Sukiyaki Party!

Ever since my dad bought a small electric hot plate in his recent efforts to raise shiitake mushrooms, I've been itching to use it to make Japanese sukiyaki for my family at our usual Sunday night dinner gathering. Tonight was the night! I lived in Japan for two years studying Japanese and then teaching English at a high school on a small island south of Kobe. One of my favorite Japanese dinners was nabe, a family-style meal where meat, vegetables, tofu and mushrooms are cooked in a flavorful broth right at the table. Sukiyaki is a version of nabe that calls for extra-thin cut pieces of beef, a sweet-savory soy sauce broth and a small bowl with a beaten raw egg for dipping. I still fondly recall cold nights with one of my best friends, Eriko, and the rest of her family, eating nabe at their kitchen table up in the mountains of rural Japan. It's a dish that invokes togetherness and warmth and it's deceptively easy to make.


The fun of making nabe is that it is participatory. Everyone adds more ingredients as they are used up. I prepared a nice spread so that we could easily put more things in the broth while we were eating dinner. I loosely followed this recipe, so I opted for grass-fed flank steak cut extra thin, yakidofu (fried tofu), fresh firm tofu, green onions, napa cabbage, shiitake and enoki mushrooms, and shirataki noodles (described here as having a 'gelatinous' texture...I love gummy, slightly chewy things so I particularly enjoy these). I also put in a bit of kimchi, since I had found a jar of authentic korean-style kimchi. Kimchi is not traditionally part of sukiyaki recipes but it is sometimes included in other nabes and in my opinion nothing is better than that sour, spicy, living flavor of lacto-fermentation.

I heated the nabe pot right on the electric hot plate, then sauted some of the beef in a little oil to brown it and infuse the broth with that delicious flavor. I added the broth right after that first round of beef had cooked through. Here is the recipe for the broth:

1/3 cup soy sauce
3 tbsp sake
4 tbsp sugar
3/4 cup water

I doubled this recipe to make enough. Once the broth was simmering, we added the other ingredients and allowed them to cook. Then we prepared the most important part of the sukiyaki meal: the eggs. Each person cracks one egg in a small bowl and beats it with chopsticks, creating a yummy yellow dipping sauce for the pieces of the soup. Once everything was cooked through, we grabbed tofu, veggies and meat out of the hot pot with chopsticks and dipped them in the egg before slurping it up and enjoying that sweet-savory flavor. It may sound gross to coat your food in raw eggs, but I promise you, it is the best part of this dish. I recommend using farm-fresh organic eggs for this, so you will not have to worry about salmonella. As the ingredients were used up, everyone contributed to efforts to add more to the pot, and we all thoroughly enjoyed this delicious Japanese dinner.

My return to Asian cooking has been, at best, incredibly slow. After living in Japan and desperately missing cheese, bread, good wine and the density of American and European cooking, I needed a long break from the light, simple quality of Asian meals. Now I'm slowly re-learning what I once knew about Asian flavors. I'm looking forward to incorporating my best memories of Japan into the cooking I do this season, and this sukiyaki meal was a wonderful start. I encourage you to try it too -- the time for warm dishes is winding down and we're looking at the last few weeks of soups and other hearty recipes before asparagus season begins!