I first fell in love with Yoshinoya and gyudon (beef bowl) about 8 years ago when I was in Japan for 6 weeks. It became an instant “comfort food.” A bowl of rice, beef, onion, and broth. Unfortunately, there were no places near Detroit where I could find it (I didn’t look very hard). After moving to Beijing, I’ve rediscovered Yoshinoya and have spread my love for this simple but tasty dish to my wife and son. While there is a Yoshinoya directly across the street from us, I’m going to try my luck and make gyudon on my own.
Here’s the pared-down recipe I’m using.
4 cups of rice
1lb Thinly Sliced Beef
1 Onion
5 tbsp Soy Sauce
1 tsp Sake
2 tbsp Sugar
3 tbsp Hon-Mirin
1 1/3 cup Water with 1tsp Granulated Dashi
Some of the ingredients are the Chinese equivalents, so it might not come out exactly the same. Wish me luck!
I’ve found, doing Japanese cooking, that the word “dashi” really does mean “stock”. Most often it’s translated as “tuna and kelp stock”, which is what miso soup is made from. But if you try to make ramen or other things with tuna+kelp stock, it likely won’t taste anything like what you expect from having eaten in Japan.
Miso Soup - Tuna and kelp stock
Ramen - Pork stock
Curry Udon - Probably pork or beef stock
Gyudon - Probably beef stock
You should probably also make sure to have shichimi togarashi and beni shoga for your gyudon, though I agree that they’re not necessary.
I learned what dashi really means because I had to find it in a Chinese supermarket. From what I can tell, most Chinese soup stocks have extra flavors in them (chicken, egg, etc.). I think I found a vegetable soup stock (not kelp), but I won’t know until afterwards. I’m also a little iffy on the mirin. When I ran it through the translator, it came out in Chinese as Tian Jiu (Jiu meaning alcohol). But the Tian Jiu in the market was brownish in color, not clear. I’m not really sure what I bought.
This is an experiment using a double cultural translation. Should be different.
Google doesn’t seem to have any idea what Tian Jiu is. So long as it’s not a fruit alcohol, it should be fine (or even if it is, I doubt that it would be all that bad to have a bit of fruity flavor to your beef). Just add to taste rather than measuring it out, I guess. Your main worry would be that it would be very alcoholic in which case a little bit might have a significant effect, where mirin would hardly affect the flavor at all.
I was not very successful. The broth was fine, just tweak it for taste. The problem was the beef itself. There are 2 things I need to do in the future. Get fattier meat and have a machine slice it instead of doing it by hand. What ended up happening was I had tiny tough steaks in the broth instead of super-thin meat ready to fall apart. It would work great for a beef and green pepper dish but not gyudon.
I’m thinking about trying beef cut for hot pot. I was originally worried it would fall apart too much. But after last night trying to gnaw through the meat, I’ll go the opposite direction.
If you can find pre-cut meat, certainly that makes everything nice and easy. But you can cut meat thin enough for Gyudon by hand (either that or I’m less picky – but I’m pretty sure I got the thickness to roughly equivalent to what they serve at Yoshinoya.)
But yeah, if you cut it into cubes, I don’t think they’d pick up much flavor.