Japanese Gyudon Recipe - Beef Rice Bowl

We cannot overstate how incredibly tasty this dish is. And it is super simple to make. In Japan, Gyudon is a really popular dish, it's a Japanese beef rice bowl, the word 'Gyudon' just comes from a combination of the word for beef (gyu, pronounced 'goo') and the word for bowl (don). It's basically a type of donburi of which there are lots of different recipes. The essence of the dish is extremely thinly sliced strips of beef that are simmered in a flavourful broth of dashi, soy sauce and mirin served over rice and topped with pickled ginger, spring onions, shichimi togarashi and often a soft cooked egg. It's utterly delicious and super simple to make.

There is only one small complication with this dish - you want to use beef that has a good level of fat marbling, I used sirloin steak here but ribeye will work well. Very lean beef can sometimes have the tendency to become slightly more chewy. You also want the strips of beef to be sliced almost as thinly are Parma ham for which there is a very simple technique to achieve this. You simply pop the steak in the freezer for about 60 minutes (depending on the thickness of the steak), then using a thin bladed knife, slice the steak at a 45° angle. The cold (almost frozen) steak will be really firm (almost solid) and easy to slice really thinly. The bonus is that once sliced, a single 8oz steak is enough for two people.

Servings 4 | Cook Time: 25 mins | Prep Time: 10 mins | Pre-prep: 1 hour

Ingredients

475g Sirloin or Rib-eye Steak, sliced really really thinly, as described above
For the cooking broth:
1 white onion, peeled and thickly sliced
25g Ninben Shiro Dashi Stock mixed with 225g hot water
70g Hinode Cooking Sake
70g Hinode Hon Mirin
100g Soy Sauce
1½ tablespoons sugar (or to taste)
For the garnishes:
2 spring onions, thinly sliced
Beni shoga - pickled ginger, as much as you like
Shichimi Togarashi, as much as you like
4 eggs, poached or soft boiled (optional)
300g Japanese rice (white or brown)

Instructions

1. Remove the steak of any packaging and pop it in the freezer for 60 minutes to firm up.

2. Wash the rice in plenty of changes of cold water and leave to soak for 20 minutes.

3. After 60 minutes, remove the steak from the freezer and slice as thinly as you can on a 45° angle. Keep to one side.

4. Cook the rice in 1.25 times its volume of gently simmering water for around 18 minutes if using white rice or twice its volume of water for 35 minutes if using brown. All the water should get absorbed by the rice. Then turn off the heat. It's fine to let it sit in the pan for 10-15 minutes.

5. If you are going to add a poached egg, get a pan of water on to boil.

6. In a large frying pan, add in the sliced onion with all the liquid elements for the broth (dashi stock, sake, mirin, soy sauce, sugar) and bring to a simmer. Cook this gently for around 2-3 minutes, just until the onions have softened.

7. Now arrange the thinly sliced strips of beef over the top of the simmering broth and continue to gently cook for around 5 minutes - pushing the pieces into the liquid as it cooks. You want the beef to become lovely and tender, so you may have to try a piece to check!

8. For the poached eggs, drop them into a swirling pan of nearly boiling water and cook for 3 minutes.

9. Once the beef has cooked for around 5 minutes and is nice and tender, it's time to plate up. In each bowl, pile in some rice, top with the beef and plenty of the remaining cooking liquid, add on the poached egg, sliced spring onions, pickled ginger and sprinkle over some shichimi togarashi.....Enjoy!

Cooking Tips

You can take the stress out of poaching the eggs to order by pre-poaching them for 2 minutes 15 seconds and then dropping them in ice cold water. They will keep fine for a day in the fridge and then drop them back into hot water for 30 seconds just before you serve.

Don't be tempted to cook you beef 'medium-rare' - whole point of slicing the beef really thinly is so you can braise the meat in the broth and it absorbs all that lovely umami flavour and becomes tender really quickly. So make sure you simmer the beef for at least 5 minutes.

The pickled ginger is a crucial part of the dish, the fiery ginger work so well with the beef.

If you don't have a rice cooker, use a cast iron casserole dish to cook the rice. It retains the heat really well and means that you can cook the rice so that it's ready a good 10 -15 minutes before you need to serve it.

Variations and Substitutions

If you don't want to use beef in this recipe you can substitute it for chicken. In fact the Japanese have a name for this dish "Oyakodon" which when served with the egg translates as "parent and child"!

I often use our Japanese short grain brown for gyudon, although it takes longer to cook, it brings a wonderful nutty flavour to the dish.