Food Blogging: Japanese Style Curry Rice

Curry Rice

Type: Japanese

Difficulty: Easy

Non-Standard Ingredients: Japanese style curry roux

Grade: C+

It's easy to see why curry rice is one of the most popular foods in Japan.  It is one of the quintessential Japanese comfort foods, a dish eaten both in restaurants and made at home, it can be made with expensive ingredients turned into a gourmet treat, or bought pre-made in a pouch for a dollar and poured over some rice by broke college students, or it can be anything in between.  No matter how you eat it, where it comes from, or how much it costs, curry rice is always good.

This is one of the very few recipes where I'll advocate using something pre-prepared as the critical part of a main dish.  Normally I'm all about making things from scratch but trying to make your own Japanese style curry sauce that tastes right is an exercise in futility; so use a curry roux from the store.  I listed it as a non-standard ingredient, but I've found Japanese style curry roux for sale in Wal-Mart so it isn't exactly rare or hard to find.

There are two major brands in Japan, House is the most popular, followed by S&B.  I prefer S&B, but House is perfectly fine too.

As a comfort food, it's hard to beat.  Warm, filling, spicy, savory, filled with onions and carrots, it warms you on a cold night, and tastes just fine on a muggy summer night, it's great for nights alone or nights with the family.  There's never a bad time to eat a plate of curry rice.   Eat it with your family along with a conversation, or eat it watching Netflix by yourself.  It's also delicious put in the fridge and nuked for lunch the next day.  Hell, I've eaten it for breakfast from time to time.

Curry's introduction to Japan shows how secluded Japan had kept itself during the Edo Period.  India isn't exactly right next door to Japan, but it isn't that far away.  Yet curry didn't come to Japan until it was brought by British sailors in the 1870's.  

Which is why Japanese style curry has a distinctly British aspect and doesn't much resemble any any of the Indian curries, or Thai curries, or really any other curry.  Basically it's sort of like beef stew with some fancy spices served over rice.

Japanese recipes always call for potatoes, but I find that redundant since it's served over rice and so I usually leave potatoes out.  Also, if I leave the potatoes out all I have to wash is the pot I make the curry in and the rice pot.

Below is a "recipe", but really it's just my take on following the directions on the box of curry roux. This isn't just an easy recipe, it's the sort of thing a person can do if they've never cooked before in their lives.

Ingredients
1 Package curry roux
1.5 pounds thin sliced beef
1 pound crinkle cut frozen carrots (or fresh if you're super fancy)
1.5 pounds thin sliced onion
1 serving rice per person (short grain rice or sushi rice is best)

Following the instructions for your rice cooker, get the rice going.  It should be finished by about the time you're done with the curry.  If you don't have a rice cooker, I'm very sorry for you and highly recommend you get one, but in the meantime you can make your rice in a pot (don't stir it!).

Heat a tablespoon or so of oil in a very large skillet or a pot.  Slice the onions into long thin strips, and saute them over high heat until slightly browned.  While that's happening cut the beef into bite sized chunks, slice the curry roux into small pieces for quicker integration, and nuke the carrots for a few minutes to get thawed.

Don't brown the meat, normally you'd want to but for thin sliced beef and this sort of dish it'll get tough if you do.

Reduce heat to medium, add carrots, beef, the amount of water called for by the curry roux, and the cut up curry roux.   Stir until it begins bubbling, then reduce heat to low and lid.  Allow to simmer until the rice is done.

I find that the normal S&B is a bit less currylike than I prefer, so I always add a bit of black pepper and some extra curry powder.  Taste it and decide for yourself if you want to add extra spices or not.

Dish up some rice, pour the curry on top, grab a fork, and dig in, life will be better with curry.

Food blogging: Okonomiyaki, the best way to eat cabbage that exists

Type: Japanese

Difficulty: easy

Non-Standard Ingredients: 2 from any Asian market

Grade: B

Okonomiyaki means "whatever you like fried up", you can put just about anything into okonomiyaki as an extra, but there are some basics that don't change.  It's essentially a savory batter with a bunch of cabbage and green onion mixed in along with your optional ingredients, and then cooked kind of like a pancake with thin strips of pork belly on the bottom.  You top it with a sauce called, boringly enough, okonomiyaki sauce, most people also add mayo.  Its simple and good, and as it says in the title the best way you'll ever find to eat cabbage.

There's two main types of okonomiyaki, I just described Kansai (or Osaka) style, which is the type I like best and the only variety I'd recommend trying to make at home.  Hiroshima style is a lot more complicated to try to make at home and involves layering lots of stuff together rather than mixing it up from the start.  

Despite living in Japan for a semester and knowing more about Meiji Era Japan (1868-1912) than anyone who didn't actually get a degree in East Asian history should, I really don't care for most Japanese food, though there's very little I actively dislike there's also not much that really makes me excited.

There are some Japanese dishes that are excellent, sushi may well be one of the best food inventions ever, and no one ever has anything bad to say about miso soup.  But to me most Japanese cooking is a bit like the less inspiring variety of American midwestern cooking.  It's generally sort of sweetish and bland and boring.  There are several exceptions, Japanese dishes I absolutely love, but for the most part I'm kind of meh about Japanese cooking.  

Okonomiyaki is one of the exceptions.  It is just plain good, and oddly new.  As nearly as anyone can tell, it didn't exist prior to WWII, and may have been invented due to the post-war shortages of rice.

In Japan you mostly encounter it at fairs or restaurants, but it's dead easy to make at home.  Most of the ingredients can be found at any American grocery store, and the stuff you can't find at most American grocery stores can usually be found in even the smallest and less well stocked Asian grocers.

Mind, as long as you're headed to your local Asian grocery anyway, you might as well get some other stuff while you're there because Asian grocers are filled with many amazing, awesome, and delicious things.

This recipe makes either two large servings or three medium servings.

Ingredients From An Asian Market That You MUST Have:

You cannot make okonomiyaki without these two things:

Dashi stock.  HonDashi is usually what you'll find both in your local Asian market and in Japan, it's a powder that looks a bit like baking yeast, a small jar should cost less than $3.  If you really feel like it you can try to make your own from kombu seaweed and bonito flakes, but I've never thought it was really worth it.  Until you know what dashi should taste like, just use the powder.  Dashi is the root of almost all Japanese cookery.

Okonomiyaki sauce.  The brand you'll most likely find is Otafuku, and it is good stuff.  Restaurants in Japan often have their own house secret sauce, but I'm not an okonomiyaki restaurant and neither are you so just buy some from the store.

Optional Extras from an Asian Market:

This stuff is kind of nice to have but not actually necessary.

Kewpie brand mayonnaise, has a somewhat different flavor from American mayo

Aonori, ground up seaweed, makes a nice topping for the okonomiyaki and some other dishes

Bonito flakes: super thin shavings of smoked dried fish, traditional topping for okonomiyaki and quite tasty

Miso you're there anyway, miso soup is bloody delicious, might as well grab some and have it too!

Pickled, shredded, ginger, there's two kinds: gari which you get with sushi and comes in pale pink thin slices, and beni shoga which is radioactive neon obviously fake red and comes in julienned shreds.  You want beni shoga for this.  

If you really, really, feel like it you can try to find naga-imo, Japanese mountain yam, if you do you omit the potato starch from the recipe and grind up a couple tablespoons of naga-imo into a sort of slimy sticky stuff that adds extra body to the batter.  I've never found naga-imo at a low enough price I thought it was worth it.

Ingredients From Any Grocery Store:

1 cup flour

2 tablespoons potato starch

1 teaspoon baking powder

2 eggs

4 cups chopped cabbage

12 or so green onions, fine sliced on the white end and chopped to about 1/2 inch pieces on the green end

6 strips bacon (or uncured pork belly if you want to be more traditional) cut into 1/2 inch or so strips.

How to cook it:

Measure 2/3 cups of water and add about 3/4 tablespoon of dashi powder, that's a bit strong for soup but perfect for okonomiyaki.  Stir until dissolved.  Congrats, you now have dashi stock.

Mix the flour, potato starch, and baking powder in a large bowl.  Crack in the eggs, and add the dashi stock, and mix with a spoon or whisk until well blended and smooth.  No need for a hand mixer or stand mixer.

Chop your cabbage into somewhat smaller than 1/2 inch pieces, you're looking for bite size here, and mix that into your batter.

Chop the white part of the green onions into very thin slices, and the green part into roughly 1/2 inch long pieces.  Mix that into your batter.

Heat a large pan or skillet over medium heat until it's about right for making pancakes.  Add a touch of cooking spray then put 1/2 or 1/3 of your batter/cabbage/green onion glop.  

Smoosh it flat and round until its only about 1/2 inch thick.  Put bacon pieces on top.

Cover with a lid and let cook for three to four minutes, until the bottom is golden. 

Flip, you may need two spatulas for this step.  Now your bacon is on the bottom and cooking away merrily.  Cover and cook for three to four more minutes.

When the bottom is cooked and your bacon all nice and done, remove from a pan and plate.  Start your next one right away then decorate the first.

Top with stripes of okonomiyaki sauce, mayo, and (if you got it) aonori and bonito flakes.

Eat.

Extras:

That's a very basic okonomiyaki.  You can add whatever you like to the basic batter and cabbage mix.  In Japan you usually see octopus or shrimp, but also chicken, sometimes beef, more pork, tofu, extra veggies (zucchini shredded thin is nice), okonomiyaki is all about what you want to add so add whatever sounds good.