okonomiyaki

You like pancakes? Yeah, me too. Now imagine a savory pancake full of pork, seafood, and/or your favorite crunchy vegetables. You can eat it for brunch, lunch, dinner or even a late night snack! Not a terrible idea huh? Okonomiyaki is exactly that, a wonderful savory Japanese pancake you can eat at any time of the day. It's pretty deliciously amazing and I'm convinced that if we got a few marketing geniuses from Kellogg together, we could sell it as the perfect hangover food here in the US. For the time being, if you want one, you'll probably have to do a little searching on Yelp or Chowhound or... just make this wonderful disc of deliciousness yourself!

The first time I was introduced to okonomiyaki, I was in Tokyo, in a restaurant that pretty much only makes okonomiyaki. Actually they don't make it - you make it! They give you the batter, whatever ingredients you want in it (just like you might order a pizza here), but then you cook the thing yourself. Having a griddle in the middle of each table might not fly with lawyers in the US, but the Japanese seem to manage just fine. Besides, watching your friends attempt to flip their pancakes is rather amusing too. Ingredients run the gamut from thin slabs of pork belly to fermented soy beans and chunks of octopus. Pretty much anything goes. In fact okonomi mean "what you want" and yaki means "grilled."

As I said, there are a few key ingredients and then the rest is up to you. The base is essentially just pancake batter. In its most basic form, its flour and water. Traditionally grated mountain yam is added to make it slightly gooeyer (read: mucussy) and dashi stock is used instead of water. Eggs and baking powder aren't uncommon additions either. However you make it, the end result should be something that resembles a traditional pancake batter in terms of consistency. The other two ingredient that you probably don't want to skip are chopped cabbage inside the pancake and okonomiyaki sauce on top. The sauce is often described as similar to Worcestershire Sauce, but sweeter and thicker. You'll have to go to your nearest Asian grocer to find it, order it online, or just make it yourself (this recipe is easy!)

Once you've made your batter, what you mix into it is entirely up to you. Today I used shrimp, calamari, shimeji mushrooms, cabbage, and green onion. I also added small bits for fried tempura batter (see above) called tenkasu. This adds a nice crunch. Regular potato chips could be easily used as a substitute in a pinch. Depending on the size of the pancake, you'll need to cook it at least 3-5 minutes per side on a griddle or frying pan. I also cooked my seafood beforehand so that I wouldn't have raw calamari in the middle of my dinner! Finally, it's also rather common for okonomiyaki to have strips of pork belly placed on top and cooked into the pancake. I decided to save that for next time...

To finish it all off, the dish is traditionally topped with the aforementioned okonomiyaki sauce, mayo (don't forget the mayo!!!), nori (seaweed), and bonito flakes. Perfect!

 

Okonomiyaki (serves 3)

1 cup flour

3/4 cup dashi (or water)

2 eggs

1.5 cup chopped cabbage

Optional

2 green onions, sliced

1/2 cup  chopped calamari and shrimp, cooked very lightly

1 cup shimeji mushrooms, cooked very lightly

1/4 cup tenkasu (fried tempura batter, can substitute potato chips)

Toppings (to taste)

Okonomiyaki sauce

Mayonaise

Nori, finely chopped

Bonito flakes

Directions

Mix the flour and dashi until smooth

Gently mix eggs, cabbage, onions, calamari, shrimp, mushrooms, and tenkasu into the batter

Poor onto hot griddle and shape into pancake (can divide into 2-3 small, or 1 very large pancake)

Cook 3-5 minutes per side depending on size

Brush okonomiyaki sauce onto one side, remove from heat

Add mayo, nori, and bonito to taste

yakitori

It amazes me that sushi and miso soup are the Japanese foods that made the successful trip across the Pacific some 40 years ago. Who exactly decided that raw fish and fermented soy bean soup would work in the US back then?? The Japanese have a cuisine that includes noodle soup, grilled fish, fried veggies, hot pot, steak, and my favorite -- chicken morsels bbq'd on skewers. Those would all seem like much more likely candidates to appeal to the American palette - especially back then.

Today I made my first attempt at yakitori, which essentially means chicken (tori) morsels, grilled over live coals (yaki) and basted with a sweet soy-based sauce. It's dead simple and of course delicious. I only made one type of yakitori today but usually when you have this in restaurants or as street food, you would likely order several different types. Typical varieties include dark meat, liver, gizzards, skin, small chicken wings, ground up chicken balls, green onions, peppers, mushrooms, and the list goes on. Today I made chicken with green onion, which is one of the more popular types. Though it's usually made with dark chicken meat, I had a chicken breast in the fridge, so I used that. The basting sauce recipe is very simple, and is included below. I scaled it down quite a bit since I only made four skewers this time. Just bring the ingredients to a boil and it's ready to use.

To make life simple, I used the broiler in the oven to cook the meat, flipping and basting every couple minutes. I would estimate it took no more than 10 minutes to cook the chicken all the way through.The result was good, though it certainly lacked that smokey grilled flavor and the little charred bits that you get when you use coals. Nevertheless, it's a great little appetizer that could easily be turned into a larger meal. Rumor has it that there are plans to make a little yakitori grill for our balcony... I'm sure you'll hear about it if that comes to be. As for the rest of the meal today... salmon nigiri and onigiri with kelp.

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Simple Yakitori Sauce

Ingredients
12 Tbls Soy Sauce (3/4 cup)
  6 Tbls Sake
  3 Tbls Mirin
  2 Tbls Sugar 

makes about 1.5 cups yakitori sauce

Directions
Bring all the ingredients to a boil to dissolve sugar and to burn off the alcohol. Baste the skewers with the sauce while cooking over coals, or if you have enough sauce, dip the skewers into the sauce ever couple of minutes during the cooking.

buta no kakuni

Ok, so you're not sick of Japanese food... good, cause I'm on a roll! Tonight: Buta no Kakuni - braised pork belly! But rather than spend hours describing how delicious dinner was, I'm going to review the cookbook I used for the recipe.

Japanese Cooking: A Simple Art was originally written in 1982 by Shizuo Tsuji. At the time, Japanese food was relatively unknown in the US, especially outside of a few coastal cities. Many of the key ingredients were nearly impossible to get. Sushi was still exotic. Yet there it is, uncompromising in it's use of traditional ingredients and chock-full of great information. The book is both insightful into Japanese culture and extremely useful to anyone interested in learning how to cook Japanese food. The first section discusses ingredients, techniques, tools, and much more. This isn't a typical five page list of basic things you need in your pantry, as with most other cookbooks. No, this is 340 pages of detailed and carefully researched information, including six pages on the art of simmering, 15 pages on how to select and cut fish, and a discussion of every ingredient used in the book. I haven't read the whole thing, but whenever I need answers quickly, I know where to look.

The second section includes another 100 pages full of recipes. Each includes a philosophical explanations about why certain techniques are used and the purpose of the key ingredients. There are only a few pages of color photography at the beginning of the book, but you really don't miss pictures as your thumbing through recipes. Most pages have clear illustrations detailing the many critical techniques used - which makes the book seem less "dense" and a pleasure to read. The only possible reproach I have is that this book doesn't have any "modern" Japanese recipes. This is traditional food. But in my mind this is hardly an issue, because it teaches you the essentials, educates you about ingredients, and you have the entire internet to find whatever other recipe you might want. 

I'm going to steal a line from an Amazon review I just read. "At it's worst, it is impressive".  If you have any desire to learn Japanese cooking, this is where you should start. As for the pork belly braised in soy, dashi, mirin, sugar and sake - this picture doesn't do it justice. It's a perfect balance of sweet and salty, with plenty of umami, whatever the hell that is. Delicious!

onigiri

Are you guys sick of me cooking Japanese food yet?? Inspired by my earlier finds regarding mirin, I made a quick Japanese dinner tonight. First up, udon with shimeji mushrooms. The noodles came with a soup packet, so I really didn't do much there. I did add the mushrooms and some wakame seaweed to make it a bit more interesting. good start!

Next up some homemade onigiri. Now these little suckers have kept me going whenever I've traveled through Japan. They're available everywhere in the ubiquitous 7-11s, and make a solid breakfast or midday snack. They're basically big rice balls... or triangles, usually stuffed with something or other - salmon, seaweed, pickled plums are common, and then wrapped with crisp seaweed (nori). I've also had fresh onigiri which are served at room temp and far better, but perhaps not nearly as convenient to find.
Anyway, it's really not all that hard to make, and I've been wanting to give it a shot for some time. I mixed my rice with some scallions, black sesame seeds, bonito flakes and seaweed. None of this is necessary - in fact the ones I ate from the 7-11s were almost always just plain rice. The rice should be Japanese short grain. You don't season it like you do sushi rice, it's just plain, but should be a bit sticky so the whole thing holds together.
 
Then I made a little salmon salad for the stuffing. I used decent quality canned salmon and added a bit of mayo and some soy sauce. In the second one I also added chili sauce to give it a kick. That's it. Just wrap it up using cellophane and press it together. Then use nori seaweed to wrap the exterior - again not necessary if you don't have it. In the end you have some delicious and filling snacks that are great any time of the day.

mirin

I've been cooking a fair amount of Japanese food lately. Along the way I'm learning about new techniques and ingredients, such as mirin. It's an ingredient that I've been using for sometime, though I've never really understood it very well. What I mean by that is that I wouldn't know how to use it when I'm not following a Japanese recipe. mirin is a heavily sweetened wine used to add the sweet component to many Japanese dishes, especially in sauces and glazes (think Teriyaki sauce). Sugar is the recommend substitute.  While researching recipes, it has come to my attention that not all Mirin is the same. Of course that's true of any ingredient really - you can buy good quality and "lesser" quality versions of almost anything, but I did a bit more digging and this is what I found...

So according to wikipedia, there are generally three types of mirin, also labeled as "sweet cooking rice wine" in English. The first is hon mirin (true mirin), which contains alcohol. The second is shio mirin (salt mirin), which contains alcohol as well as 1.5% salt to avoid alcohol tax. The third is shin mirin (new mirin), or mirin-fu chomiryo (mirin-like seasoning), which contains less than 1% alcohol yet retains the same flavor. True mirin is made by fermenting rice and alcohol together for a few months. The process is carefully monitored until the desired flavor is achieved, and the process is stopped before all the sugar is turned into alcohol.

So this is all well and good, but once I get to the supermarket I really didn't remember any of it. So thanks to marketing and brand recognition what I came home with was Kikoman's Aji-Mirin. Aji means flavor, and it's about 8% alcohol - a bit lower than a typical mirin (13-14%).  What really caught my attention though (unfortunately I was already home), was the list of ingredients. Glucose Syrup, Water, Alcohol, Rice, Corn Syrup, and Salt. Sure enough what I'd brought home was some boozy corn syrup, flavored to taste like mirin. So I went back and looked around the store and sure enough there were some other alternatives. What I ended up with this time was Wan Ja Shan brand, incidentally produced in Taiwan. That's probably not ideal, but the list of ingredients is a bit more reassuring. Water, Rice, Rice Vinegar, Sugar, Salt. Now I'm not sure what the ingredient list "should" read like, but I'm certainly happier with this second purchase. Note that the alcohol content is also closer to the typical levels I read about. I love that it's variable by the way.

As for flavor - it's what you would expect. The Kikoman mirin is sweet and syrupy, but the Wan Ja Shan brand has a much more complex flavor. Its still syrupy, but reminds me more of brandy than simple syrup, and you can see where the rice comes in. I don't have a reference point to tell you what taste more "authentic", and I think both of these are shio mirin (with salt, though it certainly doesn't taste salty). So that's what I've learned so far. If anyone has any more advice/input on a good Japanese brand mirin to buy, please share. For now I'll be throwing away what's left of the Kikoman bottle, and I'll upgrade to hon mirin when I have a salary :)