Tamagoyaki

This Japanese egg roll is a favourite o-bento and picnic dish. Without it, o-bento is almost not o-bento. O-bento is the Japanese “lunchbox”: a wooden box, once lacquered, nowadays more like a plastic or metal box, in which they put all sorts of delicious snacks, neatly arranged, so that they can eat them when they leave home. The most typical participants are various kinds of sushi (mostly rolls), tako (octopus), onigiri (rice balls, usually filled with something) and of course tamagoyaki.

It’s basically a rectangular egg omelette that is rolled up (in a roundabout way 🙂 ) and then cut into slices. It comes in sweet and savoury versions, I’m going to show you the savoury version here, but if you use less sake and more sugar, you can easily get to the sweet version.In the dough of sweet tamagoyaki (and sometimes also in the normal ones), instead of sake, they also put mirin (a kind of sweet sake variant used for cooking). Given that it’s hard to find at home, you can easily substitute it with a little more sugar.

Preparing the dish doesn’t require much preparation as it consists of the basics, eggs, soy sauce and sake. Soy sauce and sake are available everywhere, but if rice wine is not a possibility, you can substitute a dry or – for sweet tamagoyaki – even sweeter (semi-sweet) white wine. The biggest problem is something that you don’t think about at first: the Japanese use a special rectangular pan for frying this (this is the tamagoyaki pan…how convenient) – well I have a rectangular pan, but it’s for the grill (and it’s not smooth on the bottom), and I couldn’t find a square one -like the tamagoyaki pan- anywhere. I hadn’t given up yet, but by now I was pretty desperate (just kidding) to cook it in a round pan. It didn’t turn out as well (my rola didn’t get as nice and big), but it’ll do.

Tamagoyaki

4 eggs
3 tablespoons sake
2 teaspoons soy sauce
1tablespoon sugar
oil
and of course a tamagoyaki pan…or a flat pancake pan

Beat the eggs and add the sake (mirin), sugar and soy sauce and mix well. Heat the oil in your frying pan.

Pour a quarter of the egg into the pan and fry a thin, pancake-like omelette. When it’s set (no need to fry it!), use a chopstick or a spatula to roll it up on one side, as if you were just rolling up pancakes. Soak up the oil, then slide the roll over to the other side of the pan. Pour in the second quarter of the egg and gently lift the roll so that the egg flows underneath your finished roll. Once set, starting from the side of the finished roll, continue rolling the tamagoyaki, soak up the excess oil and slide the roll over. Repeat this with the third and then fourth quarters of the egg, soaking up the oil each time you roll up.

When the egg is done, fry the tamagoyaki a little more to get a nice color on the outside (about golden brown), then take it out and let it stand for a while (about until it is lukewarm). Using a sharp knife, cut the rolled egg into finger-sized slices and serve it on its “bottom” (the way it was) or put it in the lunch box.

First publication: 14th March, 2009