Chef Masaharu Morimoto suspects that many home cooks don’t attempt Japanese food because of the mystique around the cuisine.

That’s a mistake, he says, and one he aims to correct with his new cookbook, “Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking” (Ecco, $45).

Morimoto will be at Williams-Sonoma at Ala Moana Center on Christmas Eve for a meet-and-greet and to autograph copies of the book.

The chef titled the book as an homage to the late Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” (co-authored with Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck). More so, however, it was to make cooking Japanese food more approachable for home cooks who might be unfamiliar with the techniques, just as Child’s book brought French cooking into many a home kitchen in America.

In his introduction, Morimoto recalls breathless reviews written about the $25-a-plate miso-marinated black cod served at the famed Nobu restaurant in New York, where he was once a young executive chef.

The dish — what we know locally as misoyaki butterfish — was an upscale version of a humble dish his grandmother would make, Morimoto said. He credited chef Nobu Matsuhisa’s brilliance for knowing “how much Americans would love the dish,” and said the praise “revealed how thrilling even the simplest Japanese home cooking could be.”

Morimoto, who just closed his restaurant at the Modern Honolulu and will open two new restaurants in Waikiki next year, includes his butterfish dish in the book.

For many in Hawaii, preparation of Japanese dishes at home is a daily routine, but for many others it might seem too ethereal and difficult.

They can be put off, for example, by stories of how sushi chefs “train for years before they’re allowed to even touch rice or fish,” Morimoto says in his introduction to the book. He cites other reasons as well, such as the number of components involved in many traditional dishes.

“I wanted to reaffirm the value of home cooking,” he said, in an email interview. “As Japanese cuisine has become more popular, I want people to try it at home as well.”

Because the book is being released all over the United States, the chef provides alternatives to ingredients that might not be easy to find in some areas.

“You can substitute with anything you’d like. That’s one of the good things about home cooking. I always say this, I have only one rule: no rules,” he said.

Kinpira gobo is almost de rigueur with a Japanese meal, but as gobo, or burdock root, might also be hard to find in, say, Peoria, Ill., the dish has been converted to use parsnips.

Hawaii-style poke is not a traditional Japanese dish, but given his feelings about rules, Morimoto’s recipe for Tekka Don No Poke, a Hawaii poke-style tuna and rice bowl, is in the book.

Morimoto begins his book with dashi, the essential stock at the base of so many Japanese dishes. There follow chapters on rice; soups; grilled, broiled and seared foods; steamed dishes; simmered dishes; stir-fries; noodles; fried and dressed foods; and pickles.

“Please don’t take Japanese food as some difficult and mysterious food from the Far East,” he said. “I hope people will try making it with whatever ingredients they wish to use.”

For all that, Morimoto no longer cooks at home himself. His favorite comfort food, he says, is “anything my wife prepares for me.”

Is he tired of being known as the “Iron Chef”?

“No doubt that being on the shows has had a significant impact on my career. It was an eye-opening experience,” Morimoto said.

The show fueled his growth as a person and as a chef, but fame brought some unwanted attention. “My privacy became (a) more slippery thing, but I learned to enjoy the whole package.”

He wouldn’t necessarily recommend similar competitive experiences to others, “because now I know how difficult it can be,” Morimoto said. Now when he appears on “Iron Chef,” he views it less as a competition or an opportunity to impress judges or viewers. “I take it as a challenge with myself, for myself. Of course, I feel pressure to win, but that is not my focus.”

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Shira Ae

Take a quick glance at shira ae and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was boring health food. Yet the coarse white dressing isn’t cottage cheese — it’s tofu perked up with soy sauce and mirin. And the vegetables aren’t raw — they’re steeped in dashi to infuse them with flavor. It’s still health food, though, just far from boring.

From “Mastering the Art of Japanese Home Cooking,” by Masaharu Morimoto (Ecco/HarperCollins, $45)

• 4 cups loosely packed trimmed spinach (not baby) 
• 4 medium dried shiitake mushroom caps, re-hydrated (page 254) and thinly sliced 
• ½ cup carrot matchsticks (about 1½ by ⅛ inch) 
• 1½ cups dashi (dried fish and kelp stock, page 20) or Kombu Dashi (kelp stock, page 23) 
• 1½ tablespoons plus about 1 teaspoon mirin (sweet rice wine) 
• 2 teaspoons plus about 1 teaspoon Japanese soy sauce 
• Generous pinch kosher salt 
• One 14-ounce package firm tofu, drained 

Bring a small pot of water to a boil. Prepare a bowl of icy water. Add the spinach to the boiling water, stir well, and cook for 20 seconds. Use a slotted spoon or spider to transfer the spinach to the icy water. Stir well, drain, firmly squeeze the spinach to remove as much water as you can, and set aside.

Combine the shiitake, carrots, dashi, 1½ tablespoons mirin, 2 teaspoons soy sauce, and the salt in a small pot and bring to a boil over high heat. Reduce the heat to maintain a simmer and cook for 10 minutes, so the dashi flavor begins to infuse the vegetables. Take the pot off the heat and let cool slightly. Add the spinach, stir well to loosen the clumps, and let the mixture sit at room temperature for at least 30 minutes or up to 2 hours.

Set the tofu on two layers of cheesecloth, gather the edges of the cheesecloth around the tofu, and squeeze firmly over the sink to extract as much water as possible. Add the tofu to a medium mixing bowl and crumble it with your fingers. Serves 4.

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