“Omurice combines three of my all-time favourite comfort foods into one wonderful dish: eggs, fried rice and ketchup. It’s so simple yet so satisfying, a perfect package of protein, fat and carbs, so cheap and easy to make, and yet so beautiful I’m actually getting a bit teary-eyed just thinking about it,” says chef and cookbook author, Tim Anderson.
“Omurice is a dish that says, ‘I want you to feel full and content, I want you to get plenty of calories so you grow big and strong, and I want to put a smile on your face, because I love you.’ There are restaurants in Tokyo (and probably home cooks) who have applied cheffy techniques to refine omurice, cooking the omelette just so and serving it with demi-glace and that sort of thing.
“But really, omurice doesn’t need careful cooking or fine-dining embellishments to make it delicious. In fact, to me that’s really the whole point of omurice. Just about anybody can make it, and it will always be delicious even at its most basic.”
Omurice
Equipment
- 2 frying pans
Ingredients
- 30 g butter
- 1 banana shallot or small onion, diced
- 60 g shiitake mushrooms destemmed and diced
- 1 chicken thigh boneless and skinless, cut into 1cm cubes (optional)
- 300 g cooked rice (from 150g uncooked; rice that has been chilled in the fridge works best)
- ketchup to taste, plus extra to serve
- soy sauce to taste
- salt to taste
- pepper to taste
- 3 eggs beaten with 1 tbsp double cream (optional)
Method
- Melt half of the butter in a frying pan over a medium heat, then sauté the shallot or onion until translucent. Add the shiitake and the chicken (if using) and sauté until the mushrooms soften and the chicken is cooked through.
- Add the rice, breaking up any clumps, and stir in the ketchup, soy sauce, salt and pepper.
- Meanwhile, melt the remaining butter in a non-stick frying pan over a medium-high heat, then tip in the beaten eggs and season with a little salt.
- Cook the egg until set on the bottom but still runny on top, then gently fold the eggs over themselves so the runny bit is now in the middle. Scoop the fried rice into a mound on a plate, then tip the omelette onto the top of the rice. Serve with more ketchup, if you like.
Nutrition
Tokyo Stories: A Japanese Cookbook by Tim Anderson, photography by Nassima Rothacker, is published by Hardie Grant.
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