Kansai & Osaka · Starter
Ikayaki, Sennichimae Style
- Easy
- 15 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, richness that coats and comforts.
Ingredients
- 100 g plain flour
- 200 ml kombu and katsuobushi dashi
- 2 g fine salt
- 200 g squid body
- 1 egg
- neutral oil
- 40 ml okonomiyaki sauce
- beni shoga
The skills inside
DashiSteaming: basket, leaf and lid
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · fish · shellfish · molluscs
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
- Whisk the flour, dashi and salt to a batter the thickness of pouring cream and chop the squid into 1 cm pieces.
- Bring a heavy pan to 220C (430F), oil it, pour a thin round of batter and scatter the squid over straight away.
- Cover with a second heavy pan or a foil wrapped weight and lean on it for 60 seconds; steam should hiss from the edges and the disc should compact to about 3 mm.
- Lift the weight, crack the egg on top and spread it thin, then fold the sheet in half as soon as the egg has just set.
- Brush with sauce, scatter beni shoga and eat immediately, while the rim is still lace crisp.
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.
Steaming: basket, leaf and lid 130 recipes
- Steam was running before the food went in: the water at a rolling boil and vapour coming steadily through the basket, rather than the whole thing warming up together.
- Nothing touches the water at any point: the food sits clear of it throughout, and the level neither drops enough to boil dry nor rises enough to wet it.
- The lid stayed on. Every lift costs the chamber its heat, and the number of lifts should be as close to none as the dish allows.
- Lifted out, the surface is glossy and plump with its colour heightened rather than dulled: greens brighter than they went in, not olive.
- Cooked through with the shape intact: it yields at the centre without having slumped or split, and there is no more than a spoonful of clean condensate beneath it.
Where it goes wrong The lid was loose or dripping and the condensate fell back onto the food, so it arrives waterlogged and pale with its seasoning washed down into the bottom of the dish.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Albariño or Muscadet
- Also Right
- Assyrtiko or Vermentino
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with lemon
The Atlantic’s whites beside the sea’s own liquor: salinity in sympathy, acid keeping everything bright.
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