PETALING JAYA, June 8 — Japanese cuisine is one of my favourite types of food because it is healthy, delicious and low in calories.
Whenever I have the chance, I would go out and order a bowl of steaming hot ramen or donburi (Japanese rice bowl dish).
One of my top two favourite donburi is Oyakodon which translates to mother and child. It is named this way because the dish consists of both chicken and egg. No prizes for guessing which mother and child the dish is referring to!
Of late, it’s been harder to find good Japanese donburi as the places I used to frequent closed down over the years. Craving for comfort food one day, I decided to attempt Oyakodon. My other favourite, Katsudon, will have to wait. That one looks more complicated and I don’t want to be discouraged by the degree of difficulty.
As usual, I went online to search for a simple recipe. I managed to find a Japanese cook who puts videos of her recipes on YouTube. The short clip was interesting and easy. It helped that the woman spoke impeccable English and she made sure that the Japanese ingredients she used could be easily bought at the supermarket. I bought all my ingredients in the Japanese section of the supermarket. Although she didn’t specify which brand to use, it was easy to find the ingredients.
The use of dashi (Japanese seasoning) and mirin (Japanese sweet sake) are commonly used in most Japanese dishes so that was not a problem for me. For this particular recipe, she uses dashi stock made of dashi powder instead of the liquid form. It was a challenge to find dashi powder as I’ve never seen it before but eventually, I found one. You can use bonito flavour, anchovies or sardines and it would just turn out fine.
The dish was really simple to prepare as you literally just cut everything up, measure the sauce and pour it into a pot and boil. The only challenge was to make sure that the egg cooks well when you pour it into the pot. After a few seconds, turn off the heat and cover the pot. This will ensure that your egg is cooked but not to the point that it overcooks. After this session of cooking, I was pretty happy with the results. Perhaps I shall experiment with more donburi recipes in the future.
Recipe for Oyakodon
(serves two)
A few sprigs of parsley
100 grams chopped white onion
100 grams minced chicken
150ml dashi stock (made of dashi powder)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
2 tablespoons mirin
2 eggs (beaten)
2 bowls cooked rice
1. Firstly, chop the parsley into 5cm pieces. Dice the onion until they are about 1cm or less
2. Defrost the minced chicken and measure it out. Make the dashi stock in a separate pot.
3. Measure out the soy sauce and mirin. Remove the dashi stock from heat.
4. Beat two eggs until smooth. Heat up the fire and pour dashi stock into pot, followed by mirin and soy sauce.
5. Add in chopped onions to the mixture and set to boil. Once it starts to simmer, add minced chicken.
6. Stir the minced chicken until it is cooked then pour in the beaten egg slowly in circles.
7. Add the parsley on top and cover the pot. Wait a few seconds then turn off the heat.
8. Keep the pot covered until the egg cooks well. Remove lid after a few minutes. Divide the oyakodon mixture over two bowls of cooked rice.
