How to cook Japanese style Curry Rice 🍛 〜カレーライス〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiji's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make Japanese style curry rice. So a lot of people know about Japanese curry even though it actually doesn't belong to like traditional Japanese food and it's kind of still fairly new to our culture. So curry was introduced in our Japanese culture about 150 years ago from the British. For us, 150 years ago is fairly new. It does actually have a little bit of exotic feeling to it but a lot of people in Japan do make curry at home quite often. Today we're going to use the regular curry mix like this. So these curry mix you can find pretty much any Asian shop nowadays. If not I'm sure you can find it online. Today I'm going to show you the version that I like to make which the way I make it at home. I'm sure there are different versions and some people may not agree with the way I make it but it's the way I like it and hope you like it as well. Then let's get started. Here are the ingredients for Japanese style curry rice. I have here a couple cloves of garlic, ginger, onion, carrots, potatoes and today we're going to use beef for the meat but you can of course use other meat like chicken or pork but of course if you're a vegetarian you can go without meat and then you have a vegetarian Japanese style curry. Then we're going to put in also an apple. You might find it strange to put in an apple for curry but that's something a lot of people do in Japan. It just kind of takes the edge off and then make it milder. Then I also like to put in tomato can also to enrich the flavor. As you may have seen in the other video of dashi, tomato contains a lot of umami as well and so I like to put it in to enrich the flavor. As you can see here, a lot of ingredients of curry are full on umami. Garlic, onion, carrots and beef. They're just full of umami so whatever you make out of these you couldn't fail. And for the seasoning I'm using today this golden curry mix. In Japan we call this curry roux. Here are some cooking instructions and this is for 12 servings so we're going to make half of that and I am going to follow some of it but ignore some of it. I'm not going to follow amount of water because I'm going to use the tomato can and that's pretty much water. So I'll show my version and you can of course follow my version or this version. Cooking is try and error so you just have to try different things and find what's best for you. And then I also like to put in a little bit of garam masala. That's an Indian spice mix. Just kind of get a little extra kick but of course you don't need to put this in. And of course you have to have rice. Here I have two cups for four servings. Oh yeah and you need a little bit of frying oil. Whatever frying oil you have is fine. The first thing I'm going to do is to rinse the rice and let it soak in the water so that when everything gets ready rice is also ready. If you want to see more in detail of how to cook rice properly watch my other video on cooking rice. And here I'm going to put in some water. For the curry rice I want to have the rice a little bit firm cooked so for that I'm going to use just one to one ratio of water. But of course if you like some soft rice then you can use a regular ratio of 1 to 1.2. Two cups of water and then we're going to let it sit like this and let the rice soak up the water. Let's cut up the ingredients. I'm going to first prepare the ginger and garlic. Peel the garlic off. A little light smash. A little light smash. And the skin will peel right off. I think a lot of people grate this but as a lazy person I'm just going to use a garlic smasher. It just goes much faster. Then I'm going to peel off the ginger. So you want to take a little bit black part off and then the rest you can kind of scrape the skin like this. And then we're also going to smash this as well. So garlic and onion they go in the pot at the same time so I'm just going to put it together. And then let's cut up the onions. There's no really right way to cut this but I like to just kind of cut it in small pieces like this. They're going to kind of melt in the curry anyway so it doesn't really matter but I think a little thin like this is good. So this may seem like a lot of onion but when they get cooked they shrink and they give a lot of umami so don't be stingy on the onion. So let's cut up the potatoes. I think in the western culture they tend to peel the potatoes often but I think in Japan fewer people peel the potato and I like to put in just as it is. I just cut off a little bit of these where the sprouts come out or where it's kind of darker. I'm just going to take these parts off. We're just going to cut these into bite-sized pieces. A little bit smaller maybe. I like to cut these into this kind of bite-sized pieces but if you like it chunky you can cut it bigger or if you like it smaller you can cut into smaller pieces. And then for the carrots. So cutting the carrots I'm going to cut in what's called rangiri which means chaotic cuts and you just kind of have to cut a piece and then roll cut a piece roll cut a piece roll like this and then you kind of have like uneven pieces and they just kind of look kind of neat like that. And lastly I'm going to cut off the beef. If you like it chunky you can use like this big piece but I like kind of smaller pieces so I'm going to just kind of cut them into bite-sized pieces. There's no real rule but so the idea is that you kind of have like a same size pieces of different ingredients. We're going to grate the apple. A little tip on cutting the apple try not to cut from the top but instead from the bottom. The reason why is that all the pesticides will be collected here because I think nowadays there's very little place where they make any vegetable or fruit that don't use pesticides. So when pesticides spread out then it will spread out here and then when it rains then all the pesticides will collect right here so this is high concentrated pesticides area. If you cut in this way then you just kind of spread out all the pesticides in the apple but if you cut it the other way around then it goes away from it and have very little pesticides. I don't know how much difference that will make but I'm told from my mother that way so I just follow that. And then we're going to just grate this. So this is finished cutting the ingredients let's cook them. In a big pot I'm going to put about a tablespoon of cooking oil then I'm going to turn the heat to medium. So once the pan is being heated I'm going to put in the grated ginger and garlic. I'm just going to roast it a little bit. Once it got a little bit roasted I'm going to put in all the onions right here. Then I'm going to keep cooking like this for about 15 or 20 minutes until this white onion will be caramelized and look light brown. This is probably the hardest part but also the most important part of cooking the curry rice. So as you can see the amount of onion has decreased significantly and that it's nicely caramelized. So in this I'm going to put in about a teaspoon of galangal masala. If you don't have this you don't need to buy extra just for this but if you have it lying somewhere in your kitchen then you want to put it in just give it a little kick. So as I was just explaining this I just kind of burnt the bottom and this is why it's important to keep mixing. So anyway I'm going to put in the galangal masala. Then I'm going to put this in here and just kind of give a little roast to the spice. So using a spice it's important to kind of give it a little frying because just with water it only reaches 100 degrees but with frying it reaches higher temperature and with higher temperature the aroma of the spice kind of comes out really significantly so you want to do that. Oh it's starting to smell already good and here I'm going to put in the tomato can. I'm going to put half of this. Just about half of this. So this is about 400 grams of can so I'm going to put about 200 grams. To this I'm going to add in about two cups of water 500 milliliter. And here I'm going to put in the carrots and also the potatoes and also the ground up apple. I'm going to turn the heat to high and wait until this comes to boil. So this has come to a boil then I'm going to turn the heat to simmer. I know exactly what you may be wondering right now. Why is this guy not putting the meat in the curry? And of course you can put this in right here and that's also not a problem. A lot of people probably do this but what I like to do is I like to fry this separately a little bit. So the reason why I'm not putting it here directly or I didn't fry this in this pot is that if you fry this in here you don't get really roasted flavor of the meat. So what I usually do is I like to fry this on a separate pan. Of course you can skip this part and just kind of put it in. You still get a good curry but I just kind of like this kind of roasted flavor caramelized meat. It just kind of gives another layer. I'm going to turn the heat to high and put about a tablespoon of frying oil. Now the frying pan is heated. I'm going to put in the meat. So once I get the good searing of the meat I'm going to put these in the pot. So this is looking already great. Now I'm going to put the lid on and let it cook for about half an hour. So this has been cooking for about half an hour now. This is looking just great. Now we're going to put in the curry mix. So in a curry mix they usually they come in like package like this. We're going to use half of it and so and they're kind of cut into four pieces then it's easier if you kind of break them out in four pieces before you open it and then put this in. As you see they dissolve very easily. So we're going to have to keep mixing like this until the curry mix dissolves in this. Now we're going to cook the rice as we normally would. So I'm going to turn the heat to high. So this has come to boil. I'm going to give a little bit of mix so that it'll be cooked evenly. I'm going to put the lid back on and turn the heat to simmer and let it cook like this for 10 more minutes. The 10 minutes has passed. I'm going to turn the heat off and let this rice steam on its own heat for 10 more minutes. So yet another 10 minutes has passed and just kind of a little mix. I'm going to reheat this. I'm going to turn the heat to medium. So this is warmed up. I'm going to turn heat off. So let's serve this on a plate. I'm going to put the rice on one side then I'm going to put the curry on the other side. So this is finished. Let's eat. Oh this looks so delicious. Let's eat. Itadakimasu. Oh this is looking great. Oh this is so savory. Oh this is good. Oh this is really good. So you really really taste the sweetness of the onion and each vegetable is just kind of giving in everything to this curry. And then there's that punch from the spice. Also the savory from the beef. Oh this is a great mix. Oh this is so good. Oh this is just really good. I love curry. This is also totally balanced with one dish. You have your protein, you have your vegetable, you have your carbohydrate with the rice. This is really great. Among the Japanese people who like baseball, everybody know that Ichiro Suzuki, one of the most famous Japanese in the world. He's a major league baseball player who just retired last year I think. Quite famous that he loves curry and he actually eats curry every day. So in that sense curry is just balanced and it's just delicious. Oh that was totally delicious. Oh that was yet another delicious meal. So making curry is actually a little bit of work I have to say. So it takes usually about an hour to an hour and a half depending on the amount you're cooking. But it is definitely definitely worth it. And if you use this curry box then it's really really difficult to fail. And when I make curry I make like a big amount and the rest of it I save it for later. Curry is actually better on the next day. And of course with curry you can be very creative. You can put some cutlet, then you have a katsu curry, and you can put some noodles in this like udon or soba or ramen even. Then you have curry soba, curry udon, curry ramen. And that's also very very delicious. You can also freeze it up and save it in a freezer. What I usually do is I put it in one container for one serving and then freeze it. And when I don't have time I just microwave it and then serve it for dinner. And it's just an easy dinner. So you can put in also different kind of vegetables like eggplants, paprika, zucchini, what else? Pumpkin and some leafy vegetable like spinach is also definitely good. Yeah be just creative with it. And I urge you to make this at home yourself and I can guarantee that you will not regret it. If you like what you saw please hit that like button. If you want to see more of these please subscribe. And I would also be very very grateful if you could share my videos on my channel with your friends who might be interested in Japanese cooking. Then I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye!