Grated radish is used as a kind of ‘condiment’ (yakuzen) to enhance the flavor of the dish or to neutralize the smell of fish, and it further helps to digest the food. That is why it is often served together with tempura, fish, meat or other oily food. Since the enzymes in radish that enhance digestion are destroyed when cooked, grated radish is served raw. And it seems that the more pungent the radish is, the better the digestion. Food enthusiasts suggest that the process of grating as such raises its pungent flavor. If grated radish is left at room temperatures for some time, it will lose its pungency and therefore should be immediately used after grating.
There are/were different ways how to make radish spicy.
- one method deals with the grating process as such
- the another method focuses on the radish before grating
How to make grated radish spicier
You can basically use any grater at hand. I usually grate radish with this device:
I’ve been told that in order to get the most of its pungent flavor you have to grate the unpeeled radish in circles traverse to the fiber. The radish is also more pungent towards the tip. Some people swear by high performance: the more energetic one grates the more pungent the radish gets. They seem to rely on an old Japanese proverb that says “grating the radish in a furious state makes it spicy” (okorinagara daikon wo orosuto karaku naru 怒りながら大根をおろすと辛くなる). After about five minutes the flavor will be fully unfolded. In contrast, if you prefer the radish less pungent, you should use the bottom of the peeled radish and gently grate it alongside the fibers. Try it out! There is also a scientific explanation behind this, it has a lot to do with unfolding enzymes and smashed cells.
For a colorful garnish, you can also mix grated radish with grated carrots (or other vegetables). Or, if you like it very hot, you can mix it with chili peppers. Therefore, you make holes into the radish, stuff these with chili peppers and then grate the radish.
How to make radish more pungent: the historical way
Therefore you need:
– a hot place (best is a fire place)
– good ventilation
Many old manuals are a very good source for practical knowledge. Here, I would like to introduce a seventeenth century food encyclopedia called Honchō shokkan (“Food mirrow of our country”, 1697), which provides exhaustive information about food and food products. It also contains detailed descriptions about how to cultivate, harvest, process, and cook everything that can be digested in order to make it safe for consumption. Here comes the relevant passage:
" Recently, people became widely fond of noodles and enjoy it with extremely pungent radish juice. Because of that, every household competes with each other for cultivating the most pungent radish. Old and fat radishes with a hard and full texture are very pungent whereas young and soft radishes with a fluffy and delicate texture have a mild taste. Thin and solid ones too are very pungent. If one puts freshly harvested radishes nearby a fire place and ensure good ventilation so that they can dry and become firm, they become very pungent too. In general, this applies to all good radishes that are dried at a place with good ventilation for about one or two days; they will all become very pungent. As a general rule, we can say that summer radish barely tastes hot in contrast to winter radish that has got much more pungency. Nowadays, Kageyama radish seeds of the province Shinshū as well as the seeds from summer radishes are sold in Edo; they too are extremely pungent and mostly used with noodles. They are in no way inferior to the pungency of Owari’s Nezumi radish, but I haven’t tried them yet." (Honchō shokkan)
Kageyama radish is regarded as the same as present-day Togakushi radish. It is also called Ueno radish because it was cultivated in Togakushi village, Ueno district in present-day Nagano prefecture. Kageyama is today called Iriyama in Nagano city, and it borders on Togakushi. A legend said that in the Tokugawa period a merchant introduced the seeds: he traded them for hemp seeds. Radish, at that time, was mainly cultivated as secondary crop after hemp.
Owari is the old province name of the Western part of present-day Aichi prefecture.
Shinshū (also called Shinano) is the old province name of present-day Nagano prefecture.
The dish the author of Honchō Shokkan talked about is called oroshisoba: grated radish or the juice is put upon a hot bowl of soba or udon to enhance the flavor of the dish. It was a very popular dish in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), and still is. It is called Echizen soba in Fukui prefecture (Echizen is the old name for the Fukui region). If you put Echizen soba into a search engine, then many places (in Fukui prefecture and elsewhere) where you can eat the dish will pop up. They sometimes vary in ingredients or the way how to eat it, but the main ingredient, grated radish, remains the same.
To sum up, the pungency depends on
a) the type of radish,
b) the grating method,
c) the way how radish is prepared for further use
d) your secret method (which I’d love to know)
Enjoy!