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Niku Udon (Japanese Beef Noodle Bowls) | Kenji's Cooking Show

Mar 23, 2024
Hello everyone, I'm Kenji, we're going to make some nikku

udon

, these are Japanese

noodle

s with meat, really very simple, there aren't many ingredients, especially if you use Dashi powder, which is what I'm using here, so I have a recipe for Dashi, you can find it. in uh in the link below oh sorry I'll open that door for you Shabu but this is Dashi powder that comes in different levels of quality come on chef come in come in it comes in different levels of quality. It turns out it's a fancier one that's made with bonito and anchovies and seaweed and all kinds of stuff, but you know you can also use something like hondashi, which is probably the really run-of-the-mill mass market type. -mill things that still have great flavor, or you can make your own Dashi, making your own Dashi is very simple and I'll leave instructions below, oh the other thing you can do is they have these kind of Dashi tea packets that I use frequently. when I run out of them, that's why I use this powdered stuff, so Dashi anyway is a Japanese broth, it's like the base of most Japanese soups, in fact, this base of almost all Japanese cuisine it's a broth made with kombu which is giant seaweed and usually you know the simplest one is going to be kombu and um katsuabushi which is dried, salted, smoked, fermented and shaved bonito, so it doesn't say that you would make it yourself at home, but you buy it at This type of flakes that look almost like salt, like wood shavings, you can also buy them.
niku udon japanese beef noodle bowls kenji s cooking show
You know, my grandmother used to buy them in solid blocks and then shave them herself, which is how people used to do it, but no. It's a very common way to do it nowadays, so I'm going to let this dissolve or dissolve for the most part and it will finish dissolving on its own. This is a very rich Dashi broth that will be quite tasty, but it's kind of the base of the soup, okay, I have about three and a half, maybe four cups of Dashi and to that I'm going to add a couple of tablespoons of mirin, which is a sweet Japanese

cooking

wine, and a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce.
niku udon japanese beef noodle bowls kenji s cooking show

More Interesting Facts About,

niku udon japanese beef noodle bowls kenji s cooking show...

We'll give it a try, depending on the type of Dashi you use you may need to add a little more salt but this one is quite salty on its own so I'll put it on the back burner and let it sit. this pot is going to be for my

noodle

s, okay, there's my soup base, here's my noodles, this is what I'm going to cook my meat, so there's a lot, there's a lot of different ways you can make this

beef

, um, oh, this is an onion that was accidentally frozen. uh, in this top part of my refrigerator, um, you know, you generally don't want to cook with frozen vegetables because when you freeze what happens is the ice, the expansion of the ice destroys the walls of the plant cells and they become soft like that, but for a recipe. like this one, where we cook the onion by essentially simmering it.
niku udon japanese beef noodle bowls kenji s cooking show
I'm throwing this part out because it's a little moldy, but essentially where we're throwing it is

cooking

the onion until it's very, very soft anyway, you can use a previously frozen onion. and will not affect the final results. This is an old onion. I'm going to remove all these slimy bits. This is a very quick recipe. I have to do it quickly because my daughter has violin lessons in about 15 minutes. Leaving the house in about 15 minutes, so I'm going to cook this quick halfway and then we'll save the rest for dinner later, okay, so we've got our onions, we've got meat, this is thinly shaved ribeye, um, what I bought at the Japanese restaurant.
niku udon japanese beef noodle bowls kenji s cooking show
Sukiyaki market, you can buy any meat that you would use for a Sukiyaki or shabu-shabu or something like Korean barbecue bulgogi, you can use

beef

that you can buy, you know, anywhere you buy meat steaks or cheese, you can do that, but you need this kind of thinly sliced ​​beef that you know depending on where you live, it can be hard to get, but if you live somewhere where they sell Cheesesteak meat or meat for Sukiyaki, like in an Asian supermarket eh. You're in luck and likewise, if you want to make um cheesesteaks and you don't live in an area where that's common but you do live near an Asian market, a Japanese or Korean market in particular, you can use the meat for uh Sukiyaki and shabu-shabu for cheesesteaks and it's delicious or Italian beef, you can do that too, so some people browned the onions and meat before cooking it.
I don't. I've always made it as a kind of simmered wave, simpler for me. This is on low heat. plate um so all I'm doing is taking my meat and my onions adding. I like to use quite a bit of sake, so I'm probably adding about half a cup or so of sake. Some recipes will only call for a couple tablespoons. a couple tablespoons of mirin, oh, that was about three-quarters of a pound of meat, by the way, that will make, as you know, three servings and a couple tablespoons of soy sauce and a couple tablespoons of sugar, finally, a little bit of that foundation suitable for Tadashi and so on.
Now all we do is let this simmer. By the way, it's exactly the same way you would make something like Japanese beef noodle

bowls

and the idea here is that the beef will cook pretty quickly, but that's totally fine. falling apart is part of the experience so it's this very thinly sliced ​​tender meat that cooks oh yeah go ahead they cook really quickly and then they start to get tender and you know some people like to cook it until it's barely In fact, I generally like to cook it longer, until it's almost starting to fall apart, so if I have time I'd let it simmer for probably half an hour or so, but today I'd probably just let it simmer for a few 10 minutes because I have that violin lesson going well, the only other ingredients here are boudo noodles, these are fresh, you can also use dried or frozen.
The frozen one is probably the one I use most often, but I happen to see these fresh, so I bought some fresh, we'll take the chive leaves. I'll cut them nice and thin this way. These will be my garnish vegetables. Oh and here's something interesting you can do when you cut scallions nice and thin like this, what we can do is then put them in some ice water and let them sit and they get super curly and look good, that's something I learned when I worked in one of my first jobs in a restaurant, it was in a pizzeria.
A place in Harvard Square called Cambridge, if you're familiar with Miracle of Science, which is an MIT bar that's been there for I don't know 30 years and is where a lot of startups were founded, if you believe the stories. but anyway that place is owned by a guy named Chris Lutz who used to own a pizza place called Cambridge, one that I think eventually closed during the pandemic, but that was one of my first restaurant jobs: making pizza there and They used to top the pizzas at the end um with uh uh these chive hairs, which is how they did it at Al Forno in Providence, also the place where grilled pizza was supposedly invented, but yeah, they topped them with these chive hairs and That's where I learned that trick. of putting scallions in ice water so they get nice and curly so if you've ever been to a uh you won't see that just in I mean obviously not just that um uh Cambridge water and sushi

bowls

, but if you go to places you like sushi, um or sorry, um, bowls, but if you go to sushi places, sometimes you'll see salads with chive hairs or certain rolls that have chive hairs in them and that's how they do it, pretty good. , talking about chives.
I'm not going to bore you and make you watch this, um, boil and simmer, so I'll be back in a few minutes, but my son just woke up, so I have to take care of him before I take my daughter. to music class, so what I'm going to do is turn this off, turn this on, turn this off, just leave everything, turn everything off and I'll finish this later tonight when we get back home, so yeah, the realities. from real life, okay, I'll see you in a bit, I'll be back in a couple of days, in fact, it turns out that yesterday we had to do it, not yesterday, the day before yesterday we had to leave a little faster than I thought.
I got to my daughter's gym class and then I couldn't finish cooking this and eating it that day, but basically all I did was simmer the meat until it looked like this, so it's probably a total of about 10 minutes more and then I put it in the refrigerator and now this is two days later and we are reheating it for dinner so I have the same things. I got a pot of water. I got my broth which was also in the fridge for a couple. nights and the meat is practically ready, so we just have to cook our noodles so that they are fresh

udon

noodles.
If you can't find them fresh, you should look for frozen and if you can't find frozen, you can use dried if you can. You won't find any kind of udon, just use spaghetti, yeah, no one will stop you, udon or some kind of thick Japanese wheat noodle, they come in various thicknesses, you can also make them yourself of course, um, oh, I forgot to mention, I think I forgot. to mention it was two days ago so I don't know, but if you don't have sake or know that for some reason you don't keep alcohol at home or cook with alcohol, you can use water.
For this, it will taste great, that combination of soy and Dashi will still taste great, so instead of sake and mirin use just the sugar, maybe add a little extra sugar to offset the sweetness of the mirin. but otherwise, yeah, soy and peas, we'll do fine, so these noodles will only take a couple of minutes to cook in the meantime, I'm going to get my bowls ready, so we'll have our broth, this is enough. making like two servings here, one I don't even know why I bother with the ladle, do that, we'll just grab it, uh, and uh, if you've ever liked a Yoshinoya, which is a Japanese fast food chain.
Um, they, the meat, the meat mixture that they put on top of their guton, their meat rice bowls are essentially the same as this one, so you could put this on top of the rice instead of noodles and that would be completely appropriate and completely delicious. , bring some of those. clumps of noodles in summer, I mean, it's summer, I guess technically right now, but in early summer when it was really hot, what I like to do is serve them cold, so you take the noodles, you cool them down, and you throw them in an ice bath. when you finish cooking them and then you can serve them all cold, okay, the noodles are ready, bring them, bring them here so we can get about half of them, okay, foreigner, if you want those noodles to look pretty.
What I can do is take a bunch of miniature chopsticks like this, shake them a little bit so they're flat and then place them that way and put them back and then you'll get a little bed of noodles lined up, of course. I'm not that good with these people who do this every day. You're much better off getting some noodles so your meat can sit on top without sinking too much into our meat mixture. I think it's enough for everyone. Bowl, let's save the rest for my daughter's lunch sometime or something. Oh, and then here are those graphs, those chives that have also been in the refrigerator for a couple of nights, but you can see how they got nice and curled up and what I.
What I like to do is toss them in whenever I have herbs in water or something before I put them in the dish. I throw them in just to shake off the excess water and there we go, which is a Japanese seven spice powder that has like chili peppers, sesame seeds. orange peel some aromatics different coriander seeds I think that's okay let's go ahead and try this delicious light broth oh wow how tasty there you go yeah it has that kind of classic sweet and salty Japanese profile like tons of umami from the Dashi hmm, okay. one is for my wife, guys, non-binary friends, Japanese beef noodles and see you next time.

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