• In the box: Uneno Rishiri kombu dashi powder, 50g (Kyoto) · Himeno small-cap donko shiitake, 90g in a resealable bag (Oita)
• Ingredients: Kombu powder — Rishiri kombu (Hokkaido), single ingredient. Shiitake — log-grown shiitake (Oita), single ingredient. Nothing added to either.
• Allergens: None. No fish, no animal ingredients, no wheat, no soy — both components are plant-based and naturally gluten-free.
• Shiitake size: Caps approx. 2cm — the smallest grade Himeno sorts, chosen so they can be cooked whole
• A note on the bag: Himeno is part-way through redesigning the packaging for this range, so the bag that reaches you may not match the one photographed here. The shiitake inside are the same — same house, same forest, same grade.
• Storage: Both keep in a cool, dark, dry place unopened. Once opened, seal and refrigerate; for long keeping, freeze the shiitake. See our full storage guide.
• Origin: Kyoto (kombu, milled) · Oita (shiitake)

Himeno Ichiro Shouten has been a shiitake merchant in Taketa, Oita, since 1877 — not a grower, but a grader. For a hundred and forty-nine years the house has done one thing: look at what the forest produced that year and sort it. Oita grows shiitake on felled oak logs, the slow way, over two years; Himeno's work is to know, by eye and by hand, which of them are worth a name. Their sorting is what Isetan and the other department stores in Tokyo have bought for generations.

Uneno has drawn dashi in Kyoto since 1903. Their Rishiri kombu is the one the city's temple and kaiseki kitchens have leaned on for a century, ground here to a powder so that it dissolves rather than needs straining. The full story lives on the Uneno Rishiri Kombu Dashi Powder page.

In 1908 a chemist in Tokyo tasted a bowl of kombu broth and found a taste that did not fit sweet, sour, salt or bitter. He called it umami. What took longer to understand is that umami has more than one source, and that the sources amplify one another: kombu's glutamate against shiitake's guanylate produces a savouriness several times what either gives on its own.

Japanese cooking arrived at this by palate long before anyone named the compounds. In temple kitchens, where fish was not used, kombu and dried shiitake became the whole foundation — shojin dashi. It is not a substitute for anything. It is one of the two original ways. If you would like the longer version, we wrote it out in What Is Umami? and What Is Dashi?

Put a small handful of the shiitake in cold water in the refrigerator and leave them overnight; in the morning the water has turned amber and faintly sweet, and that water is your dashi — no heat, no straining, nothing to throw away. Whisk a spoonful of the kombu powder straight into that liquid and you have the full pairing in about four seconds of work, ready for miso soup, for simmered vegetables, for rice cooked in broth instead of water. The rehydrated mushrooms are the second half of the ingredient: at 2cm they need no knife, so drop them whole into the same pot, or slice them into a chawanmushi, or brown them hard in a pan with a little soy sauce and eat them on their own. The soup we make most often with this pair is kenchin-jiru — root vegetables and tofu, cooked in the broth that made itself overnight.

Both components are dried and light — the pair travels as a single parcel of well under half a kilogram, the lowest weight band we ship. Import duties are calculated and collected at checkout, so nothing is billed to you after the box arrives.