How to cook Nikujaga, a typical Japanese side dish 〜肉じゃが〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taishi's Kitchen. Today, I'm going to show you how to make Nikujaga. Nikujaga is one of the, so to say, most typical comfort food in Japan. So it's like something that kind of reminds me of home. I don't think there are many restaurants that serve Nikujaga. This is a very typical home cooking. Each family has their own versions, and I'm just going to show you my version that my mother used to make quite often. Then, let's get started. Here are the ingredients for Nikujaga. I have here thinly sliced beef. What I usually do is I go to the butcher and ask them to cut the beef for shabu-shabu, or just as thin as possible. But you can, of course, use regularly cut beef meat, but you can also use pork meat. That's also delicious as well. For the vegetable, we have onions, potatoes, carrots, and I also have a little bit of snap peas just to put the very end as condiments to get a little color, but you don't need to have this. And then for the seasoning, I have here dashi powder, soy sauce, sugar, mirin, and sake. If you don't have mirin or sake, you don't have to buy them extra for this. It just gives a little more depth to the flavor, but if you don't have them, you can just substitute with sugar and water. Okay, let's prepare the ingredients. I'm gonna prepare the snap peas first. What you just need to do is there are a little fiber on the both sides, so I'm just gonna cut the tip off like this, and then just take it off, and then another tip off, and then like this. Beef meat is already thinly sliced and cut up, so I'm not gonna do anything to that. So, for the potato, I'm not gonna peel off the skin, but if you prefer to peel them, then, of course, you can do that. I'm just gonna take off parts like these where it's a little darker or the sprouts may come out. So, this part, it's starting to sprout a little bit. You want to get this out because the potato sprouts are poisonous, so you wanna make sure that you take off all these parts. Then, I'm gonna cut these potatoes in bite-size pieces. Then, I'm gonna cut up the carrots. I'm gonna take a little bit apart where it's maybe damaged or darker, and then take the top off. And also, if you want to peel the carrots, you can. I just prefer not to. And then, what we're gonna do is so-called rangiri. I'm just gonna make a cut like diagonal, and then roll, cut, roll, cut, roll, like this. We do this just to have a little funny kind of neat shape like this. And lastly, we're gonna cut up the onion. Take the top and bottom off. And then, what you want to do is kind of cut up diagonally like this. All the ingredients are cut up and prepared. Let's start cooking. I'm gonna heat the medium-sized pot with high heat. In here, I'm gonna put in about a teaspoon of frying oil. Any frying oil will do. So, once the pan is heated, I'm gonna put in the beef. I'm just gonna give it a little searing effect. And once the meat is a little bit browned, I'm gonna put in all the rest of the ingredients. So, this pot is way too small for this. I'm gonna use a bigger pot. In here, we're gonna put in a little under a cup of water, 200 milliliter of water. To this, we're gonna add in three tablespoon of sugar, three tablespoon of soy sauce, and also three tablespoon of mirin. If you don't have mirin, then instead add another tablespoon of sugar. Then, also three tablespoon of sake. And then, put five gram of dashi powder. If you don't have dashi powder, then you can skip this part because beef itself is going to give umami, but with dashi, you have a little more depth to the flavor. Then, we're gonna wait until this comes to boil. So, you wanna give it a little mix every now and then so that all the parts will get heated evenly. So, this has come to a boil and you see that it's starting to build a little bit of scum. I'm just gonna take the scum out because they give a little bit of tanginess to the flavor. Now, I'm gonna put over this just a regular cooking paper. We call this otoshibuta, which means drop lid. We don't wanna put a lid over it because we want to concentrate the soup, but at the same time, we want to make sure that all the ingredients is covered with this soup. So, what we're gonna do is put it over a regular cooking paper and then this will make sure that everything is covered under the soup. We're gonna turn down the heat to low or simmer and let this cook for about 20 to 30 minutes or so until all the ingredients will be cooked through. While we're at it, I'm gonna boil the snap peas. I'm gonna bring the water to boil, put a little bit of salt, half a teaspoon or so. So, the water's boiling, I'm gonna put in the snap peas and just very lightly cook this for about 20 seconds. So, just that, I think it's good. I'm gonna turn the heat off and then put this on a cold water. Otherwise, it just gets cooked further with its own heat. Yep, this looks good. I think a lot of Western cooking, people cook the vegetable way too much. So, just slightly cooked is better for the taste and also for the nutrients. So, this is finished. So, about 20 minutes has passed. The water has vapored a little bit. Let's see. Yeah, it's cooked through. Let's see if the carrots are also cooked through. Yep, cooked through. Okay, let's put it on a plate. And then I'm gonna turn the heat off. What you actually want to do is you wanna cover this with this otoshibuta, the droplet, and then let it cool off like this because it's actually going to taste better once it gets cooled off because as the ingredients cool off, they soak up all the flavor. So, this is ready, but actually the next day is gonna taste much better. So, leave it at that and let it cool and then on the next day, you can heat it again and that's going to taste better because the ingredients has soaked up all the juice and all the goodness. Put a little snap peas, just give it a little color to it. And this is finished. Let's eat. Okay, let's eat. Itadakimasu! Oh, this looks so delicious. The golden combination of beef, onion, and potatoes. Itadakimasu! Oh, this is totally incredible. So, this sauce is just great and it just brings everything all together in one harmony. Oh, this is just totally great combination. And also this snap peas just kind of adds a little freshness to the flavor. So, everything is just kind of giving in the flavor to each other. So, the sweetness of the onion is just really, really supporting everything and the potatoes kind of soaking up all the goodness from everything else. This is so great. This is also a perfect dish to go with the rice. So, you may have noticed the flavor is pretty much the same as the teriyaki sauce, sugar and the soy sauce. So, this is the base to our cuisine but because the ingredients is different, they taste all different and the savoriness from beef is just also great. So, like I mentioned earlier, you can make this with pork meat and it's also delicious. Or also if you're a vegetarian, you can make it without any meat and then in that case, I would add in kombu and dry shiitake to that so that it'll still have the savoriness to it. Oh, that was so delicious. Gochisosamadeshita. That was totally delicious. So, making nikujaga is really easy. So, like I mentioned, you can make this without sake and mirin and in that case, you don't really need any special ingredients except for soy sauce but soy sauce maybe you have at home. So, I hope you give it a try. So, we usually have this as a side dish but of course, you can make this as a main dish and in that case, you might wanna add in a little more meat. If you like what you saw, please hit that like button or if you have any questions or requests, please feel free to write anything in the comments below. I'm always really, really happy to hear your feedbacks. Then, I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye.