How to cook YAKISOBA (Japanese fried noodles) 〜焼きそば〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taiju's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make yakisoba. Yaki means to stir-fry or grill and soba means noodles. So yakisoba is a Japanese style stir-fried noodles. I think in Japan yakisoba is kind of considered as street food but I like to make it often for lunch. I kind of have a nostalgic feeling to it because when I was in elementary school we still had school till midday and so whenever I come home from school hungry and then I stem all this I was very happy. So whenever I make this at home I feel that I'm a child again. For this you usually need a special noodle but today I'm going to show you how to make alternative version with spaghetti. Then let's get started. Here are the ingredients for yakisoba. I have here pork belly. It doesn't have to be belly. It could be other part of pork or it can also be other meat or if you are a vegetarian then you can make yakisoba without meat and then I have carrots, scallion, onion and cabbage. Somehow German cabbage there's a this kind of pointy cabbage. It's called spitzkohl and then for the noodle I use capellini which is angel hair pasta and baking soda. Somehow if you cook pasta with baking soda it kind of imitate the ramen noodle so we're going to do that. If you have ramen noodle or yakisoba noodle then great use that but I show in my video the alternative of Japanese food and then of course you need okonomiyaki sauce. If you don't have okonomiyaki sauce then I have another video on how to make alternative of that so please look up my video on okonomiyaki. So let's cut up the vegetables. So I have this onion one whole because it's small but if you have a big onion then you probably just need half of it. Peel this off. I put this in a bowl. I'm not going to use the whole carrots just probably that much is enough. Then I'm just gonna make thin slices like this. So what I want to have is just kind of like the same size as the onion like this. That's probably good enough. I'm gonna let that and the rest I'm just gonna cut this in half. So I'm gonna put this together because they both takes a little time to cook and then the scallion bottom top off. I'm just gonna cut this in diagonal because I think they look kind of neat like that. So for the scallion it doesn't take that long to cook. I'm gonna put this knot together with the onion and carrots and then the cabbage. Peel it off. Depending on how big the cabbage is or what part of cabbage you have you might need just two or three leaves. This is small cabbage so I'm just gonna use I think now four leaves. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take the middle part because that's going to take longer time to cook and then this I'm going to slice it like so. So I'm going to put this stem of cabbage with the onion and the carrot because they take a little longer time to cook and this leaf part of cabbage I'm going to just kind of cut into like the same same kind of strip as the rest of the ingredients. I'm going to put these with the scallion because they'll take about the same time to cook and then lastly I'm going to cut up the pork. I'm going to take off the skin and I cut these in bite-sized pieces. So that's all the ingredients. So let's start cooking. I'm going to heat the frying pan too high and I'm going to heat the water to boil the spaghetti and also that's fine and I'm going to put a little oil in the frying pan. So the frying pan is heated. I'm going to put the onion and the carrots. So the vegetables are midway cooked. I'm going to put in the meat. So the water is boiling. I'm going to put in the baking soda and then I'm going to put in the pasta. So this says cook three minutes so I'm gonna set the timer to three minutes and then at this time meat and the onion and carrots look pretty good. Got cooked. So I'm gonna put in the leaf part of the cabbage and scallion. So this looks a lot but the cabbage is gonna shrink when they get cooked. I'm gonna turn the pasta heat to low and I'm gonna put in here a little bit of water. What this does is it kind of steams the vegetable so it gets cooked faster and evenly without burning. So the noodle has been cooked. I'm gonna have a little taste. Good. It's al dente. I'm gonna drain the water and put this with the vegetable and then I'm going to season it with okonomi sauce. So this is finished. So I'm gonna turn off the heat and put this on a plate. So it's ready to eat. Okay let's eat. Itadakimasu! Okay let's eat. Looks great. Oh so delicious. This okonomi sauce matches so great with the sweetness of the onion and the scallion and with the rest of the vegetable. And of course the meat gives a little punch to it. So you may be wondering why I have rice next to yakisoba. I think I said in the video of okonomiyaki but in the west part of Japan we eat yakisoba or okonomiyaki or takoyaki with rice. But I think some people who live in the east side of Japan may find it strange. But in my region where I come from, Nagoya, I think it's kind of mixed. I think some people eat yakisoba with rice. I at home we eat like this but of course you don't have to. Yakisoba is good enough on its own. So I hope you're not bothered that I'm making slurping sound or that I'm picking up the plate. In Japanese manner you're allowed to slurp. Sometimes you're encouraged to slurp and also you are supposed to pick up your plate like this so that nothing drops down here like this. Oh this is really great and like I said it reminds me of my childhood. Really delicious. Whoever came up with this okonomiyaki sauce is a total genius. So I hope the video was informative for you. I hope it made you hungry and please try it at home yourself. It's really not that difficult and it's actually pretty well balanced with vegetable protein and carbohydrate. If you have any comments or any requests please write in your comments and if you like what you saw please subscribe and I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye!