Recipe and Photo Policy

Last updated: October 2026

I’m Yuto Omura, the person behind Sudachi. My cookbook, Japan: The Ultimate Cookbook, was published in the US in 2025 and contains more than 300 recipes. You can learn more about me on my About page.

This page explains how I create recipes, choose the substitutes I recommend, and photograph the food. It also covers how our team calculates nutrition and how you can share my work.

What “authentic” means here

I never want to cook by rigid rules that keep dishes frozen in time. Without room for change, recipes would never develop and everyone’s version would end up much the same. To me, revisiting recipes and making them our own is the best way to honor the cooks who came before us. I don’t hold on to tradition for its own sake or call someone else’s cooking “wrong.”

But as a Japanese person, I also believe a dish should still be recognizable, both in its flavors and in how it looks, even when I adapt it. These are the principles I cook by.

Respect the authentic Japanese flavors found in Japan today.
Bring in my own ideas or a modern touch where they fit.
Draw on my experience growing up with this food to share the version I think tastes best.

Ebi Mayo (Fried Shrimp in Mayonnaise Sauce) on a brown plate with salad and lemon wedges — My beer battered ebi mayo is a good example.

I make an exception for little-known regional dishes with very little information available worldwide. For those, I share a faithful traditional version first. I feel responsible for preserving the foundations of these dishes and introducing them to the world in English.

And one more thing. Don’t let someone else’s definition of “authentic” limit your cooking. What feels authentic to you, and what tastes best in your kitchen, matters more. That’s the philosophy behind my recipes.

How I develop a recipe

My starting point never changes. The food must be Japanese or at least related, and it must taste great. I choose the idea behind each dish, then work out the approach that suits it.

I develop, cook, and taste every recipe myself in my own kitchen. Throughout that process, I draw on the cooking knowledge I’ve built over the years to check my work.

I don’t require a fixed number of test batches. A recipe might meet my standards on the first try, or it might take 5 attempts or more. I trust my sense of taste more than my technique, and nothing is ready until I’m happy with how it tastes. Often, I abandon an idea entirely. If I don’t think a recipe tastes better than what most restaurants serve, I scrap it. I can’t settle for “good enough.”

The recipe also has to work in your kitchen. However good my own batch tastes, I’ve failed if most people can’t recreate it at home. Part of what I enjoy is seeing how far I can make a recipe exciting while keeping it reliable. I look for a similar balance in the instructions. Too much explanation can get in the way, but too little can leave you without what you need.

When a recipe is trending, I don’t repost it or make a close copy. I study the idea or technique, take it apart to understand why it works, and build a new recipe in my own style from the ground up.

Of course, taste is personal. Above all, each recipe on this site is the version I enjoy most.

Ingredients and substitutes outside Japan

I truly believe that if you buy good staple seasonings, such as soy sauce, sake, and mirin, the fresh ingredients available locally will often taste better. That’s why I include substitutes in so many recipes.

Those recommendations have to come from experience rather than theory. I was born and raised in Japan and live here now. The only other country I’ve lived in is England, where I spent 5 years. My readers live in many more places than those 2 countries, so I need a way to understand what cooking and shopping are like elsewhere. To recommend something confidently to a reader in the US, for example, I ask Japanese people who live there.

I don’t simply collect substitutes from the internet and pass them on. Before I recommend one, it must be based on real experience and convince me that it’s a good choice.

I draw mainly on 4 sources.

My experience cooking abroad. I spent 5 years making Japanese food in England with ingredients I could buy locally.
Our own survey. Through Japanese services including CrowdWorks, Lancers, and Locotabi, we ask Japanese people living abroad about the ingredients they use. We pay them for their time. Everyone we survey cooks at home and shops in local stores outside Japan. For each ingredient or seasoning, they tell us the brand they buy and where they find it, or what they substitute when they can’t get it. We exclude anything brought from Japan. This is a small survey built around listening to individuals, so we never treat it as statistics.
Your experiences. Readers tell us what kind of substitutes did and didn’t work when they cooked a recipe. We hear from them here on the website, on YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and elsewhere.
Message boards for extra context. I sometimes look at Japanese-language classified boards used by Japanese people living abroad to learn what people in those places use. This is separate from our survey and only supplements the other 3 sources.

Here are a few more of my thoughts on ingredients and measurements.

Dashi: I will never push you to make it from scratch. I will always give you another way to make the dish.
MSG: I see it as a seasoning like any other, neither something special to favor nor something special to avoid. Getting the amount right takes care, because too much umami can be as much of a problem as none. But I rarely use MSG in my recipes.
Measurements: I develop recipes in Japan with ingredients available here, using Japanese measurements (grams, milliliters, tablespoons, and teaspoons). The recipes you see include US cups and spoons alongside grams. For vegetables, meat, and similar ingredients, I give both a count and a weight so you can buy by the piece and measure accurately.
Salt: I write recipes for fine sea salt, the type used in most Japanese homes. Grain size makes a big difference when measuring salt by the spoonful. Kosher salt, which is common in the US, has larger grains with more air between them, so a teaspoon can be less salty than a teaspoon of fine sea salt.

My kitchen and tools

I use a gas stove for almost all my recipe development. You can find the equipment and pantry ingredients I use on my Ingredients and Tools page.

Photos and videos

I shoot every photo and video on this website myself, in my own kitchen. In every finished-dish photo, the food was made by following the recipe exactly as written.

When a recipe changes

Sometimes a reader asks whether a recipe has changed. It may have. I never consider a recipe so finished that I can’t revisit it.

As I learn more and improve my knowledge/skills, I often find ways to improve recipes I loved years ago. That growth is why older recipes can begin to feel as though they’re missing something, and why I’m happy to update them.

If I find a way I think is better, I may start again from scratch. Other times, a small adjustment is enough. When an update makes a major change, I try to note it in the post and link to the older YouTube video if one exists.

How we calculate nutrition

Our team calculates the nutrition information on this website. You will find 2 kinds of calculations here. Some were done by hand by our registered dietitian, Shiho Maeda, while more recent recipes use a nutrition database system we built ourselves.

Shiho’s qualifications include a Japanese registered dietitian license (2007) and an MSc in Applied Human Nutrition from Oxford Brookes University (2020).

We mainly use the Standard Tables of Food Composition in Japan 2020 (Eighth Revised Edition). Many Japanese ingredients and seasonings aren’t covered by US or UK databases, and using one main source helps keep our calculations consistent. If we know the exact product used, we give priority to the information on its nutrition label. We fill gaps with sources such as USDA FoodData Central and account for changes in weight and nutrients during cooking.

We apply these rules to the calculations.

A pinch is counted as 0.25 g.
Ingredients listed as “to taste” are left out.
Ingredients marked “optional” are left out.

The figures are estimates. They may vary slightly depending on the brands and ingredients you use.

Using my recipes and photos

I’m glad you’d like to share my recipes. I create all the recipes, photos, and videos on Sudachi and own the copyright to them.

You’re welcome to pin from the website. Please do so directly from the recipe post so your pin links back to it.

To feature my work on your own website, please follow these rules.

Use only one photo, without cropping or editing it. Put a direct link to the recipe post nearby.
Don’t copy and paste a recipe. If you’ve cooked it and would like to share it, describe it in your own words and link to the original recipe on sudachirecipes.com.
Don’t combine my photos into a collage.
Don’t pin my photos with a link to your own page.
Don’t add text or a watermark, or alter a photo in any other way.