Japanese hamburg steak (ハンバーグ, hambāgu) is one of the most beloved dishes in Japanese home cooking — a juicy, tender patty of ground meat, softened onion, and milk-soaked panko, pan-fried until browned and finished with a glossy ketchup-and-Worcestershire sauce. It’s a staple of yoshoku (Japanese-style Western food), served on every family dinner table and in…
In our house, tonkatsu is a Friday-night kind of dinner — the sort of meal that turns an ordinary evening into a small treat. It’s a thick piece of pork loin, coated in panko breadcrumbs, fried golden and served with a tall pile of shredded cabbage and tonkatsu sauce. One of Japan’s most beloved home…
Ask a Japanese family what’s for dinner on a tired weeknight and “curry” is one of the most common answers — ours included. Japanese curry rice — kare raisu — is one of the most popular home-cooked meals in Japan. Almost every Japanese household has a box of curry roux in the pantry, and everyone…
The Miso Soup Japanese People Actually Make at Home If you’ve ever had miso soup at a Japanese restaurant, you might think it’s something special. But in Japan, miso soup is the most ordinary thing on the table — it shows up at breakfast, lunch, and dinner, almost every single day. This is how I…
Disclosure: some links below are affiliate links. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, at no extra cost to you. What Are Dashi Packets? Open the cupboard in almost any Japanese home and you’ll find a bag of dashi packets — ours included. These small tea-bag-style pouches (だしパック, dashi pakku) are filled with…
Gobo salad is the one you find in every Japanese supermarket deli case, sitting in a plastic tub between the potato salad and the hijiki. Thin strips of burdock root, carrot and cucumber in a mayonnaise dressing with a little soy sauce. It’s crunchy, a bit earthy, and it’s the side dish that makes a…
Chashu don is what happens to leftover chashu in a Japanese house. You slice it, lay it over hot rice, fry an egg, and chop some green onion over the top. It takes about four minutes once the pork exists, and in our house it is the Sunday lunch my wife asks for by name….
Boiling edamame sounds like it needs no recipe, and in a sense it doesn’t — you could drop the pods in salted water and be done. But the version served in Japanese homes and izakaya involves two small steps that most English recipes skip entirely, and they’re the reason restaurant edamame tastes seasoned all the…
Squid rings cooked in butter with a splash of soy sauce and mirin, with maitake mushrooms and spring onion. It takes about fifteen minutes, and roughly two of those are the squid actually cooking — which is the entire difficulty of this dish. Squid is tender for about a minute, and then it’s rubber. Butter…
This is ground pork and potato cooked down in a thick, glossy soy sauce with strips of green pepper through it. In Japanese it’s a soboro ankake — soboro being crumbled seasoned meat, ankake being a sauce thickened with potato starch so it clings to everything instead of running to the bottom of the pan….
Japanese sweet potatoes are the ones with purple skin and pale yellow flesh — drier, starchier, and noticeably sweeter than the orange American kind. Sliced paper-thin and cooked in an air fryer with a little honey and butter, they turn into crisp, faintly caramelized chips that taste like a cross between a potato chip and…
These are chicken wings with three ingredients: chicken, salt, and pepper. There’s no batter, no marinade, no sauce, and no flour — just seasoned wings in an air fryer until the skin goes thin and crackly and the fat underneath renders out. In Japan this plain version is called shio tebasaki (塩手羽先), salt wings, and…
Kiriboshi daikon (切り干し大根) is daikon radish that’s been shredded and dried in the winter sun until it’s brittle and amber-colored. Drying concentrates it — the sweetness, the minerals, and a faint smokiness that fresh daikon doesn’t have at all. Simmered with carrot and fried tofu in a soy-dashi broth, it becomes one of the most…
Yaki onigiri (焼きおにぎり) is a rice ball that’s been grilled until the outside turns crisp and golden and the soy sauce caramelizes into a savory crust. It’s sold frozen in every Japanese supermarket, it’s a standard izakaya order, and it exists for a very practical reason: it’s what you do with leftover rice. Traditionally you…
Lotus root is one of those vegetables that looks far more intimidating than it is. It’s a pale, heavy, slightly muddy-looking root, and when you slice it you get those famous wheel-shaped rounds full of holes. In Japan it’s called renkon (れんこん) and it turns up constantly in autumn and winter cooking — and the…