Japanese for "As You Like It, Fried"

Everyone likes sushi.  Non-foodies of all races happily dig into spicy tuna, cooked eel cutlets on rice, and ubiquitous American variations like the California roll.  Quick lunch during work?  Pop over to a nearby deli and get a mini-bento box of salmon maki for $6.95.  Got a date?  Coyly feed your lover sea scallops over a large lacquered bowl of chirashi zushi.  By and large, sushi is now an American tradition-as imports go, it's topped their cars.

But what do our cohorts across the Pacific pond think of this?  According to my dear half-Japanese friend Yukari Rymar, it's terrific; she even likes the new sushi we've created here, said California roll implied.  However, all this joy does come with a dark side: Yukari bemoans American ignorance of what she calls "real, down home Japanese cooking."

  "If you ask any American if they like Japanese food, they'll say they love sushi," says Yukari.  "Which is great.  I like sushi too.  But sushi isn't what Japanese people are making everyday at home."

 

 Yukari's childhood dinners recount like a culinary dreamscape.  Her mother cooked angel hair pasta with homemade tomato sauce and mussels, Japanese curry (a sweeter, milder version of the Indian standby) with sticky rice, and okonomiyaki, a sort of Japanese "pizza."  This last item piqued my interest, as it was the one dish I had actually encountered previously.

"Okonomiyaki is simple," says Yukari.  "My mother has a plug-in table top griddle that she would make them on when I was little.  The basic ingredients are shredded cabbage, flour, water and eggs.  You mix them all up into a sort of pancake batter.  Then you can add whatever you want.  People generally will add green onions and some sort of meat.  I made it with chopped barbeque chicken leftovers my sophomore year in college."

Yukari says her top picks are mushrooms, green onions and shrimp, though her limited college income often prevents her from enjoying that last ingredient.  Along with barbeque, pork has found its way into her okonomiyaki these last years, which she says is perfectly delicious.  Whatever your choice, the key is to chop all your ingredients very finely to ensure even cooking.  The small size of the goodies also guarantees that the batter will flatten out into a nice pancake once it hits the griddle.

"It's the easiest thing in the world to make," says Yukari.  "If you can know how to cook pancakes, you can make okonomiyaki.  Whatever you have left in your fridge, you can toss in.  Put some cheese on the top if you like!"

A quick Wikipedia search for okonomiyaki revealed that the dish is generally associated with Hiroshima and the Kansai region of ; coincidentally, Yukari's mother Ritsuko is from the latter region.  Hiroshima okonomiyaki layers its ingredients as opposed to mixing them together.  Typically, you begin with batter, then cabbage and vegetables, bacon and other optional items, fried noodles, a fried egg, and okonomiyaki sauce.

Oh yes, the sauce.  Yukari says that's important too.

"It's not going to be okonomiyaki without the sauce," she says.  "Otherwise, it's just batter and cabbage."

Yukari says there are several different sauces and toppings that you should combine atop your pancake, but the most important condiment is far and away the tonkatsu sauce.  Japanese liberally smear their okonomiyaki with this thick, sweet Worcestershire-like sauce.  The most common brand is made by a company called Bulldog-Bulldock in Japanese.

"The difference between a G sound and a K sound in Japanese is two tiny dots to the side of the character," says Yukari.  "The company that makes Bulldog sauce must have somehow mistyped the name onto the label, because they left the little dots out.  It reads 'bulldock' in Japanese.  Obviously, the English word bulldog isn't going to be familiar to a Japanese person, so I'm sure no one thought much of it-it was just one funny sounding word over another."

If you have an Asian market by you, you'll find Bulldog brand tonkatsu sauce no problem.  The one near my place sold it for just over three bucks a bottle.  Online suppliers and how-to recipes for making the sauce abound on the Internet-though I would personally shy away from the latter.  Half the joy is seeing that little underbitten bulldog logo.

Once you've poured the batter and flipped it for full cooking, Yukari recommends dressing it while still on the griddle.  With a spatula, joyfully apply the first strange and exotic condiment: mayonnaise!

"Yes, a good ol' jar of Hellman's is perfect," says Yukari.  "The Japanese love mayonnaise.  We use it in our everyday cooking as often as you guys do."

Yukari pointed out a Japanese mayonnaise bottle to me in the Asian market.  It was Kewpie brand and came in a beautiful, vase shaped plastic squeeze bottle with a small kewpie doll logo on its front in relief.  If you want to go all out authentic, get one of these.  Forgo the spatula and squeeze your name in Japanese characters.  Decorate your turkey sandwiches with mayo rose buds.

Once the mayonnaise is on, pour the tonkatsu sauce, and don't be shy!  The more the better; this sauce is sweet and spicy in all the right ways.  If you've been lucky in your Asian food shopping, you'll have dried seaweed (aonori) and fish flakes (katsuo) to sprinkle on.  The heat from the okonomiyaki makes the katsuo dance.  Remove from the griddle and serve up.

"Honestly, it's the easier thing, done any way you want it," says Yukari.  "The name actually means 'as you like it (okonomi) fried (yaki).'"

Check out this  video of Yukari cooking Okonomiyaki!