A Japanese favourite Okonomiyaki is a cabbage ‘pancake’. It’s really delicious and easy to make. This recipe is an Anglo-Japanese version. Whilst it’s not totally authentic, because it uses easily accessible ingredients, it’s still close to the original, and just as tasty.
Ingredients
1 small cabbage
2 cups of flour, can be either self raising or plain.
1 1/2 cups of chicken stock (can be from a stock cube)
4 eggs
Okonomi sauce (or sweet teriyaki or Hoi Sin sauce as an alternative)
9 rashers of smoked bacon
3 spring onions finely chopped
Mayonnaise (in a squeezy bottle)
Butter
Method
- Finely slice the cabbage. After slicing and washing squeeze the cabbage to ‘bruise’ it with your hands. This helps to soften it.
- Mix the flour, cold chicken stock and eggs in a large mixing bowl. Add the cabbage and the spring onions and mix well.
- Heat a small amount of butter in a 20cms frying pan over a medium heat. Add a heaped cup of the cabbage batter mixture to the pan. Spread out to make a round pancake about 1.5cms thick. There should be enough batter to hold the cabbage together. Neaten the edges by using a spatula to push in the edges and any cabbage or batter that’s sticking out.
- Place 3 rashers of bacon on top.
- Cover the frying pan with a lid. I don’t have a lid to fit my frying pan instead I cover it with a lid from a very large pan, which covers the frying pan completely. It’s really important to cover the pan to help the cabbage pancake cook properly in the steam that’s produced.
- After about 5 minutes flip the pancake so the bacon is underneath and cook uncovered for another 5 minutes.
- When cooked through turn onto a plate, bacon side up.
- Dress with the Okonomi sauce and the mayonnaise drizzled generously on top. Serves 3-4
Sue Stones