Street Food Atlas · Starter
Takoyaki
- Advanced
- 50 min
- roughly 1 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, fresh herbs arguing happily on top, opening aromatic and staying there.
Ingredients
- Batter: 150g flour, 2 eggs, 500ml cold dashi, 1 tsp soy, thin, almost alarming
- 200g cooked octopus, cut in bite chunks; pickled red ginger (beni shoga), minced; tenkasu (tempura crumbs); scallions
- The takoyaki pan: half-sphere wells; the æbleskiver pan moonlights honorably here
- Toppings in order: takoyaki sauce, Japanese mayo in stripes, aonori, and a snowfall of katsuobushi
- Two thin skewers or picks, the turning tools of the trade
The skills inside
The words inside
Cephalopods (Squid, Octopus, Cuttlefish)
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
- Heat and oil every well generously; pour batter to the BRIM and then over it: flooding the flat top is correct, not sloppy.
- Drop octopus, ginger, tenkasu and scallion into each well.
- When the edges set, cut the flooded batter into squares with your pick and TUCK the flaps in as you rotate each ball a quarter-turn: the overflow becomes the sphere.
- Keep rolling until bronzed and crisp all over. Sauce, mayo stripes, aonori, katsuobushi: serve while the flakes still dance and the centers are still molten. Warn people. They never listen.
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.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.