, an aged black vinegar.

There are also blended vinegars, awase-zu, which come pre-mixed with sugar and salt for convenience. Sushi vinegar is the one you’ll have heard of. They’re genuinely popular here because they save a step.

None of which is a reason to go and buy a collection. It’s a reason not to believe anyone who tells you Japanese cooking depends on one specific vinegar.

There happen to be five different vinegars in my kitchen at the moment. That isn’t the number of kinds that exist — the range on a Japanese supermarket shelf is a good deal wider than that, and five is simply what one household ended up with. The point is that no single bottle among them is doing most of the work.

The three that make it taste Japanese

Soy sauce, miso and vinegar exist in some form in most cuisines. These next three are the ones that produce the flavor people actually recognize as Japanese.

4. Dashi

Dashi is the stock underneath nearly everything — miso soup, simmered dishes, noodle broth, savory custards. It’s usually made from kombu and dried bonito flakes, and it is the single biggest reason home cooking tastes flat when someone has followed every other step correctly.

Here is where English-language recipes tend to make life harder than it needs to be. They’ll tell you to steep kombu, bring it just short of a boil, add bonito flakes, strain. That’s a good technique, and worth learning eventually.

But it isn’t what most Japanese households do on a Tuesday. Dashi packets and granulated dashi are what’s actually in the cupboard — certainly in mine, and I’d guess in most of the kitchens around me. You drop a packet in hot water for a few minutes and pull it out, like a tea bag. Nobody considers this cheating.

Start there. If you later want to make it from scratch, you’ll have a much clearer idea of what you’re aiming for.

5. Mirin — and this is the one to read carefully

Mirin is a sweet rice seasoning that gives simmered dishes their gloss and rounds off the salt in soy sauce. It’s brewed, like sake, and contains alcohol.

The problem is that a great deal of what’s sold as mirin in American stores is a different product. Look for hon-mirin — “true mirin.” Bottles labeled aji-mirin or “mirin-style seasoning” are typically sweetened with corn syrup or glucose and are not brewed the same way. They aren’t poison, and a recipe will still work with them.

Hon-mirin does cost somewhat more, which is the entire reason the substitute exists.

I buy hon-mirin. I should be honest, though: I’ve never put the two side by side and tasted them against each other. I buy it because it’s the actual brewed product and the other thing is a manufactured seasoning — not because I could pick it out blind.

6. Cooking sake

Sake in cooking does what wine does in French cooking: it softens, adds depth, and takes the edge off strong flavors. It appears in an enormous number of everyday recipes.

Read this label too. Many products sold as “cooking sake” have salt added, which matters, because the dish is then being salted without you deciding to. What you want is a cooking sake with no salt in it. These are easy enough to find now — as people here have grown more conscious of sodium, “no salt added” has become something manufacturers print in large letters on the front of the bottle rather than bury in the ingredients.

That’s what I keep in my own kitchen. When I’ve run out, I use ordinary drinking sake, which has no salt in it either and works perfectly well as a substitute.

And one thing that isn’t a seasoning

7. Short-grain rice

Rice obviously isn’t a seasoning, and it doesn’t belong in the sa-shi-su-se-so scheme at all. It’s here because none of the six things above get you a meal on their own, and because the wrong bag of rice will quietly undo everything else you do.

In Japan you don’t specify the type, because there’s nothing else on the shelf — all the rice in an ordinary Japanese supermarket is short-grain japonica, and the varieties differ by name, not by shape. In an American supermarket you have to choose, so the term matters.

Short-grain rice cooks up sticky and holds together. That’s the whole point: it’s what lets you pick up rice with chopsticks, form onigiri, or eat a rice bowl without it collapsing into loose grains. Long-grain rice — basmati, jasmine — is bred to do the opposite.

Look for “short grain” on the bag. Koshihikari is the variety name you’ll see most often, and it’s a safe choice.

Three labels that don’t mean what you think

If you take nothing else from this, take these. All three are cases where a bottle sits on the shelf under a name that suggests something it isn’t.

Aji-mirin is usually not mirin. It’s a mirin-style seasoning, sweetened rather than brewed. Look for hon-mirin.

“Seasoned rice vinegar” already has sugar and salt in it. It’s essentially sushi vinegar under a different name. Excellent for sushi rice, and quietly wrong in any recipe that expects plain vinegar, because you’ll end up seasoning the dish twice. Buy the unseasoned bottle as your default.

“Sushi rice” on a bag of raw grain is a misnomer. In Japanese, sushi-meshi means rice that has already been cooked and seasoned with vinegar. The dry grain in the bag is just short-grain rice. The label is harmless, but knowing this saves you wondering whether you need a separate kind of rice for everyday cooking. You don’t.

What not to buy yet

Resist the urge to buy the full shelf. A few things that can wait:

• Ponzu, tsuyu, and other pre-mixed sauces. Genuinely convenient, but they’re combinations of things you now own. Learn what they’re made of first.
• Specialty soy sauces — usukuchi, tamari, white soy sauce. Real differences, but not until koikuchi is a bottle you use without thinking.
• Red miso, until white or awase feels limiting.
• Katsuobushi and kombu, until instant dashi has stopped being enough for you.

And one that belongs on this list even though almost every English-language guide puts it on the other one:

• Toasted sesame oil. You’ll see it recommended as a Japanese pantry staple everywhere. It isn’t really one. It turns up in dressings, in gyoza, in a handful of dishes — but Japanese cooking doesn’t lean on it, and the cuisines that genuinely do are Chinese and Korean. Buy it when you start cooking those, or when a specific recipe asks. It’s a good thing to own. It just isn’t foundational here, and putting it in the starter list means something more useful gets left out.

Storage, briefly

Miso is worth a paragraph of its own, because it’s the one that visibly deteriorates.

Refrigeration is fine if you’ll get through the tub in one to three months. For anything longer, put it in the freezer — the salt content means it won’t actually freeze solid, so you can spoon it straight out, and the cold slows the yeast activity that dulls the color and flavor over time.

Either way, the surface is the problem. Miso oxidizes where it meets the air, going darker and losing aroma from the top down. Press a piece of plastic wrap flat onto the surface so there’s no air gap, then put the lid on over it. It takes five seconds and it’s the difference between miso that lasts and miso that goes brown and tired in the tub.

Opened dashi, once you’ve made it into liquid, goes in the refrigerator and should be used within a couple of days.

Soy sauce keeps at room temperature but loses its aroma once opened, so a bottle you finish in two or three months is better than a bargain-sized one that sits for a year. Vinegar keeps well in a dark cupboard. Mirin and sake are stable; hon-mirin’s alcohol content helps it keep.

Rice keeps best somewhere cool, sealed, and out of the light — not in a bag with the top rolled over.

Where to start

If eight purchases at once is too many, buy three: soy sauce, mirin, and dashi. Those three plus the sugar and salt already in your cupboard will cook a surprising amount of Japanese home food, and they’ll teach you more about what the cuisine is doing than any single recipe will.