Home Cooking Review: Okonomiyaki
Tuesday, 9 September 2008 by Dr Maytel
I finally found an excuse to use the teppanyaki set given to us as a gift some years back.
I made okonomiyaki. I was going to make it in a pan on the stove but Hock got excited by the prospect of cooking it a la minute at the table.
Okonomiyaki is as easy as....japanese pancake pie really. Mix about a cup of flour or Japanese okonomiyaki flour with a couple of eggs and any left over vege or frozen meats you have lying around. I used frozen prawn balls, chinese cabbage, shitake, onion, spring onion, bean sprouts. I added some mirin and miso paste. I mixed it all up and slopped it on the grill. Flipped it and covered it with pre bought Japanese okonomiyaki sauce, mayo and bonito flakes and green seaweed flakes that you can buy at Japanese stores.
Hock ate it up. So I made it again a couple of weeks later but this time he didn't touch it. I understand why. You eat it once and it seems like a good idea at the time, but all in all it really is pretty gross. Works well when drunk.
I made okonomiyaki. I was going to make it in a pan on the stove but Hock got excited by the prospect of cooking it a la minute at the table.
Okonomiyaki is as easy as....japanese pancake pie really. Mix about a cup of flour or Japanese okonomiyaki flour with a couple of eggs and any left over vege or frozen meats you have lying around. I used frozen prawn balls, chinese cabbage, shitake, onion, spring onion, bean sprouts. I added some mirin and miso paste. I mixed it all up and slopped it on the grill. Flipped it and covered it with pre bought Japanese okonomiyaki sauce, mayo and bonito flakes and green seaweed flakes that you can buy at Japanese stores.
Hock ate it up. So I made it again a couple of weeks later but this time he didn't touch it. I understand why. You eat it once and it seems like a good idea at the time, but all in all it really is pretty gross. Works well when drunk.
A question and comments.
A question: What about it is "pretty gross"?
Comment 1: Never put mirin or miso in okonomiyaki. Never.
Comment 2: Also, usually regular cabbage, not Chinese cabbage, is used.
Comment 3: It's similar to a situation, say, a Thai person makes a sweet-mayo tuna sandwich, or a Japanese person loading teriyaki chicken on pizza, and after having vandalized the original recipe, decides it's pretty gross.
I guess the recipe book I got was wrong. Thanks for the tips. It still tasted pretty much like okonomiyaki
But overall okonomiyaki is pretty gross. It's covered in mayo and that sweet japanese sauce, and it's fried. It's not a nice, crisp, clean food
well, it's your hand that puts mayo on it... and mayo can be skipped. it's not an absolute necessity. whether or not it's clean, it depends how clean your kitchen is.
monja-yaki doesn't have sweet sauce and mayo factor, so even though it looks like vomit you might find it less gross.
I think we have some cross-cultural language problems here. Sometimes when kiwis and the like say some sort of food is gross or dirty, we don't mean literally, more like eating a hamburger or a pizza with lots of cheese on it, it's good but it's dirty in the sense that it's not healthy. So anything that is unhealthy can be called "dirty" food, but we tend to use it more in relation to very greasy or fried foods