Gyudon

Ingredients

• Beef — sliced almost transparent300 g
• Onion — thinly sliced1
• Dashi200 ml
• Soy sauce3 tbsp
• Mirin3 tbsp
• Sake2 tbsp
• Sugar1 tbsp
• Ginger10 g
• Cooked rice400 g
• Beni shoga pickled gingerto taste

Salt and spices grow more slowly than the rest: doubling a dish does not double the pepper.

Weight converts to ounces and volume to cups. Grams of flour are not turned into cups, because that depends on how tightly it is packed.

Method

1. 1

   Bring the dashi with the soy, mirin, sake, sugar and grated ginger to the boil in a wide pan.

   3 min

2. 2

   Add the onion and simmer for five minutes over medium heat, until it turns translucent.

   5 min

3. 3

   Lay the beef over the surface slice by slice rather than in a heap, and cook two or three minutes. Skim any foam.

   3 min

4. 4

   Take it off the moment the beef loses its pink. Left longer it toughens within a minute.

   1 min

5. 5

   Divide the rice between bowls, spoon the beef and onion over with two or three spoons of the broth, and serve with the pickled ginger.

About the dish

Gyudon takes fifteen minutes and rests entirely on thin slicing. Meat a millimetre thick cooks in seconds and stays tender; cut like a steak it becomes another dish altogether.

The onion is simmered to translucency but not to collapse. It should give its sweetness to the broth and keep its shape — the second most important element after the meat.

There is not much broth: it is a concentrate rather than a soup, and part of it soaks into the rice. Too much liquid and the rice goes to mush.

Worth knowing

• — The beef slices thin after twenty minutes in the freezer. Asian shops sell it ready-sliced for sukiyaki, which is exactly right.
• — A raw egg cracked on top is the classic addition. Only use eggs you are confident about.
• — Do not throw out the leftover broth: the next batch is cooked in it, and it improves each time.

Nutrition

Per serving at the base yield, calculated from the ingredients rather than measured in a lab.

Calories

640 kcal

Protein

34 g

Fat

18 g

Carbs

82 g

More from Japan

• Miso soup — A soup of dashi and miso that takes ten minutes. Miso must never boil: boiling takes out both the aroma and the point of it.
• Katsudon — A breaded pork cutlet finished in sweet-salt broth with egg and slid onto rice.
• Shoyu ramen — Broth, tare and oil — three separate things assembled in the bowl rather than cooked together.