Bio

Japanese cooking with Ayako Iino
Or you could call it Beyond Sushi and Tempura. Ayako Iino expands her students’ experience of Japan’s varied cuisine as she teaches them to make such dishes as chawanmushi, yaki aburaage, and handmade udon noodles.

Instructor: Ten years of nearly self-sufficient living in rural Japan—growing rice, harvesting edible plants, and learning traditional ways of cooking—left Iino with a deep appreciation of her native cuisine. After moving to the Bay Area in 2000, Iino attended culinary school and worked for four years in the kitchen at Oliveto before leaving to focus on teaching.

Curriculum: Classes, held in different commercial kitchens in the East Bay, are typically built around a single seasonal menu. Grilled salt-cured salmon with daikon radish is featured in the late summer, for instance, and traditional New Year’s dishes, such as sticky rice cakes and dried anchovies with sweet soy seasoning, are taught in January. After a brief explanation of recipes, ingredients, and techniques, everyone gets to work. Iino moves about the room, stopping to demonstrate how to swiftly cut udon noodles or to dip her spoon into the dashi to check the seasoning, all the while answering questions and sharing tales of her life in Japan.

Philosophy: Seasonality and a focus on ingredients may be a very Bay Area ethos, but according to Iino, the same values are essential to the Japanese kitchen.

Write it down: “There’s no such thing as a traditional recipe. I lived in the Japanese countryside for years, cooking alongside the grandmothers there. No two people ever made the same dish exactly the same way.”

Worth the tuition: After one class, Iino sent students home with jars of her pickled Napa cabbage.

Extra credit: BYO sake to enjoy with the meal at the end of class.

Tuition: $70. To register, go to http://www.ayakoiino.com/