The post is all about the desire to find good okonomiyaki in Melbourne, after having had Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki in the past.  They heard about a place called Teppansan and headed straight over with their foodie hats on:

Being sophisticated travellers and food coinessuers, naturally we took our little monacles along with us, and our handy dandy mental notebooks to make an adequate (personal) review of the fine establishment, let me take you on a journey… to flavour town…

This little excursion doesn’t exactly go as well as hoped, which really just makes it all the more fun to read.  Sorry to hear about Melbourne’s lack of good okonomiyaki though!

Hey Aussies, if anyone should be able to make a good okonomiyaki in the English-speaking world, it’s you!  Get on it!  ^_^

Over at NipponPhile blog you can read about a group outing to a restaurant called Sakuratei, situated near the nifty Design Festa Gallery.

I’ve been there!  It’s a cool place, and you get to walk through the amazing fashion district of Harajuku to get there.

The gallery itself is affiliated with the Sakura Hostel of Asakusa, a place I heartily recommend spending some time at.  The cost is under 3000 yen (about $30) per night for any dorm bed, and the dorm rooms are actually pretty spacious with good privacy and access to your own power outlets.  Plus, free WiFi!  It was my favorite budget accomodation in Japan.

The best part about spending your nights in the Asakusa area of Tokyo: you’re about a 5 minute walk away from about 10 different places to eat okonomiyaki!  Hee hee.

Yup!  They do grow ‘em big in Kansai.  Wow. 

And in Japan, you really can’t take the food home with you.

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:

• Tapioca Flour
• Sweet Potato Flour

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.  ^_^

Kanmuri’s 100-Yen Okonomiyaki Dinner:

Beef: 50¥
Cabbage: 25¥
Egg: 18¥
Total:93¥

• This is not the exact recipe for Okonomiyaki but it is my simpler version of it.
• In a bowl mix half a cup of flour with half a cup of water. Add an egg and mix well
• Mince cabbage (a little less than 1/5 of a whole cabbage) and add it to the mix.
• Put about a table spoon of olive oil in a fry pan. Add the mixture and fry the same way you would a pancake. Add thin slices of beef or pork on top.
• Once the the okonomiyaki starts to brown, flip it over and wait for the meat to be cooked.
• Transfer in a serving plate and add mayonnaise, okonomiyaki sauce and aonori (green seaweed flakes) and serve!

I noticed that flour and okonomiyaki toppings aren’t in the ingredient price list.  I suppose it’s assumed that most people already have these on hand.

But the cost of a tablespoon of mayo and a half cup of flour wouldn’t jack the price up all that much.  All totaled, maybe it would come to about 150 yen — still impressive.

Whether you buy your ingredients in yen, dollars, or pounds, go give Kanmuri’s recipe a try and tell us how it works out for you!

The ingredients are pretty much the same — it’s the technique that makes them distinct.

Okonomiyaki in the Kansai and Kanto regions (aka Osaka-style okonomiyaki) is created by first putting the batter and all of your fillings into a big bowl, and mixing it into a pasty, lumpy mass before shaping it all into a pancake in the pan.

Hiroshima-yaki, on the other hand, requires a progressive layering of ingredients.  It begins with a small circle of batter on the grill, after which comes a heap of cabbage and fillings, proceeding to a fresh egg cracked on top of it all which is allowed to trickle down through the fillings and sort of glue them together.

What happens next depends on the chef, the style, and the fillings.  But usually, after the cabbage has cooked down quite a bit, the chef drizzles on another thin layer of batter, and then flips it to cook on the other side.

The effect is to create sort of a stuffed pancake.  And because the fillings and the egg are not mixed homogenously, the layered and varied textures of the pancake create an enjoyably interesting eating experience.

  In Hiroshima there’s a famous okonomiyaki restaurant called Waka-Taka that boasts the best Hiroshima-style okonomiyaki.  They’ve been doing it for 40 years — that’s more than enough time to become masters of their craft, I think! ^_^

Right on their front page you can see a progression of pictures that shows you how they make theirs.  It looks almost easy!

Most people seem to do Kansai-Style Okonomiyaki since it’s a little easier.

Have you tried making your own okonomiyaki in Hiroshima style?  What are your experiences with it?

Please post comments — I’m eager to hear about other people’s experiences making Hiroshima-yaki.

Here’s a recipe for one large Kansai-Style Okonomi-Yaki pancake from Bob & Angie [english version]:

Ingredients: (for 1 serving)

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:

1. In a bowl mix egg add yamaimo.
   (Powdered yamaimo can be used)
2. 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.

1. Dice cabbage to 1-1.5 mm pieces
2. Cut pork into 3 cm. pieces. Remove skin of squid. Cut into small pieces.
3. Wash shrimp and drain.

How to make:

1. Add cabbage and filling to batter.
2. Pre-heat hot plate or fry pan. Cover surface completely with oil.
3. Pour batter into a circle about 20 cm in diameter.
4. Cook for about 5 minutes or until golden brown. Turn over with a spatula .
5. Cook for about 5 min until completely cooked.
   Be careful not to overcook or burn. Do not press down on it.
6. 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.

There are more pictures of the process over on Bob & Angie’s website.

You can also find a great glossary of Japanese ingredients.

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.

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!

Tokyo-style Okonomiyaki Recipe from Momo-Zaza.com:

• 2 cups Okonomiyaki mix* (try Yama-imo Oji-san)
• 1.5 cup water
• 4 eggs, uncooked (one for each person)
• 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.

Go check out the fun pictures that bloggers Matt and Tazbaa took of their okonomiyaki, covered in the traditional Kewpie mayo and Okonomi sauce.

Very authentic and home-style! Looks yummy!

I’m getting inspired to host my own sort of “as you like it” party as my okonomiyaki recipes get better. The kitchen will be swimming in cabbage, I’m sure. Stay tuned!

The making of this humble subsistence food turned into a celebrated and specialized craft, with many restaurants serving only okonomiyaki.  The popularity of this dish, termed “okonomi – yaki” which loosely means “whatever you like, grilled”, grew and spread all over Japan, with many regions developing their own standardardized versions of it.  Over at JapanSugoi.com, there’s a fantastic overview of okonomiyaki and various ways it’s made in different parts of Japan (complete with patrons exclaiming “oishii!!” and “umai!!” in reaction to everything they eat — very Japanese TV).

My favorite style is Hiroshima okonomiyaki, often seen shortened to “Hiroshima-yaki”.  Here’s a photo I took in Kyoto during New Year’s (shougatsu) festival, where a bunch of guys in this stall were making what quickly became my favorite okonomiyaki recipe.

No okonomiyaki recipe is complete without okonomi sauce!  This somewhat mysterious, proprietary, very Japanese concoction can be made at home, but for the most authentic okonomiyaki experience, I say just buy the sauce.  You can find it at many Asian grocery stores, and it’s simply labeled “Okonomi sauce” or “Okonomiyaki sauce”.  If that’s not on the shelf, Tonkatsu sauce is quite similar, as is Takoyaki sauce.

Having trouble locating Okonomiyaki sauce in your area?  Amazon’s got it!