Spaghetti Napolitan (Japanese Ketchup Spaghetti)
Cuisine: Japanese
Region: 日本各地
Servings: 2人分
Spaghetti Napolitan (Japanese Ketchup Spaghetti) is a home-style staple dish. Ingredients and step-by-step instructions are below, with notes for home cooking.
Ingredients
- Spaghetti (1.7–1.9 mm) 200 g
- Vienna sausages 4
- Onion 1/2 (100 g)
- Green bell peppers 2
- Mushrooms (canned, sliced) 50 g
- Butter 15 g
- Vegetable oil 1 tbsp
- Tomato ketchup 6 tbsp (about 90 g)
- Worcestershire sauce 1 tsp
- Sugar 1/2 tsp
- Milk 1 tbsp
- Salt as needed (1/2 tbsp for the cooking water)
- Pepper a pinch
- Grated Parmesan and Tabasco to taste
Steps
- Bring 2 L of water to a boil in a pot, add salt and cook the spaghetti 1 minute longer than the package time. Drain and toss with a little vegetable oil (not included in the list).
- While it cooks, slice the onion 5 mm thick, seed the bell peppers and cut them into 5 mm rings, and cut the sausages diagonally into 5 mm slices.
- Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and stir-fry the onion and sausages. When the onion softens, add the bell peppers and mushrooms and stir-fry briefly.
- Push the ingredients to one side and add the ketchup, Worcestershire sauce and sugar to the empty space; cook for about 1 minute. The ketchup's moisture evaporates, its color deepens a little and its acidity mellows.
- Add the spaghetti, then the milk and butter, and stir-fry for about 2 minutes, mixing everything well. Season with salt and pepper.
- Plate and top with grated Parmesan and Tabasco to taste.
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Notes
For the soft, chewy texture of a Japanese coffee shop, cook the noodles a little longer, coat them in oil and let them rest before stir-frying. Some shops use noodles boiled the day before and refrigerated.
Frying the ketchup to cook off its acidity before combining it with the noodles gives a sweet, rich flavor.
The butter and milk at the end add mellowness and a nostalgic yoshoku (Japanese-Western) flavor.
Pour a thin layer of beaten egg onto a hot iron plate and pile the spaghetti on top for the Nagoya-style "teppan Napolitan".
Origin and history
Napolitan is boiled spaghetti stir-fried with onion, green pepper and sausage in tomato ketchup. Its name comes from the Italian city of Naples, but it does not exist in Italy: it is a yoshoku dish born in Japan.
A well-known story about its origin says that after World War II, the head chef of a hotel in Yokohama saw occupation soldiers eating spaghetti with ketchup and created a proper dish using a sauce made from tomatoes. Later, the style made with readily available ketchup spread to neighborhood coffee shops and Western-style restaurants and even appeared in school lunches.
Thick, soft noodles with a sweetish ketchup flavor, served with grated cheese and Tabasco, are still loved by many as a "nostalgic taste" tied to Japan's coffee shop culture.