Kansai & Osaka · Main
Negiyaki
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 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
- 60 g plain flour
- 150 ml cold kombu and katsuobushi dashi
- 1 egg
- 300 g Japanese negi or thin spring onion
- 100 g squid, cut small
- 30 g tenkasu
- 20 g beni shoga
- neutral oil
- 30 ml usukuchi soy sauce
- 15 ml sudachi or lemon juice
- shichimi togarashi
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · egg · fish · shellfish · molluscs · soy
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, cold dashi and egg to a thin pourable batter, barely thicker than single cream, then slice the negi 5 mm thick, greens and all.
- Oil a medium hot plate, spread a thin disc of batter, and bury it under a deep drift of negi, squid, tenkasu and beni shoga; the onion should outweigh everything else in the bowl.
- Spoon a little more batter over the pile to glue it down and cook until the underside is set and freckled and the onion smells sweet instead of raw.
- Flip once, tidy only the edges flat, and cook until the second side is patched brown and the squid has turned opaque.
- Slide onto a board, fold in half, cut into fingers and dress with usukuchi soy sharpened with citrus juice; shichimi at the table.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the technique 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.
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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