Curry Udon (カレーうどん) Japanese Curry Noodle Soup

Today I'm going to show you how to make curry udon without making Japanese curry first, so stick around! In past episodes, I've shown you how to make chicken udon, how to bring summer festivals into your kitchen with yaki udon, and even how to make your own udon noodles from scratch using just three basic ingredients. Today I want to share my curry udon recipe which uses some kitchen hacks to make a rich and flavorful noodle soup in no time at all. It has a sweet base of caramelized vegetables and a beautifully aromatic soup that tastes like it took hours to make, not the 20-ish minutes it actually takes. Looks delicious, right? Let's take a look at our ingredients. For the chicken, I've got 250 grams of boneless skin-on chicken thighs, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and one tablespoon of vegetable oil. For the curry paste, I've got one very small onion, one small carrot, one large clove of garlic, an equal amount of ginger, an eighth teaspoon of baking soda, and two tablespoons of Japanese curry powder. For the soup, I have two and a half cups of dashi, two tablespoons of mirin, one tablespoon of soy sauce, two teaspoons of chuno sauce, a quarter teaspoon of salt, and one very small onion. Finally, you're going to need two servings of fresh udon noodles. I'll include a link to my homemade udon recipe at the end of this video. We're also going to use some scallions, and a quarter cup of sour cream to finish off our curry udon. Curry udon was a dish created in the 1930s at a Japanese restaurant as a wave of Western restaurants swept through Tokyo. Kare naisu was a staple in these newfangled shops, and the owner of Sanchoan, a soba restaurant near Waseda University, created this clever mashup in response. Growing up, my mom used to make curry udon the day after making a big pot of curry by pouring the leftovers over a bowl of plain udon made with Japanese dashi stock. It's a great way to upcycle leftovers, but what do you do if you don't have a few hours to make a batch of curry? Well, the two parts that take forever when making Japanese curry are caramelizing the aromatics and cooking the meat until it gets tender. Since onions caramelize faster when they're chopped smaller, I've taken this to the extreme and grated them. This allows the water in the onion to evaporate faster, which significantly speeds up the process. While I'm at it, I'm also going to grate the carrots, garlic, and ginger. This is going to create a sweet and flavorful base for our curry in no time. To speed things up even more, I'm stirring in some baking soda. By raising the pH of the vegetables, we're able to speed up the degradation of the sugars. Altogether, these hacks help take the caramelization time down from an hour to just three minutes. My other time-saving technique is to use chicken, which doesn't require long cooking times to be tender. I'm using skin-on boneless chicken thighs today, and cutting them into bite-sized pieces. The skin keeps the chicken from getting tough when we brown it, and the fat that renders out of it is going to give our curry paste a bump in flavor. Okay, let's go ahead and sprinkle the chicken with some salt to season it. Next, let's slice up our onions. These are going to get added to the soup with the chicken to give our curry udon a bit more texture. Finally, I'm going to chop up the green parts of some scallions for garnish, and our prep is done. Before we start putting this together, I want to take a quick moment to thank my supporters on Patreon who helped me to make this video. If you're learning something new from my recipes and want to pitch in, hit the link in the description down below to join the crew. The cooking time for udon varies by type, and we want to finish cooking it in our curry, so subtract three minutes from the boiling time on the package and cook it accordingly. If you're using my homemade udon, it takes 12 to 13 minutes to boil, so we're going to start boiling it before we start working on our soup, and then drain it at about 10 minutes. To make our curry soup, I'm going to add the oil to a large chef's pan over medium-high heat, and then add the chicken, skin side down. Now we just need to let this fry until the chicken is nice and brown on one side. This took me about two minutes. Then you can start removing the chicken from the pan in the order you added it. The chicken should have rendered out a good amount of fat, so we're going to add our vegetable puree to this. Be careful though, because this is going to spatter like crazy at first. Just keep it moving around the pan to burn the liquid off as quickly as possible. If you use the leaner cut of meat, you may need to add some more vegetable oil here. Once the liquid has evaporated, you'll want to continuously stir the vegetable paste to keep it from burning until the paste is nice and thick and reaches a caramel brown. This took me about another two minutes. Next, I'm going to add the curry powder and toast it together with the vegetable paste for about 30 seconds. You want it to get nice and fragrant, but be careful not to burn it or it's going to end up bitter. Now I'm going to add the dashi, mirin, soy sauce, chuno sauce, salt, and sliced onions. I'm also going to be returning the chicken to the pan. Then I'm just going to let this simmer for about five minutes, or until the chicken and onions are cooked through. Okay, our udon should be ready now, so I'm going to go ahead and drain it and rinse it well with cold water. You'll want to get as much of the starch off of the surface of the noodles as possible, so our soup doesn't get too thick. Now let's go ahead and add these into our soup and finish cooking everything together. This gives all of the flavors a chance to get acquainted, and it also helps thicken our soup a bit from the starch coming out of the noodles. When the udon is cooked to your liking, turn down the heat and add a ladleful of hot soup into the sour cream and whisk it together. Keep repeating this until the sour cream mixture is lukewarm. This process is called tempering, and by slowly raising the temperature of the sour cream, it helps prevent curdling. Once the mixture is warm, turn off the heat and stir it into the curry udon. Don't cook the soup anymore at this point, or you risk curdling it. Oh wow, this smells incredible! So let's get it plated up! Let's get our udon into a bowl, then I'm going to top it off with a bunch of chicken and onions. Now I'm going to ladle some of that beautiful curry onto there. Let's finish it off with some chopped scallions, and our kare udon is done! This kare udon is a delicious way to get your curry fix without spending the entire afternoon in the kitchen. So I hope you'll give this a try! If you enjoyed this video and want to see more like it, let me know by giving this a big thumbs up, and by sharing it with all your friends that love a good noodle soup. Well, I'm gonna go get my slurp on, but I'll catch you in the next one!