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Home Cooking: Oyako Donburi
In 1975, Don Maloney, an American
expatriate businessman who’d been writing a series of short columns for the
English-language Japan Times, published a collection entitled Japan: It’s Not All Raw Fish. In these
little vignettes, Maloney conveys a lot of the difficulties and oddities of a
big fat white guy living in Japan — the sort of guy who, at least as he describes
himself, not only never managed to learn Japanese, but also never quite got
used to people driving on the left side of the road. In his best stories,
Maloney comes off the loser: just when it seems that at last his irritation
with the Japanese is justified, he discovers that he is much more confused than
he’d thought and very much in the wrong. It’s a very funny, if dated, little
book, and worth a read.
Since I am myself a big fat white guy who doesn’t speak Japanese and currently lives in Kyoto, I thought it would be appropriate to borrow from his title for my own column. But I also mean something else. For Maloney, the point, I think, is that the omnipresent raw fish is hardly the only weird thing about Japan, nor by any stretch the weirdest. For me, there is the much more salient point that Japanese food isn’t all raw fish.
The point of this column is to talk about ordinary food, mostly but not exclusively Japanese, that you can make at home without a lot of trouble. What is it, how do you cook it, what tools do you use, what can you substitute, how do you play with it — these are the questions I want to try to answer. My blogspot blog, One Delicious Year, is wider-ranging, and also a little more experimental at times. Some of the food I’m cooking and talking about there is not readily translated to the ordinary home cook in America: the ingredients aren’t available, the dishes are insanely complicated or take all day, etc. Sometimes I review restaurants here in Kyoto, and what use is that except as food porn, really?
“Not All Raw Fish” is intended to be practical, for folks who actually want to put a meal on the table, and maybe are also a bit interested in Japanese cooking. I want to keep it simple, straightforward, and as un-fussy as possible.
But I’m not Rachael Ray, either, okay? For one thing, I’m not perky.
In any event, let’s start with something everyone in Japan loves: oyako donburi.
A Little Background
Donburi is basically a biggish bowl of rice with some stuff on top of it, often including egg. The idea with the egg thing, which we’ll be doing here, is that you have stuff simmering, and when it’s ready you add beaten egg and swish it around. You don’t quite finish cooking the egg in the pan, though: you pour the whole mix over hot rice just before it’s done, and you slap a lid on top. The steam from the rice and the egg-simmered-stuff mixture completes the cooking, and when you remove the lid you have a steaming bowl of just-set egg, rice, and goodies.
I am not inclined to get into rhapsodies about the authentic history of this or that dish, as you’ll see soon enough, but I suspect this thing has a pretty humble origin. From pretty far back, rice is the staple starch in Japan, and if you have a non-modern oven one easy thing to do is to put a pot of stuff in flavorful liquid on to simmer at the back all day long. When it’s dinner time, you pick out the best simmered things and put them in a bowl. You get out your pickles and serve them cold on the side. And then you heave a few eggs in the pot, stir it up until pretty gloppy, and pour it over hot rice. Dinner! If you’ve got fish or something, you cook that by itself if it’s good (grilling with a bit of salt is popular), and in the pot if it’s less good, and so on.
Now oyako donburi means “mother-and-child” donburi, which means chicken and egg. Mother and child, you see? I suppose some might think this a tacky name for such a dish, but the Japanese don’t. They love this. It’s very big with college students, because it’s cheap and filling, and even bigger with their mothers a few years before, because it’s cheap, quick, feeds the troops, and doesn’t require much planning ahead. You can use it as a last-minute “extra” dish to fill up your 17-year-old son who eats twice as much as everyone else. He eats what everyone else eats, in roughly the same quantities (so long as he’s restrained), and then mom whips up an oyako donburi out of the bottom of the simmering pot and some more rice from the electric steamer, and slurp slurp slurp you’ve got a full teenager. Temporarily.
In restaurants you can get it too, of course. You can get any home cooking at a restaurant: that’s much of what they serve, actually. We’ll come back to this in later columns. Here is an example from Honke Owariya, a very fine soba restaurant that’s been around for 500-odd years. They don’t do a lot of rice dishes, but they do this one. You can see what it’s supposed to look like: moist, tender, and simple.
A little shop around the corner from me that does nothing but donburi, to take out. You pick up a couple on your way home and you’ve got instant dinner. Popular with bachelors, and college students, and in fact anyone who’s had to be at work late and doesn’t want to spend time or money on filling food. Here you can get a wide range of different kinds, but they’re all pretty much the same principle: stuff on rice. I tried to take some pictures of the shop, but they didn't really show well, because there's not much in the window to see, I'm afraid.
But in any case, I hope you see that this is very ordinary food. The prices for these things at a restaurant vary, of course, from about $5 to maybe $20 at a super-fancy place, but that would be exceedingly rare and there would surely be a good reason for it.
Some Important Differences
Japanese cooking and eating are quite different from what most of us are used to in America, whatever that might be, and oyako donburi is actually a pretty decent demonstration of some rock-bottom differences.
First of all, the liquid used for the simmering is almost invariably dashi, which is usually but not always made from dried kelp (kombu) and shaved dried-smoked bonito (katsuo bushi). This stuff is so basic that you quickly stop noticing its flavor much of the time: you can’t avoid it. Most people make it instant, either from powder or from various kinds of semi-premade packets. For special occasions, or if you’re into cooking, you might well make it slowly and carefully from the real thing, but you will still quite likely get the real thing (the kombu and katsuo bushi) from vacuum-sealed packets. Some brands of what you get in those packets are quite expensive and good. And the more high-end professionals and such still make it the old-fashioned way, which is a bit of a pain and can be mildly expensive.
Second, the Japanese in general like things that are simmered very slowly for a long time, until they are rather squodgy. This is not fast-boiling, nor is it done to things like peas that will turn into gray slime (this isn’t old-fashioned English “cuisine”). But for example they’re into carrots, turnips, daikon (giant mild radish), and eggplant cut in big bite-sized chunks and simmered for, oh, say, an hour or two at amazingly low heat, covered tightly, with dashi, soy, sake, and likely sugar. Think what will happen to your friend the homely potato if you do this — they like potatoes done this way, too. It will, if done perfectly, still be just barely firm, like potatoes in chowder. It will also be deep brown. Everything else in the pot will be more or less the same color, and will have almost exactly the same taste unless you’re paying attention. If you’re running a restaurant or getting very fancy for some reason, you simmer the different vegetables separately, sometimes with varying liquids, so that each has its own flavor and color (and ideally texture, though that takes skill), but doing this requires a lot of pots and pans and people don’t do it much at home. For translation purposes, I think it’s best to think of these dishes (called nimono) as hearty soups with very little liquid. Think of garden-variety American-style minestrone, and take 90% of the liquid out. You have long-simmered vegetables, maybe the odd bit of meat, etc. Done right, it will be pretty good.
Third, the Japanese in general prefer fatty cuts to lean, especially with chicken. Thigh meat is invariably at least twice as expensive as breast meat, and it usually comes boneless — and skinless in the case of the breasts. If you want to replicate the moistness of the Japanese oyako donburi, you will probably want to buy thighs, drumsticks, or leg quarters and bone them out yourself, since I’ve never seen boned-out dark meat in an American supermarket that I recall. If you’re not a perfectionist—which in my book is a vote in your favor!—use whatever strikes you as the most appetizing. (At the end of the column are some instructions for boning legs if you want to do it.)
Fourth, eggs in Japan are meticulously sorted and tested by amazingly complicated methods to ensure quality — and also irradiated. You can buy a basic egg in a supermarket (checking that it’s fresh, by which I mean laid in the last few days), crack it in a bowl, and eat it raw. People do this all the time, using a raw egg as a sort of dipping sauce for noodles or whatever, or just dumping it over rice for breakfast. And salmonella is very, very rare. In the US, of course, this is not the case at all. If you are going to do this dish at home, either overcook it (please, no!) or else buy the very best and freshest eggs you can, because they’re going to be very lightly cooked and there is a slight possibility that some of it might not get quite to 140-150̊F for long enough to ensure that any salmonella is killed. Wash your eggs in the shell first, too, as a great deal of the bacterial infection is actually on the surface.
Okay, let’s get, you should pardon the expression, cracking.
Oyako Donburi As Usual: Click here for the complete recipe.
Oyako Donburi Not In Japan
Let’s start with some replacements.
Dashi
In place of dashi, you could use powdered instant dashi. I happen to think this is a bad idea unless you grew up in Japan or in a Japanese household. The stuff doesn’t taste much like dashi, but it does have something sufficiently reminiscent of that flavor that a local can sort of get by on it. Kind of like a McDonald’s hamburger, or Hershey’s chocolate: if you’re addicted to something like the real thing, sometimes you just have to satisfy the craving. And since dashi is in everything here, you learn to get along with powder if you’re lazy or far from home. But if you don’t know that flavor very well indeed, you shouldn’t use it. I find that dashi from powder is a lot worse than beef stock from a cube, and that’s pretty horrible. What to do?
If you live near a Japanese community of any size, you can probably get good-quality packaged instant dashi makings if you figure out where they shop. The system varies, but essentially this is to dashi (or to powdered dashi) what that thick stuff called “Better Than Bouillon” or the like is to real stock (or to bouillon cubes). Another comparison would be the expensive instant ramen as opposed to the wavy yellow brick: the expensive stuff often has five or six different little packets, and there are several steps to making it, and while it ain’t good ramen it’s a hell of a lot better than the brick. With the good instant dashi things, you basically add water and follow directions, generally three or four steps, and you’ve got functional, even passably good dashi. Problem is, you’re going to end up with a couple of cups of it, and what do you do with it? (Make miso soup, that’s what, but let’s assume you’re not going to do that this time around.)
You could actually make real dashi. It doesn’t keep very well: about 2 days in the fridge covered and that’s the show. It is a pain in the butt—quite time-consuming to do right, and finicky. And it is very difficult to get good-quality ingredients in America: most of what you can readily find for kombu and katsuo bushi is mediocre at best. In my experience, using ingredients like this makes it much more important to use the finicky, time-consuming method, or it won’t taste right at all. I think high-end pre-packaged is better as well as easier if you’re not going to make a production of it, but some prefer freshly made from bad ingredients. Of course, you’re going to end up with a couple of cups again. (If you want to do it, see the very end of the post.)
My opinion is that you should use very mild chicken, fish, or vegetable stock, whatever you have handy. Not beef: that would be odd, I think, but you could try it. Homemade is much preferable, but bear in mind that all dashi is salty because katsuo bushi and the various things used in its place are all salty, so add salt with the sugar if using homemade, and if you use good-quality canned or boxed stock the saltiness isn’t going to be a problem. If you have time, I suggest soaking a bit of dried shiitake mushroom (one medium-sized would do it) in warm stock first for an hour or so, because that’s got the umami flavor that is what dashi is really all about.
Mitsuba
Mitsuba has a very mild green flavor, and a tiny bit of crunch in the raw stalk. I’d say the best replacement I can imagine would be the stalks of flat-leaf (Italian) parsley. Don’t use the leaves: they’re much too strongly-flavored, believe it or not, and they’d also add an odd texture. Try the leaves the second time you make this, if you want—see below. Hey, you always wondered what you could do with the stalks of parsley other than put them in soup, right? The stalks of basil would probably be excellent as well.
Rice
This is painful. If you don’t have a rice cooker, you’re going to find this an annoying dish to make, unless you are exceedingly practiced at making steamed rice in a pot. You don’t want rice that separates, i.e. in which the grains stay separate, but rather the stickier rice you get in East Asian cooking. If you know how to do that in a pot, great, but I haven’t done it often enough to give you advice. My feeling is, get a decent rice cooker—it’s a wonderful thing, and not expensive as small appliances go. If you’re shopping for one, be sure you buy one that allows you to hold the cooked rice at serving temperature for 24 hours.
Oyako Donburi American-Style
If you’re looking for the authentic flavor of oyako donburi, you can just stop right now. Please. Close this page and stop. You’re not going to like what’s going to happen here.
Still with me?
You need to know from the outset that I don’t like the whole “authentic is automatically good” thing that you get in a lot of foodie discourse. It only applies to “ethnic” cuisine, did you ever notice that? If some Euro-American chef wants to add an Asian influence or whatever, that’s clever or boring or whatever, but it’s not intrinsically a bad thing. But god help the American who starts up a Mexican restaurant and serves things differently from how the reviewer thinks it’s served in Mexico. (Incidentally, where in Mexico, exactly? Big place, lots of styles, lots of people, you know?) Authentic Japanese? Give me a break already: almost nobody who’s yapping about authentic Japanese has eaten a whole lot more than sushi and the things that American sushi restaurants usually serve, certainly not often enough to make pronouncements. Authentic Chinese? Which? I could go on for hours about how stupid a phrase “authentic Chinese cuisine” really is, and my friends in South Asian studies tell me that’s peanuts by comparison to the stupidity of the phrase “authentic Indian cuisine.” So I’m drawing a line here. If you want authentic Japanese, make your own dashi from powdered instant (which is what everyone here does), and then make a big fuss finding mitsuba to get that little pinch of greenery. When you rave about this to some Japanese person who’s recently arrived, you may wonder why he or she doesn’t seem all that impressed: it’s oyako donburi, you know, not something to get worked up about. Besides, that person probably likes it with ketchup or Tabasco on top—not at all unusual. Is that authentic? Get over it already. Sorry, rant off.
(Whew!) Where was I? Oh yes.
Experimental Version 1: Italian
I’ve mentioned that you can substitute stocks and herbs without trouble. But when it comes right down to it, you could actually substitute for the rice: the technique is perfectly fine as it is. The crucial thing is that the stuff you pour it on has to be hot, or it won’t set at all, and then you really could have a salmonella problem.
I’m thinking pasta. Lots of people make risotto and jambalaya with orzo (rice-shaped pasta), at high-end restaurants too. Why not this? You could, but I’d go a bit further. I’d make a good serving bowl—serving everyone out of, I mean, not one person’s serving—of pretty small, smooth pasta shapes, like narrow penne or broken spaghetti. I’d make the whole mix of oyako donburi in one go, pour it on top, and slap on a big lid or plate. Bring it to the table, get everyone sitting down and paying attention, pull off the lid, and voilà!
Now let’s get a little wilder. If you’d prefer a healthier fat than chicken has, use boneless, skinless chicken breast cut in biggish bite-sized chunks. Sauté in a little olive oil over high heat until just barely browning but still pretty raw inside. Add a little bit of minced garlic, toss for 15 seconds until fragrant, and add your liquid... for which try the same total quantity (about 1/3 cup per serving) of good chicken stock (3/4 or so of the total), white wine, salt, and a small dash of sugar. Bring down to a strong simmer and cook until the chicken is distinctly underdone and the alcohol has come off, which won’t take more than 30 seconds. Add the beaten eggs, shake for 30 seconds or so until almost setting, sprinkle with parsley stems, and pour it on the pasta. Immediately sprinkle with minced parsley leaves and cover.
You can also simmer things in advance in the liquid, as you know from the basics of this dish. Why not some chopped tomatoes, a little minced carrot and celery, and so on? If you get into this, just bear in mind that the liquid is going to have to be pretty, well, liquid, because the egg is going to thicken it right up, so don’t overdo it and make thick tomato sauce. You might now try using fresh basil, coarsely cut in shreds, as the green herb.
Experimental Version 2: Louisiana
Sprinkle chicken breasts generously with Creole or Cajun seasoning, or Old Bay if you’re into that. Roll in flour and pan-fry in a little hot canola oil until just brown on the outside and quite underdone inside. Remove and cut in large bite-sized pieces. Make basic jambalaya, as spicy or mild as you like it. Put the chicken and vegetables in the pan with stock seasoned with good-flavored hot sauce (I like Crystal) and some sugar—no salt, please. Do the egg bit, sprinkle on fresh thyme, and pour over the jambalaya, then cover. Instant Louisiana oyako donburi.
Less-Experimental Version 3: Vegetarian
Last but not least, you could do this all vegetarian. There are classic Japanese ways of doing this, but let’s stick to the theme here. Replace the chicken with cubes of firm tofu, the best you can find. Cut up fresh shiitake mushrooms, remembering to remove the stems and reserve. Use vegetable stock in which you’ve simmered the mushroom stems and a couple dried shiitake—be sure to strain this fine before using, because dried shiitake put off a lot of grit—with the traditional sake, soy, and mirin. Do the egg bit, being careful not to be too vigorous about the shaking or the tofu will break. Add parsley stems (or mitsuba if you can find it), and pour over rice. Serve from a big serving bowl, or do it in individual portions the traditional way.
Conclusions
So what have we learned, Dorothy?
We’ve learned a technique, that’s what. We’ve learned how to take a basic protein, undercooked if precooked at all, simmer in seasoned liquid until underdone, add egg and shake until just underdone, add green herbs to freshen the flavor, and finish the cooking over hot starch. You can now take this and make it your own easily, as I’m sure you see. Try using classic Indian ingredients: your favorite curry spice mixture, some cream, fat milk, coconut milk, or yoghurt in the liquid, some fresh herb that tastes of India to you, and put over saffron or turmeric rice. Try Mexican: put cumin, chile powder, cinnamon, and the like in the stock mixture, simmer a little corn in the liquid before adding the chicken, use cilantro as the fresh herbs, put over plain rice, and sprinkle with a little shredded mild cheese before slapping on the lid. See what I mean?
This is the kind of thing I’m going to be doing weekly, though usually I won’t go on so long. I’m going to emphasize basic techniques, so that you can take one dish and turn it into something that suits your fancy or your tastes without a lot of rummaging around in cookbooks. Sometimes I’ll talk about tools and what to do with them, sometimes I’ll get nostalgic for Western home cooking, and so on. In any event, as a first post, I think that’s enough, so I’ll just conclude here. What follows are minor technical notes.
Sayonara!
Technical Notes
Dashi
To make perfect dashi, according to Murata Yoshihiro, the chef at Kikunoi who’s a big deal in Kyoto-style kaiseki, you do the following. Break off one square of dried kombu kelp, about 1 oz., and wipe gently, just a bit, with a very slightly damp cloth, just to remove any dust (the dry white stuff that doesn’t come off instantly isn’t dust, and don’t remove it). Put it in a small saucepan with 2 quarts of water. Slowly bring it to 140̊F and, using a flame-tamer if necessary, keep it at this heat for an hour. Be assiduous: if you go over 170̊ you can screw it up a bit. Remove the kombu with tongs or chopsticks. Bring the liquid to 176̊, then turn off the heat and immediately add 50g of katsuo bushi—that’s half of one of the big bags, generally. When all the flakes have settled to the bottom more or less, which takes about 10-20 seconds, wait another 10 seconds and strain the mixture through a fine strainer. Let cool a tad, then strain again through the finest strainer you’ve got, or a fine strainer lined with 2 layers of damp cheesecloth. Do not squeeze the katsuo flakes. If necessary, cool to room temperature uncovered, then refrigerate covered tightly. Keeps 24 hours well, 48 hours passably, and not after that. Don’t freeze.
Deboning Chicken Legs
The most difficult to debone is the “chicken leg quarter,” and since the method for this includes the method for both bone-in thighs and bone-in legs, I’ll just explain the one. I’m going to assume that appearances aren’t a big deal for you, as in this recipe; if you want it to be beautiful, read Jacques Pépin.
Place the chicken skin-side down on the board. Grab the bone in the thigh and run a small, sharp knife under it, in both directions, to the joint. Now on the hip end, cut down to the board at a slight angle under the bone, separating the flesh from the backbone. On the knee end, grab the meat that’s now loose and pull down firmly toward the ankle to expose the knee. With the same knife, cut around the knee on the shin side, right down to the bone. Continue to pull the flesh, and it will split naturally around the shinbone. When you reach the ankle, feel for the piece of cartilage down where the meat and knuckle join, and cut the meat above this. You should now have one piece of skin-on leg-thigh meat. Feel for any remaining bits of cartilage, and cut these out. Reserve the bones and cartilage for stock: you can freeze them for as much as a couple of months in a 2-gallon ziploc bag, and when the bag is really full it’s time to make stock.
If you’re still here, thanks for reading this far. You’re obviously a lunatic, but you’re my kind of lunatic. See you in a week!
Since I am myself a big fat white guy who doesn’t speak Japanese and currently lives in Kyoto, I thought it would be appropriate to borrow from his title for my own column. But I also mean something else. For Maloney, the point, I think, is that the omnipresent raw fish is hardly the only weird thing about Japan, nor by any stretch the weirdest. For me, there is the much more salient point that Japanese food isn’t all raw fish.
The point of this column is to talk about ordinary food, mostly but not exclusively Japanese, that you can make at home without a lot of trouble. What is it, how do you cook it, what tools do you use, what can you substitute, how do you play with it — these are the questions I want to try to answer. My blogspot blog, One Delicious Year, is wider-ranging, and also a little more experimental at times. Some of the food I’m cooking and talking about there is not readily translated to the ordinary home cook in America: the ingredients aren’t available, the dishes are insanely complicated or take all day, etc. Sometimes I review restaurants here in Kyoto, and what use is that except as food porn, really?
“Not All Raw Fish” is intended to be practical, for folks who actually want to put a meal on the table, and maybe are also a bit interested in Japanese cooking. I want to keep it simple, straightforward, and as un-fussy as possible.
But I’m not Rachael Ray, either, okay? For one thing, I’m not perky.
In any event, let’s start with something everyone in Japan loves: oyako donburi.
A Little Background
Donburi is basically a biggish bowl of rice with some stuff on top of it, often including egg. The idea with the egg thing, which we’ll be doing here, is that you have stuff simmering, and when it’s ready you add beaten egg and swish it around. You don’t quite finish cooking the egg in the pan, though: you pour the whole mix over hot rice just before it’s done, and you slap a lid on top. The steam from the rice and the egg-simmered-stuff mixture completes the cooking, and when you remove the lid you have a steaming bowl of just-set egg, rice, and goodies.
I am not inclined to get into rhapsodies about the authentic history of this or that dish, as you’ll see soon enough, but I suspect this thing has a pretty humble origin. From pretty far back, rice is the staple starch in Japan, and if you have a non-modern oven one easy thing to do is to put a pot of stuff in flavorful liquid on to simmer at the back all day long. When it’s dinner time, you pick out the best simmered things and put them in a bowl. You get out your pickles and serve them cold on the side. And then you heave a few eggs in the pot, stir it up until pretty gloppy, and pour it over hot rice. Dinner! If you’ve got fish or something, you cook that by itself if it’s good (grilling with a bit of salt is popular), and in the pot if it’s less good, and so on.
Now oyako donburi means “mother-and-child” donburi, which means chicken and egg. Mother and child, you see? I suppose some might think this a tacky name for such a dish, but the Japanese don’t. They love this. It’s very big with college students, because it’s cheap and filling, and even bigger with their mothers a few years before, because it’s cheap, quick, feeds the troops, and doesn’t require much planning ahead. You can use it as a last-minute “extra” dish to fill up your 17-year-old son who eats twice as much as everyone else. He eats what everyone else eats, in roughly the same quantities (so long as he’s restrained), and then mom whips up an oyako donburi out of the bottom of the simmering pot and some more rice from the electric steamer, and slurp slurp slurp you’ve got a full teenager. Temporarily.
In restaurants you can get it too, of course. You can get any home cooking at a restaurant: that’s much of what they serve, actually. We’ll come back to this in later columns. Here is an example from Honke Owariya, a very fine soba restaurant that’s been around for 500-odd years. They don’t do a lot of rice dishes, but they do this one. You can see what it’s supposed to look like: moist, tender, and simple.
A little shop around the corner from me that does nothing but donburi, to take out. You pick up a couple on your way home and you’ve got instant dinner. Popular with bachelors, and college students, and in fact anyone who’s had to be at work late and doesn’t want to spend time or money on filling food. Here you can get a wide range of different kinds, but they’re all pretty much the same principle: stuff on rice. I tried to take some pictures of the shop, but they didn't really show well, because there's not much in the window to see, I'm afraid.
But in any case, I hope you see that this is very ordinary food. The prices for these things at a restaurant vary, of course, from about $5 to maybe $20 at a super-fancy place, but that would be exceedingly rare and there would surely be a good reason for it.
Some Important Differences
Japanese cooking and eating are quite different from what most of us are used to in America, whatever that might be, and oyako donburi is actually a pretty decent demonstration of some rock-bottom differences.
First of all, the liquid used for the simmering is almost invariably dashi, which is usually but not always made from dried kelp (kombu) and shaved dried-smoked bonito (katsuo bushi). This stuff is so basic that you quickly stop noticing its flavor much of the time: you can’t avoid it. Most people make it instant, either from powder or from various kinds of semi-premade packets. For special occasions, or if you’re into cooking, you might well make it slowly and carefully from the real thing, but you will still quite likely get the real thing (the kombu and katsuo bushi) from vacuum-sealed packets. Some brands of what you get in those packets are quite expensive and good. And the more high-end professionals and such still make it the old-fashioned way, which is a bit of a pain and can be mildly expensive.
Second, the Japanese in general like things that are simmered very slowly for a long time, until they are rather squodgy. This is not fast-boiling, nor is it done to things like peas that will turn into gray slime (this isn’t old-fashioned English “cuisine”). But for example they’re into carrots, turnips, daikon (giant mild radish), and eggplant cut in big bite-sized chunks and simmered for, oh, say, an hour or two at amazingly low heat, covered tightly, with dashi, soy, sake, and likely sugar. Think what will happen to your friend the homely potato if you do this — they like potatoes done this way, too. It will, if done perfectly, still be just barely firm, like potatoes in chowder. It will also be deep brown. Everything else in the pot will be more or less the same color, and will have almost exactly the same taste unless you’re paying attention. If you’re running a restaurant or getting very fancy for some reason, you simmer the different vegetables separately, sometimes with varying liquids, so that each has its own flavor and color (and ideally texture, though that takes skill), but doing this requires a lot of pots and pans and people don’t do it much at home. For translation purposes, I think it’s best to think of these dishes (called nimono) as hearty soups with very little liquid. Think of garden-variety American-style minestrone, and take 90% of the liquid out. You have long-simmered vegetables, maybe the odd bit of meat, etc. Done right, it will be pretty good.
Third, the Japanese in general prefer fatty cuts to lean, especially with chicken. Thigh meat is invariably at least twice as expensive as breast meat, and it usually comes boneless — and skinless in the case of the breasts. If you want to replicate the moistness of the Japanese oyako donburi, you will probably want to buy thighs, drumsticks, or leg quarters and bone them out yourself, since I’ve never seen boned-out dark meat in an American supermarket that I recall. If you’re not a perfectionist—which in my book is a vote in your favor!—use whatever strikes you as the most appetizing. (At the end of the column are some instructions for boning legs if you want to do it.)
Fourth, eggs in Japan are meticulously sorted and tested by amazingly complicated methods to ensure quality — and also irradiated. You can buy a basic egg in a supermarket (checking that it’s fresh, by which I mean laid in the last few days), crack it in a bowl, and eat it raw. People do this all the time, using a raw egg as a sort of dipping sauce for noodles or whatever, or just dumping it over rice for breakfast. And salmonella is very, very rare. In the US, of course, this is not the case at all. If you are going to do this dish at home, either overcook it (please, no!) or else buy the very best and freshest eggs you can, because they’re going to be very lightly cooked and there is a slight possibility that some of it might not get quite to 140-150̊F for long enough to ensure that any salmonella is killed. Wash your eggs in the shell first, too, as a great deal of the bacterial infection is actually on the surface.
Okay, let’s get, you should pardon the expression, cracking.
Oyako Donburi As Usual: Click here for the complete recipe.
Oyako Donburi Not In Japan
Let’s start with some replacements.
Dashi
In place of dashi, you could use powdered instant dashi. I happen to think this is a bad idea unless you grew up in Japan or in a Japanese household. The stuff doesn’t taste much like dashi, but it does have something sufficiently reminiscent of that flavor that a local can sort of get by on it. Kind of like a McDonald’s hamburger, or Hershey’s chocolate: if you’re addicted to something like the real thing, sometimes you just have to satisfy the craving. And since dashi is in everything here, you learn to get along with powder if you’re lazy or far from home. But if you don’t know that flavor very well indeed, you shouldn’t use it. I find that dashi from powder is a lot worse than beef stock from a cube, and that’s pretty horrible. What to do?
If you live near a Japanese community of any size, you can probably get good-quality packaged instant dashi makings if you figure out where they shop. The system varies, but essentially this is to dashi (or to powdered dashi) what that thick stuff called “Better Than Bouillon” or the like is to real stock (or to bouillon cubes). Another comparison would be the expensive instant ramen as opposed to the wavy yellow brick: the expensive stuff often has five or six different little packets, and there are several steps to making it, and while it ain’t good ramen it’s a hell of a lot better than the brick. With the good instant dashi things, you basically add water and follow directions, generally three or four steps, and you’ve got functional, even passably good dashi. Problem is, you’re going to end up with a couple of cups of it, and what do you do with it? (Make miso soup, that’s what, but let’s assume you’re not going to do that this time around.)
You could actually make real dashi. It doesn’t keep very well: about 2 days in the fridge covered and that’s the show. It is a pain in the butt—quite time-consuming to do right, and finicky. And it is very difficult to get good-quality ingredients in America: most of what you can readily find for kombu and katsuo bushi is mediocre at best. In my experience, using ingredients like this makes it much more important to use the finicky, time-consuming method, or it won’t taste right at all. I think high-end pre-packaged is better as well as easier if you’re not going to make a production of it, but some prefer freshly made from bad ingredients. Of course, you’re going to end up with a couple of cups again. (If you want to do it, see the very end of the post.)
My opinion is that you should use very mild chicken, fish, or vegetable stock, whatever you have handy. Not beef: that would be odd, I think, but you could try it. Homemade is much preferable, but bear in mind that all dashi is salty because katsuo bushi and the various things used in its place are all salty, so add salt with the sugar if using homemade, and if you use good-quality canned or boxed stock the saltiness isn’t going to be a problem. If you have time, I suggest soaking a bit of dried shiitake mushroom (one medium-sized would do it) in warm stock first for an hour or so, because that’s got the umami flavor that is what dashi is really all about.
Mitsuba
Mitsuba has a very mild green flavor, and a tiny bit of crunch in the raw stalk. I’d say the best replacement I can imagine would be the stalks of flat-leaf (Italian) parsley. Don’t use the leaves: they’re much too strongly-flavored, believe it or not, and they’d also add an odd texture. Try the leaves the second time you make this, if you want—see below. Hey, you always wondered what you could do with the stalks of parsley other than put them in soup, right? The stalks of basil would probably be excellent as well.
Rice
This is painful. If you don’t have a rice cooker, you’re going to find this an annoying dish to make, unless you are exceedingly practiced at making steamed rice in a pot. You don’t want rice that separates, i.e. in which the grains stay separate, but rather the stickier rice you get in East Asian cooking. If you know how to do that in a pot, great, but I haven’t done it often enough to give you advice. My feeling is, get a decent rice cooker—it’s a wonderful thing, and not expensive as small appliances go. If you’re shopping for one, be sure you buy one that allows you to hold the cooked rice at serving temperature for 24 hours.
Oyako Donburi American-Style
If you’re looking for the authentic flavor of oyako donburi, you can just stop right now. Please. Close this page and stop. You’re not going to like what’s going to happen here.
Still with me?
You need to know from the outset that I don’t like the whole “authentic is automatically good” thing that you get in a lot of foodie discourse. It only applies to “ethnic” cuisine, did you ever notice that? If some Euro-American chef wants to add an Asian influence or whatever, that’s clever or boring or whatever, but it’s not intrinsically a bad thing. But god help the American who starts up a Mexican restaurant and serves things differently from how the reviewer thinks it’s served in Mexico. (Incidentally, where in Mexico, exactly? Big place, lots of styles, lots of people, you know?) Authentic Japanese? Give me a break already: almost nobody who’s yapping about authentic Japanese has eaten a whole lot more than sushi and the things that American sushi restaurants usually serve, certainly not often enough to make pronouncements. Authentic Chinese? Which? I could go on for hours about how stupid a phrase “authentic Chinese cuisine” really is, and my friends in South Asian studies tell me that’s peanuts by comparison to the stupidity of the phrase “authentic Indian cuisine.” So I’m drawing a line here. If you want authentic Japanese, make your own dashi from powdered instant (which is what everyone here does), and then make a big fuss finding mitsuba to get that little pinch of greenery. When you rave about this to some Japanese person who’s recently arrived, you may wonder why he or she doesn’t seem all that impressed: it’s oyako donburi, you know, not something to get worked up about. Besides, that person probably likes it with ketchup or Tabasco on top—not at all unusual. Is that authentic? Get over it already. Sorry, rant off.
(Whew!) Where was I? Oh yes.
Experimental Version 1: Italian
I’ve mentioned that you can substitute stocks and herbs without trouble. But when it comes right down to it, you could actually substitute for the rice: the technique is perfectly fine as it is. The crucial thing is that the stuff you pour it on has to be hot, or it won’t set at all, and then you really could have a salmonella problem.
I’m thinking pasta. Lots of people make risotto and jambalaya with orzo (rice-shaped pasta), at high-end restaurants too. Why not this? You could, but I’d go a bit further. I’d make a good serving bowl—serving everyone out of, I mean, not one person’s serving—of pretty small, smooth pasta shapes, like narrow penne or broken spaghetti. I’d make the whole mix of oyako donburi in one go, pour it on top, and slap on a big lid or plate. Bring it to the table, get everyone sitting down and paying attention, pull off the lid, and voilà!
Now let’s get a little wilder. If you’d prefer a healthier fat than chicken has, use boneless, skinless chicken breast cut in biggish bite-sized chunks. Sauté in a little olive oil over high heat until just barely browning but still pretty raw inside. Add a little bit of minced garlic, toss for 15 seconds until fragrant, and add your liquid... for which try the same total quantity (about 1/3 cup per serving) of good chicken stock (3/4 or so of the total), white wine, salt, and a small dash of sugar. Bring down to a strong simmer and cook until the chicken is distinctly underdone and the alcohol has come off, which won’t take more than 30 seconds. Add the beaten eggs, shake for 30 seconds or so until almost setting, sprinkle with parsley stems, and pour it on the pasta. Immediately sprinkle with minced parsley leaves and cover.
You can also simmer things in advance in the liquid, as you know from the basics of this dish. Why not some chopped tomatoes, a little minced carrot and celery, and so on? If you get into this, just bear in mind that the liquid is going to have to be pretty, well, liquid, because the egg is going to thicken it right up, so don’t overdo it and make thick tomato sauce. You might now try using fresh basil, coarsely cut in shreds, as the green herb.
Experimental Version 2: Louisiana
Sprinkle chicken breasts generously with Creole or Cajun seasoning, or Old Bay if you’re into that. Roll in flour and pan-fry in a little hot canola oil until just brown on the outside and quite underdone inside. Remove and cut in large bite-sized pieces. Make basic jambalaya, as spicy or mild as you like it. Put the chicken and vegetables in the pan with stock seasoned with good-flavored hot sauce (I like Crystal) and some sugar—no salt, please. Do the egg bit, sprinkle on fresh thyme, and pour over the jambalaya, then cover. Instant Louisiana oyako donburi.
Less-Experimental Version 3: Vegetarian
Last but not least, you could do this all vegetarian. There are classic Japanese ways of doing this, but let’s stick to the theme here. Replace the chicken with cubes of firm tofu, the best you can find. Cut up fresh shiitake mushrooms, remembering to remove the stems and reserve. Use vegetable stock in which you’ve simmered the mushroom stems and a couple dried shiitake—be sure to strain this fine before using, because dried shiitake put off a lot of grit—with the traditional sake, soy, and mirin. Do the egg bit, being careful not to be too vigorous about the shaking or the tofu will break. Add parsley stems (or mitsuba if you can find it), and pour over rice. Serve from a big serving bowl, or do it in individual portions the traditional way.
Conclusions
So what have we learned, Dorothy?
We’ve learned a technique, that’s what. We’ve learned how to take a basic protein, undercooked if precooked at all, simmer in seasoned liquid until underdone, add egg and shake until just underdone, add green herbs to freshen the flavor, and finish the cooking over hot starch. You can now take this and make it your own easily, as I’m sure you see. Try using classic Indian ingredients: your favorite curry spice mixture, some cream, fat milk, coconut milk, or yoghurt in the liquid, some fresh herb that tastes of India to you, and put over saffron or turmeric rice. Try Mexican: put cumin, chile powder, cinnamon, and the like in the stock mixture, simmer a little corn in the liquid before adding the chicken, use cilantro as the fresh herbs, put over plain rice, and sprinkle with a little shredded mild cheese before slapping on the lid. See what I mean?
This is the kind of thing I’m going to be doing weekly, though usually I won’t go on so long. I’m going to emphasize basic techniques, so that you can take one dish and turn it into something that suits your fancy or your tastes without a lot of rummaging around in cookbooks. Sometimes I’ll talk about tools and what to do with them, sometimes I’ll get nostalgic for Western home cooking, and so on. In any event, as a first post, I think that’s enough, so I’ll just conclude here. What follows are minor technical notes.
Sayonara!
Technical Notes
Dashi
To make perfect dashi, according to Murata Yoshihiro, the chef at Kikunoi who’s a big deal in Kyoto-style kaiseki, you do the following. Break off one square of dried kombu kelp, about 1 oz., and wipe gently, just a bit, with a very slightly damp cloth, just to remove any dust (the dry white stuff that doesn’t come off instantly isn’t dust, and don’t remove it). Put it in a small saucepan with 2 quarts of water. Slowly bring it to 140̊F and, using a flame-tamer if necessary, keep it at this heat for an hour. Be assiduous: if you go over 170̊ you can screw it up a bit. Remove the kombu with tongs or chopsticks. Bring the liquid to 176̊, then turn off the heat and immediately add 50g of katsuo bushi—that’s half of one of the big bags, generally. When all the flakes have settled to the bottom more or less, which takes about 10-20 seconds, wait another 10 seconds and strain the mixture through a fine strainer. Let cool a tad, then strain again through the finest strainer you’ve got, or a fine strainer lined with 2 layers of damp cheesecloth. Do not squeeze the katsuo flakes. If necessary, cool to room temperature uncovered, then refrigerate covered tightly. Keeps 24 hours well, 48 hours passably, and not after that. Don’t freeze.
Deboning Chicken Legs
The most difficult to debone is the “chicken leg quarter,” and since the method for this includes the method for both bone-in thighs and bone-in legs, I’ll just explain the one. I’m going to assume that appearances aren’t a big deal for you, as in this recipe; if you want it to be beautiful, read Jacques Pépin.
Place the chicken skin-side down on the board. Grab the bone in the thigh and run a small, sharp knife under it, in both directions, to the joint. Now on the hip end, cut down to the board at a slight angle under the bone, separating the flesh from the backbone. On the knee end, grab the meat that’s now loose and pull down firmly toward the ankle to expose the knee. With the same knife, cut around the knee on the shin side, right down to the bone. Continue to pull the flesh, and it will split naturally around the shinbone. When you reach the ankle, feel for the piece of cartilage down where the meat and knuckle join, and cut the meat above this. You should now have one piece of skin-on leg-thigh meat. Feel for any remaining bits of cartilage, and cut these out. Reserve the bones and cartilage for stock: you can freeze them for as much as a couple of months in a 2-gallon ziploc bag, and when the bag is really full it’s time to make stock.
If you’re still here, thanks for reading this far. You’re obviously a lunatic, but you’re my kind of lunatic. See you in a week!
Comments (2) · Want to Comment? Log In!
mct · Wow. Thanks for the post, Chris!
Sarah Lynn · holy wow! didn't have time to read this all right now, but looks like a great resource - can't wait to get back to it. thanks!
