By HARRIS SALAT


You would think that chefs trained in French technique, in which slowly simmered stocks are the carefully concocted foundations of almost every dish, would find it laughable to rely on a quickly steeped broth of kelp and dried fish.

But that Japanese broth, dashi, is finding a place in the kitchens of many Western chefs.

“It’s basically water, but fantastically perfumed water,”said Eric Ripert, the chef at the highly rated Le Bernardin in New York. He complements Kumamoto oysters with dashi gelee, finishes mushrooms with the stock, and brushes it on raw fish before layering on olive oil and citrus.“The dashi is invisible,”he said,“but it brings more depth.”

Jean-Georges Vongerichten, another star chef, adds dashi to a light mayonnaise at Perry St. in New York, and at Jean Georges he accents caramelized sirloin, grilled foie gras and slow-cooked snapper with it.“I realized its umami flavor can go anywhere,”Mr.Vongerichten said.

Kelp and bonito are loaded with umami, the taste of mouthwatering savoriness.

Dashi, which simply means “stock” in Japanese, is prepared from many ingredients. But dashi made from kelp and bonito holds pride of place. For much of Japan’s history, eating meat was taboo. So instead of animal fats and butter, which flavor Western cooking, dashi evolved to infuse umami-rich taste.

Kelp, called kombu in Japan, grows for up to two years before being dried into cardboard-thick green-black ribbons. Japanese bonito (skipjack tuna) is filleted, boiled, smoked, covered in mold and sun-dried to the hardness of oak, then shaved into translucent flakes. Combining them in dashi synergizes their rich umami compounds.

At Kyo Ya in New York, Chikara Sono prepares his dashi daily. It is a careful process of extraction and infusion. He chooses among two varieties of kombu and three kinds of bonito he keeps handy, adjusting proportions to vary taste. Mr.Sono gently heats kombu in water to tease out its essence, removing the kombu before the water boils. Then he adds bonito flakes to simmer gently or steep in the liquid, like tea. When the dashi reaches “koku” - a sublime density of flavor - it is ready to strain.

The result is a lively, satisfying savoriness, a clean taste and an alluring smoky fragrance.

Dashi’s smoky quality is what appeals to Gabriel Bremer, the chef at Salts, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He suffuses a light cream sauce with dashi to subtly mimic the smokiness of bacon.

But how does it compare with a classic French chicken or veal stock, also naturally rich in umami- Chefs familiar with both Japanese and Western cooking say it’s simpler. And dashi yields a lighter, less complex flavor. So it magnifies rather than masks the taste of other ingredients.