Okonomiyaki

From Beijing we flew to Tokyo, where we began an eight day love affair with Japanese cuisine. I had arrived with a long list of all the different food I wanted to check out, and our genial hosts helped us kick this off, with some homemade Osaka-style Okonomiyaki.

Okonomiyaki is often described as Japanese pizza – but in reality it is nothing of the sort. There’s no pizza dough or tomato sauce for starters – and it isn’t even oven baked. Instead, a base of batter and cabbage is mixed together, and then (like a pizza, I grant you) a selection of ingredients are selected according to taste. Unlike a pizza, these are all mixed in together before being pan-fried to crispy perfection. This evening, we were treated to such seafood delights as octopus, prawns and squid, with the dish being finished off with strips of bacon.



Once ready to eat, we smothered the piping hot patties with lashings of okonomiyaki sauce, Japanese mayonnaise and dried fish flakes.



Sounds so simple… tastes so delicious (or “oishi!” as I learnt to say in Japanese)… A promising start to the love affair.