Dashi is a staple ingredient in cooking Japanese food. It is the basic broth or stock in cooking many traditional and household Japanese food and it gives flavor to many soups, meat, vegetables and stews. The umami taste of food usually comes from dashi. Dashi along with sake, soy sauce, and mirin gives a backbone to Japanese cuisine. 

Most Japanese food are simple and contains a few ingredients so it is important that each ingredient used is of the highest quality. Making a good dashi is one secret for making a successful Japanese dish.

Nowadays, we can conveniently make dashi using instant dashi in powdered or concentrated liquid form that we can buy at grocery stores. You can even find dashi bags or packets which you can prepare as if you are preparing tea were you need to drop the dashi bag in hot water. This type of instant dashi is the closest you can get to an authentic dashi and contains much lesser flavor enhancers such as salt and MSG like the other forms of instant dashi.

One thing some of you might not know is that making dashi from scratch is really easy. The only thing you need is the time to prepare it. Also, once you learn how to make dashi by yourself, I’m afraid you can not go back to using the instant dashi because there is a huge difference in taste. My Japanese husband described the food I prepared in which I've used homemade dashi this way: "the deliciousness of the food is so deep".