Kanako's Kitchen

Like everybody else in Kansai, I’m udon-crazy: there’s no udon dish I don’t love. This particular way to make udon – basically a fast noodle stir fry – is as unpretentious as Japanese cooking gets: a casual dish served to the hungry masses, typically  for lunch.

Usually, you would make yaki-udon with yakisoba sauce – a sweet-and-savory concoction close to the type of sauce we put on Japanese pancakes.

For this recipe, though, we do something a little different, relying on dashi. To make the seasoning, what we did is take some katsuobushi bonito flakes and some konbu and throw them in the blender!

Very easy…surprisingly delicious.

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Ingredients (serves four)

 

• Udon noodles – buy the dry kind – 400 g.
• Pork – 200 grams
• Onion – one medium one
• Cabbage – 1/8th of a head of cabbage
• Carrot – one medium one
• Spring onions – four
• Bean sprouts – 100 g.
• Katsuobushi flakes – two packs
• Dashi – one tea spoon
• Konbu – one small section
• Sake – two tablespoons
• Soy sauce – two tablespoons
• Salt – to taste
• Frying oil – two tablespoons

Preparation

• Chop cabbage into largeish chunks, the spring onion medium-large, the carrot into thin little strips, and the pork into thin strips. Slice the onion.
• Place katsuobushi flakes together with dry konbu in a blender. Blend. (If you have powdery Katsuobushi, use that instead.)

click to enlarge

Cooking

• Bring a pot of water to a boil, cook udon following the instructions on the package.
• Drain udon, run under cold water, massaging well with your hands to get rid of the excess starch
• Heat a large frying pan, add frying oil, stir fry the pork until it browns
• Add onions and keep stir frying until the onions get translucent
• Add carrots, cabbage, keep stir frying until everything softens a little
• Add bean sprouts, spring onions, keep stir frying
• Add the noodles, stirring all along
• Add the freshly blended katsuobushi, dashi, konbu, sake and then soy sauce
• When it’s well blended, taste to test the seasoning. Add salt if needed.

click to enlarge

Serve hot to hungry people.

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The other night, we enjoyed yakiudon – along with beer and gyoza -with our friends Patrick and Anne-Frédérique. We suspect they enjoyed making these photos almost as much as they enjoyed the meal!

 

Itadakimasu!