Kansai & Osaka · Main
Butatama (Osaka Okonomiyaki)
- Intermediate
- 30 min
- roughly 3 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, richness that coats and comforts, with a clean, bright snap.
Ingredients
- 100 g plain flour
- 80 g nagaimo or yamaimo, peeled
- 120 ml cold kombu and katsuobushi dashi
- 3 eggs
- 300 g white cabbage
- 20 g tenkasu (tempura crumbs)
- 20 g beni shoga (red pickled ginger)
- 40 g spring onion
- 120 g thinly sliced pork belly
- neutral oil for the griddle
- 60 ml okonomiyaki sauce
- Japanese mayonnaise
- aonori
- 5 g katsuobushi flakes
The skills inside
DashiGriddle & plancha workSteaming: basket, leaf and lid
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · fish
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Grate the nagaimo to a slippery paste, whisk it into the flour, cold dashi and one egg until only just smooth, then chill the batter for an hour; it should ribbon thickly off the whisk.
- Cut the cabbage into 1 cm squares rather than shreds and blot it dry; fine shreds weep and turn the middle to soup.
- Fold the cabbage, tenkasu, beni shoga, spring onion and remaining eggs in with a lifting motion, stopping while the mixture still looks loose and airy.
- Ladle a 2 cm mound onto a griddle at 180C (355F), drape the pork belly over the top, and cook until the edge sets matt and the underside is deep gold.
- Flip once and never press down; it is ready when a skewer pushed into the centre comes out clean and hot against your lip.
- Sauce, then mayonnaise, then aonori, and the katsuobushi last so the flakes lift and curl in the steam.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dashi 29 recipes
- It is clear enough to read the bottom of the pan through it. Cloudiness means it boiled, or the kombu stayed in past the first small bubbles, and neither can be strained out afterwards.
- Pale gold rather than brown, nearer the colour of weak tea. A brown dashi has been cooked too hard or too long and will taste of the pan rather than of the sea.
- The kombu came out before the water reached a simmer, and it is supple rather than slimy. A slippery surface on the sheet means alginates have started to leach, and the broth will feel viscous on the tongue.
- Strained without pressing. Squeezing the flakes or the kelp forces out bitterness and fine particles, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
- Tasted alone it is savoury and faintly sweet with no fishiness and no bitter edge. Fishy means the katsuobushi steeped rather than settling; bitter means heat.
Where it goes wrong Heat, or time, or both. Kombu boiled gives up alginates and turns the broth slippery and faintly bitter; katsuobushi left to steep turns it sour and fishy. Almost every dashi failure is an excess of one of the two things the cook controls, and neither is recoverable once it has happened.
Griddle & plancha work 45 recipes
- Full contact with the metal: the food lies flat, with no dome in the middle and no curled edge lifting it away, so browning reaches the entire face rather than a ring of it.
- Contact is immediate and audible, and the food stays where it is put rather than sliding around in a slick of its own released liquid.
- The cooked face is an unbroken sheet of even colour: the whole surface browned, not a pattern of marks with pale ground between them, and not a dark centre with pale corners.
- The metal around the food is dry: no spreading wet patch steaming out from under it, nothing weeping onto the surface and boiling there.
- Turned once or twice and no more, and lifted while the crust is still brown: a piece flipped repeatedly never holds heat long enough to build one.
Where it goes wrong The surface was crowded and its temperature crashed, so everything gave up its water at once and stewed on the metal: pale, damp, grey at the edges, and stuck fast where the crust never got the chance to form.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Junmai or Ginjo sake
- Also Right
- Dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Japanese rice lager
- Zero-Proof
- Cold green tea (sencha)
Umami bridges best with umami: sake’s amino depth shakes hands with dashi and soy where tannic wine would argue.
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