Oyakodon (Japanese Chicken and Egg Rice Bowl) Recipe (2024)

FAQs

Can you make oyakodon without dashi? ›

Homemade dashi is nice, but not necessary for this simple dish, which has so many other strong flavors.

Oyakodon is a classic comfort food of Japanese home cooking. Tender pieces of chicken, onions, and eggs are simmered in an umami-rich sauce and then poured over a bowl of fluffy steamed rice. Simple, delicious, and utterly comforting, this is the kind of one-bowl meal you can cook in less than 30 minutes!

Too much broth will lead to an excessively wet bowl of rice that lost the original richness of the dish. After much testing and experimenting, this recipe definitely churned out one of the most impressive Oyakodon you ever had ~ guaranteed rich and flavorful for every mouthful! Ingredients required are very simple.

Donburi (丼, literally "bowl", also abbreviated to "-don" as a suffix, less commonly spelled "domburi") is a Japanese "rice-bowl dish" consisting of fish, meat, vegetables or other ingredients simmered together and served over rice. Donburi meals are usually served in oversized rice bowls which are also called donburi.

Dashi most commonly utilizes a combination of kombu (kelp seaweed) and katsuobushi (dried bonito flakes), but other ingredients used to make dashi are shiitake mushrooms and niboshi (small dried fish).

Tamago gohan (literally "egg rice")—rice mixed with a raw egg—is Japanese comfort food at its simplest. It's one of my favorite recipes of all time, and something that can be made in minutes.

It is a type of “Wan" that is supposed to be lifted by hand and used to eat hot soup cuisine. To prevent excessive heat transfer to the hand, Japanese soup bowls are usually made of wood or Japanese lacquerware, which have low thermal conductivity.

Tamagoyaki is a Japanese omelet that's typically made by rolling several thin layers of egg (mixed with soy, mirin, sugar, and sometimes dashi, in which case it's called dashimaki) on top of each other while they cook in a small rectangular pan designated solely for this purpose.

The texture of the eggs will look soupy, but that's normal. Cover the pan and let the eggs fully cook, 2 to 3 minutes, or until custardy. Uncover, sprinkle the scallions and/or mitsuba, if using, over the eggs, and remove from the heat.

Does oyakodon reheat well? ›

Finally, it tastes great when you make it and reheats well too. And if you're not yet sold, it's packed with protein and absolutely perfect for a weeknight meal, so let's get into it.

The white stuff coming out of chicken as it cooks is simply extra protein that dissolves in water and is forced out of the meat by heat. Food scientist Topher McNeil, PhD, explains, “The [chicken] muscles themselves actually contract and squeeze out the liquid that's in between muscle cells.”

Chinese fried rice uses varieties of long-grain white rice, which includes the likes of basmati and jasmine. This gives the dish a characteristically dry, firm texture and leads to a little more crispness when fried. Japanese fried rice, on the other hand, uses short-grain white rice, like sushi rice aka Japanese rice.

Rice: The Heart of Japanese Food Culture

Most typical Japanese meals consists of a bowl of rice, miso soup and some side dishes. Being Japanese, rice is what we eat everyday (many cases 3 times a day) and the Japanese people truly take pride of our rice culture. What makes Japanese food iconic is the RICE.

If you're making udon and soba noodle soup, I recommend using mentsuyu (noodle soup base) instead of shiro dashi.

Alternatively, you can use Torigara Soup (鶏ガラスープの素), granulated chicken stock. The chicken stock tastes simpler than stock made with Chuka Dashi, so it works well with any recipe. You could also make Homemade Chicken Stock.