Twiggy’s favorite.

Have you noticed the new tab on my nav bar?

I've decided to do a column on the various types of donburis (rice bowls), titled, The Donburi Lab (cue dun dun dun). Donburi is awesome! Donburis are hearty and makes your belly happy. There's not as many dishes that we have to deal with, and there's so many varieties - anything and everything from the classic Yoshinoya-style Gyu-don to the hip-tastic loco moco. Besides, to make delicious donburi, you need to know a lot about basic Japanese cooking, like how to cook rice and make dashi. It's delicious AND educational (sweet)!

There are several classic bowls listed already but with broken links. I'll be adding these a little at a time... And to kick off, I'm going to teach you how to make a Sukiyaki-Don.

Sukiyaki is Twiggy's favorite dish of all time, and for obvious reasons. It's a very rich combination of sweet and savory, beef and vegetables. Traditionally it's served as a bubbling hot pot which multiple people pick at, and in lieu of the ponzu-sauce that most Japanese hot pots call for, sukiyaki is dipped in beaten raw eggs upon consumption.
A Sukiyaki-don is basically a hefty portion of sukiyaki over a bowl of white rice. But, since Twiggy doesn't like raw eggs, I topped it with a coddled egg (or Onsen Tamago, in Japanese) for her.
This dish is mostly assembly, so it should be super easy to prepare at home. It's just the matter of sourcing the ingredients.

Sukiyaki
Serves 4

half a pound sliced beef
1 whole leek
1 14-oz block of tofu
1 pack of shirataki noodles (yam noodles)
2/3 cup soy sauce
2/3 cup sake
2/3 cup mirin
1/2 cup sugar
8 shiitake mushrooms, cleaned (I used leftovers from making dashi)
1 bunch Shungiku (optional)
4 eggs

Cut up your leeks into large, diagonal chunks. Any leek would work, but the Tokyo Negi variety is, as my Little One puts it, "the best kind of negi in the world." Especially in sukiyaki. However, I was too lazy to drive to Mitsuwa so I settled for some Trader Joe leeks, which were fine and dandy as well.

Drain the tofu. What I do is, after I drain the water from the package, I wrap up the sucker in paper towels and nuke it. Or, you can be all old school and put your tofu in a large bowl and put a weighting stone over it. Unfortunately I can not wait overnight for my tofu to drain. Four layers of paper towel wrappage and 2 1-minute nukes later, the tofu should be plump but no longer dribbling with water.

Then pan fry the sucker until you've got some beautiful grill marks!

Now for the shirataki noodles. Weightwatchers and Hungry Girl endorse this like crazy, but we've loved it since we were kids. It's basically konnyaku jelly in noodle form.

And, because it's konnyaku, there are a few rules that you have to follow. 1) Always always always rinse it. Since this tofu shirataki is made for the American market, it's not as stinky... A quick rinse should do. But if you have a block of konnyaku you should massage it with salt and then rinse it. Also, 2) never ever drop your konnyaku/shirataki. Dirt and dust clings onto konnyaku like remoras on a shark, and you can't even wash it off. Drain in a colander and cut up with kitchen shears.

Prepare the sauce. Combine soy sauce, mirin, sugar, and sake, then whisk until well combined.

Stir fry the beef and leeks over high heat, until the beef looks cooked through. In traditional Kansai (west Japanese) style, everything will be stirfried in beef fat, which are given away free at the meat counter. And because I was too lazy to go the Japanese market, we used peanut oil. Great success!

Pour a third of the sauce and let it simmer until it's almost gone. Then add the rest of the ingredients and the sauce and let simmer until most of the alcohol has evaporated off, about 10-15 minutes.
If you're making a massive hot pot meal out of sukiyaki, you will probably need more sauce. Just make more sauce, and NEVER, EVER add water to a sukiyaki pot!!! Not even dashi! The cloying flavor assault is what makes sukiyaki so loveable.

Then crack a coddled egg over it and serve. To coddle an egg, bring 1000 mL of water to a boil. Add 200 mL of cold water and room-temperature eggs. Let it sit for 10-11 minutes, then remove from water bath. Or, if you happen to live by a hot spring, you can leave your eggs in the spring for 10 minutes too (hence the name, onsen tamago = hot spring eggs)! Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. earthy, gooey, fancy. I’ve told you before that my favorite don­buri (bowl) is...
2. Easy Breezy Japanesey. I real­ize that I’ve never posted a proper recipe on...
3. Boys will be boys, girls will be girls. A recent arti­cle that I found on Ameba (the Japan­ese...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged as: donburi, Easy Breezy Japanesey, Japanese, recipes