Hello Okonomiyaki fans! It’s been a long while since I updated this little blog. A lot has happened in my life. But suffice it to say, my love for okonomiyaki has not diminished.
Lately, though, I’ve been doing a very-low-carb paleo diet. I won’t go into exactly what the Paleo diet is, (you can read lots on ThePaleoDiet.com and on MarksDailyApple.com), except that you don’t eat any grains or seeds. That’s rice, wheat, quinoa, and lots of other things totally out. I can’t even make my usual gluten-free okonomiyaki!
So tonight I came up with a paleo-friendly okonomiyaki recipe. I did it Hiroshima-style, which is always my favorite.
Paleo Okonomiyaki Recipe
Batter:
6 Tb almond flour
1 egg
1/4 cup dashi (or leftover miso soup)
1 tsp oil
2 Tb finely ground flax seeds (optional) (adds chewiness but is a non-paleo ingredient)
Sprinkle a good cooking oil on a frying pan, and then heat up the pan. ALWAYS start with a sizzling hot pan.
Pour half of the batter into the pan, tilting the pan as necessary to let the batter spread into a nice circle.
Wait about 30 seconds, and then top the batter with all of the cabbage. Just pile it on there.
Let this cook down for about 2 minutes. You can make it go faster if you cover the pan for 60 seconds, but the cabbage will then be a bit soggy.
Make a “well” in the cabbage, and crack the egg on top of it. Immediately break the yolk and swish all of the egg so it covers the cabbage. (It may drop off your okonomiyaki and onto the pan. No worries! Just lift it up and back on top of the cabbage.)
Place other filling ingredients on top of the egg. I like to put a few springs of parsley in for color.
About a minute later, pour the rest of the batter on top of all of the fillings. Try to cover everything evenly, and this time if bits dribble into the pan, just let them go.
Ready to flip? This part can be challenging! Take your BEST SPATULA and lift up all of the edges of the pancake to make sure nothing is sticking. Then slide the spatula under the middle of the pancake and — very confidently, as if you cannot fail!! — flip the pancake in place.
With any luck, your flipped pancake now looks like that picture above, shown next to my hand for scale.
The Home Stretch! All you have to do now is wait until it looks like the egg inside of the pancake is all cooked, and then most likely the bottom of the pancake will be cooked too. Test the edges and then flip it onto a plate.
Lots of searches coming in for “vegan okonomiyaki” lately, and my gluten-free okonomiyaki recipe is getting the attention. That’s Hiroshima style, though, and most people probably want to do Kansai / Osaka-style.
Here’s a straightforward Kansai-style Okonomi-yaki recipe that is totally vegan and much more simple to follow.
Ingredients
makes 4 large pancakes
2 vegetable boullion cubes dissolved in 2 cups hot water
1 cup sweet potato flour
1/4 cup tapioca flour
1 cup flour (whole wheat and buckwheat work well)
Fillings:
2 c shredded cabbage or kale
1/2 c grated carrots
1 c parboiled chopped broccoli
4 Tbs beni shouga or finely grated fresh ginger
any other nice veggie you have on hand
sea salt and pepper to taste
Put dry ingredients into a large bowl and stir together.
Gradually add in the veggie boullion, stirring. Stop adding liquid when the batter appears pancake-like (thick, not too runny but still pourable).
Stir in all the fillings you would like.
Heat up a non-stick griddle or frying pan over medium high heat with a little sesame or peanut oil. (Any oil you like really, but those two are tastiest.)
When the edges look a bit brown, carefully flip the okonomiyaki over. Press down firmly, and lower the heat to about medium. Cook for at least 10 minutes, pressing down occasionally, until it’s thoroughly cooked through.
No problem! Tapioca flour is the real magic goo here. Sweet potato flour makes for a smooth and chewy texture that becomes a mesh between the tapioca and the regular flour.
Need help finding tapioca and sweet potato flour? Amazon has good deals on vegan ingredients for okonomiyaki:
Okonomiyaki for 100 yen? Even in the U.S. it would be hard to make a good okonomiyaki for as little as the equivalent in dollars, about $1.25 right now.
Over at 100yendinner, the lovely Kanmuri has posted her 100-Yen Okonomiyaki — precisely 93-yen actually — which even includes beef! That’s pretty luxurious in Japan. ^_^
Tired of buying pickled ginger at up to $6 a canister? I was! But I thought it wasn’t going to be anymore economical to buy the red shiso I would need to make the traditional beni shouga.
Then it hit me. Literally — a beet fell out of a hanging basket in the kitchen and hit me on the side of the head.
Beets! Of course! Bright red and ubiquitous. (Where in the world can you not find beets? I wonder!)
Later that day I went out and bought 2 pounds of ginger, arriving home eager to get started. I decided to use raw apple cider vinegar and turbinado sugar, because I like the taste and I have a belief in the healthiness in of these things. For salt I chose a large-grain sea salt I’ve had on hand for a long time.
Next came about an hour’s worth of ginger-peeling and shredding. I listened to This Week in Science, so at least I learned something while I worked at it.
Into the bowl went all the ingredients (recipe below), including a whole beet sliced into 1/8-inch-thin long slices. Within seconds of each beet slice hitting the liquid, the bright red color was already seeping out and colouring the ginger.
About two hours later, I had a huge bowl of bright red pickled ginger! And some ginger-pickled beets, too! ^_^
We do love our traditional okonimiyaki toppings — mayo and sauce and bonito, oh my! — but we also don’t mind keeping our girlish figures.
Omega-3 oils are hard to come by in the modern diet, so sometimes you have to go the extra mile to fit them in — even when all you want to do is eat Okonomi-yaki!
Here’s an egg-free (vegan) flax seed-based mayonnaise rich in omega-3s that’s easily made in your blender.
Flax Seed Mayonnaise
1/4 cup ground flax seeds (about 1/3 cup whole)
1/4 cup warm water
2.5 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1 tsp sea salt
1/2 tsp powdered mustard
1/4 cup avocado oil (or olive or walnut or what-have-you)
Blend ground flax seeds with water in a blender or food processor until thick. Add vinegar, mustard and salt, and blend. With blender or food processor running, drizzle the oil in slowly to form an emulsion. Allow to cool before serving.
Coming soon: Actually Healthy Okonomiyaki? Whole-Grain Okonomiyaki? Is It Possible?
50-60 g flour, 1 egg, 1 cup dashi, 1-2 Tablespoons grated yamaimo (mountain potato), 70 g cabbage. As desired: mirin, salt, 20-30 g thinly sliced pork, 1/2 squid, 10-20 small shrimp, cleaned and shelled, 2-3 whole oyster, oil.
Preparation:
Batter:
In a bowl mix egg add yamaimo. (Powdered yamaimo can be used)
Add salt, a little mirin, then flour. Mirin removes the powdery taste. note: Okonomiyaki mix can also be used. Just add egg and water.
Filling; Add any combination of ingredients to cabbage.
Dice cabbage to 1-1.5 mm pieces
Cut pork into 3 cm. pieces. Remove skin of squid. Cut into small pieces.
Wash shrimp and drain.
How to make:
Add cabbage and filling to batter.
Pre-heat hot plate or fry pan. Cover surface completely with oil.
Pour batter into a circle about 20 cm in diameter.
Cook for about 5 minutes or until golden brown. Turn over with a spatula .
Cook for about 5 min until completely cooked. Be careful not to overcook or burn. Do not press down on it.
Before eating one or a combination of the following sauces: Mayonnaise, tonkatsu or okonomi sauce, Japanese mustard (wagarashi). Catsup or any strong flavored sauce will do.
I find it interesting that they say not to press down on it. Many people say the opposite, that you should press down a bit. I’ll explore this in a future post.
On the internet, nobody knows you are really a dog… unless you make a video! This is one of my favorite series on the internet (Youtube to be precise): Cooking With Dog.
Here is a Kanto-style okonomiyaki recipe presented by Francis the Dog. (So cute. Love the accent.)
Today a good friend of mine in my neighborhood, from the city of Akita, Japan, shared with me his recipe for Okonomi Yaki Sauce (aka Okonomi Sauce). He warned me that it takes a long time, “all day!” — to make it. With a brave look on my face I said, “I’ll do my best!”
And then with a twinkle in his eye, he told me a shortcut okonomi sauce recipe that works “almost as well”.
I have moved this recipe to its own page so it can be found easily!
In the Kanto (east) region of Japan, in which Tokyo makes up the largest and densest part, the Okonomi-yaki recipe normally used involves mixing the batter and the fillings all together in a bowl and then grilling them into a big, thick pancake. Depending on what you choose to put into it, it might look like a chunky green onion pancake or maybe more like a hamburger.
At restaurants, it’s customary to let the customer stir all the raw ingredients themselves and then cook the pancake right on the grill at their own table. Here’s a picture of the seafood okonomiyaki that I ate in a restaurant in Asakusa (a neighborhood in Tokyo).
At MomoZaza.com, this blogger documented the Tokyo-style okonomiyaki that they made one evening. She and her three friends all have different styles and enjoy different fillings. These are cool pictures (scroll towards the bottom to see them all) — you can see how “what you like” may change the end product, and maybe give you some ideas for doing your own.
Update: apparently Momo-Zaza.com is no more! Sad… I’m glad I got their basic recipe before the site went kaput!
1/2 head of cabbage, chopped finely (think shredded like in cole slaw) – avoid using the center white parts)
Please visit this blog to read about and see all the variations! Oishii-sou!! (Looks tasty!)
* You can use regular all-purpose flour instead. (note: not bread flour!) If you do that, use fish broth (dashi) instead of water, or add 2 Tbsp of fish sauce to the water.
ps. Shortcut: Amazon has an Okonomiyaki Kit on sale, and a good deal when you buy the kit, a bottle of okonomi yaki sauce, and a bottle of Kewpie mayonnaise all together.
Hello Okonomiyaki fans! It’s been a long while since I updated this little blog. A lot has happened in my life. But suffice it to say, my love for okonomiyaki has not diminished.
Hmm, maybe I’ll come up with a paleo version!?
