Hello sweethearts,
How have you all been lately? I thought it’s been a while since I have made a recipe/food-post so here’s a special one just for you 🙂 I’ll share an easy recipe for my most beloved Japanese dish: お好み焼 Okonomiyaki! It actually means „cook whatever you like“ and it’s the perfect compromise of a pizza and an omelette 😀 There was a really good restaurant near the university where I studied in Japan and my roommate and I went there about once a week to have our weekly Okonomiyaki <3 Unfortunately, it’s not widely known outside Japan.. though I think it’s one of the more „Western“ parts of Japanese cuisine 🙂
Two friends, Akihiro and Fumiko, live in Berlin at the moment and Pachi and I suggested if it would be possible to do an Okonomiyaki-party together! I love to cook together with friends, my two most loved things combined! 😀 Love + food. Perfect. So Fumiko bought all the ingredients and after work we all went to her place to get the party started 🙂 With Okonomiyaki, you make the „dough“ and then you fry it in a pan. As the name suggests, you can really throw anything inside but the most common toppings are bacon/meat/cheese/any kind of seafood. But you could be very experimental I think ^w^
For Okonomiyaki, you’ll need:
Cabbage (most important)
Flour
Eggs
Spring onions
Tenkasu 天滓 (fried tempura breading)*
Dashi 出し(汁) (dashi broth)*
Yama-imo 山芋 (yam-seasoning)*
Bonito-Flakes (Katsuoboshi)*
For the sauce: majonnaise, bulldog (worcester)-sauce, ketchup
The (*)-stuff makes Okonomiyaki really delicious but you can totally do it without these things if you don’t live near an Asian market. I mostly do it without these things because I rarely go to the Asian market and it makes it a bit more expensive. It turns out just as delicous, most important is the sauce 🙂 Let’s start making Okonomiyaki, shall we…?
1. Chop the cabbage in as thin as you can get pieces and put together with chopped spring onions in a large bowl. 2. Add eggs (1-2, depending on how much you are going to prepare… if unsure, go with 2.). Add flour and water (there are no measurements for how much flour or water you need. Start with flour, add water, stirr and adjust flour + water until all ingredients are covered with paste. Texture is more watery than thick.) 3. Add all other ingredients (dashi, yama-imo or tenkasu if you have) and stirr well!
4. Prepare meat or whatever you plan on adding to your Okonomiyaki. We chose bacon and fried it in the frypan to get super-crispy bacon! Fill some of the paste you made into the frypan, add bacon/other toppings on top of it and fry for approx. 5 minutes. (Make sure to make it thin otherwise it won’t roast thorougly) then flip, so that your topping and paste is going together. Fry for another 5 minutes and top with sauce: Mix bulldog-sauce with ketchup (70:30 I’d say), add majonnaise and finish with bonito-flakes if you have! There, you’re done!
Finally time to eat! 😀 This is a dish with a very unique taste, please try if you ever have the chance to! As you can see from my explanations you can’t really do anything wrong. There is no real „to-go-recipe“, you just adjust everything until you like the texture. This is probably one of the easiest things to make when it comes to Japanese cuisine.. are you interested in Japanese recipes? I learned quite some when I lived there 🙂
We continued with our party but unfortunately I was terribly sick that day and almost lost my voice due to a cold so I only stayed for 2-3 hours. It was a lot of fun though! And so delicious *___* If you have questions, please ask!
Have a good day,
Lots of love,
Sam
