BUY REZ HD RIGHT NOW! IT'S WHAT'S FOR DINNER

After a chat over what's for dinner, itemforty (he's having udon, btw) reminded me of what I successfully attempted to do on Monday night.

I'm turning this into a Japan cblog because I feel that in order to properly enjoy Japanese culture, you have to embrace multiple facets of their society.

Japan is REALLY big on their food. So, today, I start the subset of Japanese cuisine cblogs.

Monday night I made Gyudon.

Gyu = beef
Don = bowl (as in soup bowl)

Gyudon is an excellent winter dish, quick and easy to make.

In Japan, I had the opportunity to try out two of the country's most popular gyudon chains, Yoshinoya and Sukiya.

To do a hands down comparison of the two, Sukiya had a much more flavorful sauce and saltier meat, Yoshinoya won on ubiquitousness and price.

Rolling on back to the trip from 2005, Yoshinoya popped up in many of my photos, but I never thought to ask what was served there or if it was delicious or not.


Yoshinoya in Harajuku

Gyudon is a fairly simple dish, requiring a few tricky to locate ingredients, but once found can be made cheaply.


Bowl of Gyudon. Courtesy of Wikipedia and other people. Every time I tried to take a picture of a bowl of gyudon, it was gone before the camera came out.

Gyudon consists of thin slices of beef, onions, sauce, and rice; all served in a bowl with some ginger and a side of miso soup.

I set about finding the perfect recipe for gyudon shortly after I returned from Japan, but I was vexxed and flummoxed by what the ingredients were going to be called in America.

People can tell you 20 times over that you've got dashi soup stock in your soup, but you don't know what the fuck dashi soup is called in the USA (hint: it's called bonito fish soup)
Dashi soup is the primary base for miso soup, btw...

What I found to work best went down as follows.

You need approximately 1lb of thinly sliced beef (if you have to get anal about it, fatty cuts of beef work best, and you can ask for sukiyaki beef if you go to an asian grocery store for this)
What might also work is to go to a butcher shop and ask for some round steak or unseasoned fajita style beef and have the butcher cut it to 1/8" thickness. Thickness is the key to proper preparation of this dish.

A half onion cut up however you like them in your food (or like me, you use a liberal amount of onion powder, if'n you can't eat onions)

A few teaspoons of sugar

The other ingredients require a bit of legwork. You can order many of these off of the internet, you can find some of them in your local asian grocery store, or if you're lucky enough, you know if there's an actual Japanese grocer in your town who will have exactly what you need.

You will also need:



Mirin (a sweet, rice based cooking sauce)



Dashi soup stock



Soy sauce



Sake



Calrose rice

Preparation:

Mix up all your liquid ingredients first. This is your sake, mirin, soy sauce, dashi soup stock. You don't need much more than a few teaspoons of each of these to mix in with 1 1/2 cups of soup stock.
Put those on a low boil/simmer for about 10 minutes. Add in your onions while the simmering is going on.

Take your thin sliced beef, cut it up into strips about the length and width of your thumb (or penis, whichever is smaller) and after the stock has simmered for it's time, add in the beef.

Let that continue to simmer.

I can't play up how important it is that you pick a fatty beef. The fattier it is the more the flavor soaks up into the beef. If you choose a leaner cut, like a london broil or simple cheap flat steak, it's going to have to soak awhile in the sauce before you try serving it.

While this is all simmering away, go cook up a batch of rice.

As you may have noticed, your rice looks absolutely nothing like what the Japanese eat and it's never "sticky" enough to eat in clumps like they do over there, and certainly would suck to try and use to make sushi.

The japanese use what is known in the US as Calrose grain rice (aka sushi rice). Calrose is NOT available as an instant rice, so it is well advised that you go buy yourself a steamer/rice cooker to make the rice.

I tried minute rice/basmati/brown, etc with this recipe, but they taste like ass compared to Calrose. The sticky texture of the rice after it cooks lends itself well with the beef and the sauce.

After all your food has soaked, cooked, and whatevered for enough time (say like 20 minutes), scoop up some rice in a bowl and spoon in some beef with the sauce.

If you're into the whole authenticity thing, additionally prep up a bowl of miso soup, shredded cabbage, hot green tea, and sit in a room crowded full of smokers.

It's a tasty dish, and highly recommended.