Okonomiyaki
a simple and easy dish to learn!Have you heard of okonomiyaki? Its a japanese savory pancake dish consisting mainly of cabbage and batter. Its a highly customizable dish where you can add toppings and things from your fridge. In fact okonomi means as you like and yaki means grilled. So you can grill what you like.
I know many friends who are either going to college or are starting to live on their own, and so I thought it would be cool to focus on a few foods that I made when I first started to learn how to cook! I remember that I first started cooking when I was in college and living with roommates in an apartment. I made an okonomiyaki and truthfully it didn’t turn out great. haha. But it still made me happy that it was edible! Okonomiyaki is such a great dish to start with because it’s quite simple and an easy dish to learn!
Ingredients
This is for TWO okonomiyakis. If this is just for yourself, you can save the other pancake to reheat and eat later.
1/4 of a head of cabbage
1 cup water
1 teaspoon dashi powder
Heaping 1/2 cup (~85 grams) flour
1 tablespoon corn starch
Pinch of salt
2 eggs
Meat of choice: thinly sliced pork belly, chikua (fish cake), bacon, shrimp
Toppings
Okonomi sauce
Kewpie mayo
Katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes)
Aonori (dried green laver)
Directions
Chop 1/4 of a cabbage into either thin slices or into strips then minced cubes.
Measure out 1 cup of water and add 1 teaspoon dashi powder to it. Mix and set aside.
Add a heaping 1/2 cup flour to a bowl along with 1 tablespoon cornstarch and a pinch of salt. Pour in the dashi broth and mix everything together to get your batter. I like it thin but if you like it thicker, you can add more flour a spoonful at a time.
Add half of the chopped cabbage (around 140 grams) to a bowl and crack an egg into it. Mix it together and then add around 1/2 cup of the batter (~100 grams) to get cabbage egg mixture. Mix it all together.
Add oil to a frying pan and heat it over medium heat. Once hot, add your cabbage mixture onto the frying pan and shape it into a flat circle. Use some of the reserved batter to patch up any spots. Let it cook and brown on the bottom, around 5 minutes. Then layer your choice of meat (I like to use thinly sliced pork belly), on top of the okonomiyaki. Pout a bit of the batter on top of the meat to act as a binder. Then flip the okonomiyaki confidently!
Gently press the okonomiyaki and continue to cook covered for around 5 more minutes. Then remove the lid and flip it over again to crisp it up again for 2-3 minutes.
Transfer your okonomiyaki to a plate and add your toppings of choice. I slather on okonomi sauce and then make lines with kewpie mayonnaise. I then like to use a chopstick to make lines with the mayo. Then dust the top with aonori and then katsuobushi.
Repeat steps with the other half of the cabbage. Then enjoy!
If you want to up your okonomiyaki game, you can also add a variety of different ingredients such as nagaimo (Japanese mountain yam), pickled red ginger, and tenkasu (tempura scraps). Or you can mix it up a bit and add random ingredients such as kimchi!
