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Okonomiyaki – Japanese Pizzas

Last week I volunteered as an assistant at CulinAerie, a cooking school across the street from my office. CulinAeire has a great space with lots of professional equipment. Their convection oven makes me a little jealous. The class I helped out with was “Japanese Bistro” and it taught us all how to make some of the different dishes served in Japanese Pubs. I had a lot of fun doing it, and I was able to learn a lot of new dishes. One of my favorite dishes, which I tried making at home, was Okonomiyaki. It is like a cabbage pancake that you get to add fun toppings to, like a pizza. There is also a special okonomiyaki sauce which is extra tasty. The recipe below calls for shrimp. We had left over pork, so we used that instead. You could use any topping, really.

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The Japanese Pub, or Izakaya, style of cooking seemed really interesting so I bought a book on it off of Amazon. Izakayas and tapas bars seem to have a lot in common. They both focus on food, drinking and are unfancy. Expect to see more Izakaya dishes in the future.

Okonomiyaki

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup flour
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 egg beaten
  • 1 1/2 cup cabbage, finely chopped
  • 1 cup scallions chopped
  • 1 teaspoon oil
  • 8 large shrimp, peeled
  • Okonomayaki sauce
  • Bonito flakes

Directions:

  1. Mix the flour, 1/2 cup of the water, egg, cabbage and scallion. Keep adding the remaining water until you form a thick batter.
  2. Heat the oil in a non-stick pan over a medium-high heat. Add dollops of batter to form pancakes about 2 1/2″ in diameter.
  3. Fry until the bottoms are golden brown, maybe 5 minutes.
  4. Press the shrimp into the top of the pancakes.
  5. Flip the pancakes and cook for another 5 to 6 minutes until this side is golden brown and the pancake is cooked all the way through. If it is cooking too quickly, turn down the heat.
  6. Plate the pancakes. Squeeze the Onkonomayaki sauce over them and sprinkle on the bonito flakes.

4 thoughts on “Okonomiyaki – Japanese Pizzas

  1. Had these wonderful pancakes in Japan, where we sat a table that is actually a grill. Bowls of batter were ordered and we cooked them ourselves. What fun! My daughter makes them at home in Nagoya and believes adding some fried panko gives the pancakes a great crunch. Love your blog, it is one of my faves.

  2. i absolutely love okonomayaki. love it. did i mention i love it? it’s the thing i order at our local japanese restaurant when i don’t really want to go all “healthy” with just sashimi. what about the recipe for the sauce? do you have that? our local puts a bit of kewpie mayo on it too… oh yeah…

    • Yea, I think we are hooked. I did a little searching and I think you can make some thing similar to the sauce using: Ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce.

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