Home cooking is the most essential cooking.  

Hello, my name is Sonoko Sakai and I am a writer, teacher and cook based in California.

The essence of my very being is rooted in my Japanese heritage—my name means “garden”. My cooking reflects my rich cultural upbringing as I lived in many places as a child. I was born in New York and moved to many cities including San Francisco, Kamakura, Mexico City, and Tokyo.

The five keys to my cooking philosophy are freshness, seasonality, simplicity, beauty, and economy. At its most fundamental level, my philosophy is about respecting the ingredients and letting their natural flavor come through. Your ingredients should be as fresh and seasonal as possible…let the ingredients speak for themselves!

While pursuing a doctorate in Education at UCLA, I worked as a substitute teacher for the Los Angeles School District as well as a lab assistant for the late Lou Stoumen, Oscar winning documentary film  director, writer and professor at the UCLA Theatre Arts Department. I would often make family meals for everyone at his studio. Lou loved my cooking so much that he encouraged me to write a cookbook and find my voice in English through food. I wrote the book using a manual Olivetti typewriter with a few missing keys. Three years later, I published my first cookbook, The Poetical Pursuit of Food: Japanese Recipes for American Cooks (1986 Potter). For the next 25 years, I pursued a path in film as a film buyer (not a chef) and later as a film producer but I never stopped loving food.  In order to satisfy my interest in food and storytelling, I occasionally contributed stories and recipes to the Los Angeles Herald Examiner and Los Angeles Times. 

In 2008, I produced a film which sadly opened during the week of the global market crash. I experienced personal and financial hardships but I survived. I left the film world and pursued the art of noodle making in Japan, as a way to restore my sense of being.  In 2009, I began teaching Japanese cooking workshops from my house. I taught as I learned, and learned as I taught, and found a community of wonderful people through food. I have been walking on this path ever since.

 In 2016, I published Rice Craft (Chronicle Books) and travelled around the country teaching people how to make onigiris. In 2019, I published Japanese Home Cooking: Simple Meals, Authentic Flavors (2019 Roost Books) more than 35 years after my first book on Japanese Cooking. The book won the IACP International Cookbook Award.  I am currently working on my fourth book, tentatively titled Simply Wafu: The Art of Everyday Japanese Cooking (Knopf). I am also working on my first children’s book Melon for Obachama (Shambala). 

My favorite pastime is working in the garden and returning to the kitchen with something I grew, cooking it and feeding it to the people I love. Then, going back to the garden with kitchen compost and get my hands dirty again. The cycle of cooking begins and ends in the garden.