Okonomiyaki (Osaka-Style Pork and Cabbage Pancake)

Ingredients

• 100 g cake flour
• 100 ml dashi (cooled)
• 40 g nagaimo yam (grated)
• A pinch of salt
• 240 g cabbage (about 1/4 head)
• 2 eggs
• 4 tbsp tenkasu (tempura crumbs)
• 4 tbsp green onion (thinly sliced)
• 160 g thinly sliced pork belly (4 slices)
• Red pickled ginger, to taste
• Vegetable oil, as needed
• Okonomiyaki sauce, as needed
• Mayonnaise, to taste
• Aonori (green seaweed flakes), as needed
• Katsuobushi (bonito flakes), as needed

Steps

1. [Batter] Put the flour and salt in a bowl and gradually add the cold dashi, whisking until there are no lumps. Add the grated yam, mix again and rest in the fridge for about 30 minutes.
2. Core the cabbage and chop it roughly into pieces about 5 mm square. The finer you chop it, the better it blends with the batter and the fluffier the pancake. If the pork slices are long, cut them in half.
3. Cook one pancake at a time. In a small bowl, combine half the batter, 1 egg, half the cabbage and half each of the tempura crumbs, green onion and pickled ginger, folding loosely from the bottom to work in air. Overmixing makes it sticky and tough, so stop as soon as no dry flour remains.
4. Heat a hotplate to 200 °C (or a frying pan over medium heat), oil it lightly and pour in the batter in a round, shaping it about 18 cm across and 2 cm thick. Just shape it; don't press it down.
5. Lay the pork slices over the top and cook for 4 to 5 minutes. When the edges look dry and the bottom is nicely browned, flip it in one go with two spatulas.
6. With the pork side down, cover and steam-cook over medium-low heat for 5 to 6 minutes. Uncover, flip again and cook for 2 to 3 minutes to cook through. It is done when a bamboo skewer comes out with no raw batter.
7. Brush sauce all over, drizzle with thin lines of mayonnaise if you like, and sprinkle with aonori and bonito flakes. Cook the second pancake the same way with the remaining ingredients.

Origin and history

Okonomiyaki, flour mixed with dashi and plenty of cabbage and cooked on both sides on a griddle, is, along with takoyaki, the face of Osaka's konamon (flour food) culture. In Osaka the mainstream style is mazeyaki, where all the fillings are mixed into the batter before cooking.

Its roots are often traced to fu-no-yaki, a confection served at tea ceremonies in the Azuchi-Momoyama period: flour mixed with water, cooked thin, spread with miso and rolled. By the end of the Edo period, cooking flour batter on an iron griddle had spread among ordinary people. In the late Meiji era, yoshoku-yaki ("Western-style grill") made with wheat flour, cabbage and sauce was sold like a cheap snack.

Over time people added pork and vegetables, and alongside kasaneyaki, the original style of layering fillings on top of the batter, mazeyaki became established too. From the late Showa 30s into the 40s (the mid-1960s to the 1970s), chain restaurants promoted it as an "Osaka specialty", and it became known nationwide.