Kenji's Cooking Show | Gyudon (Japanese Beef and Rice Bowls) with Simmered Kabocha Squash

everyone its Kenji I'm gonna make some you don't and you don't is a Japanese dish of simmered beef thinly sliced simmered beef I'm so similar to the Oh y'all don't I did before so it's also also a rifle sorry I'm replacing hinges which is why all this stuff is here also a rice ball also made by simmering onions simmering and simmering meat in this case it's onions and beef in a broth made with um dashi so you can make your own dashi but I'm just gonna use the use the powdered stuff oh pretty soon we're gonna replace this whole thing with with vertical pull out drawers I give this home dashi so powdered stuff what else am I going to need later I'll take some togarashi and then I need some socket and some I have some soy sauce and some sugar so sucky soy sauce dashi sugar again that classic flavor Japanese flavor combination combination if I had some mirin which is the sweet Japanese rice wine I would also use that but in this case I don't so I'm just gonna use in dashi sake soy sauce and sugar very simple all right so now for our beef you know what else I'm gonna do actually I'm gonna also I got this pumpkin so I'm also gonna cook this pumpkin and I'm gonna simmer it in wait for it I'm gonna simmer it in soy sauce dashi sake and sugar this is couple Ches squash my favorite kind of pumpkin to cook because you don't have to take the skin off you can just cook the skin right with it well you got to scoop out the seeds and if you really feel like it you can use those seeds too they toast up just like regular pumpkin seeds do I do not feel like it today we're gonna cut into relatively thin slices so that it cooks fast and do a whole meal here today so cute on kyocho squash and then we'll do something cucumber I got some cucumber over there and we'll make some kind of dressing for it I'm not sure yet but figures hang out alright so these are gonna go in here if I had some kind of green that you can also do it like so like spinach you can simmer in soy sauce dashi sake sugar and it comes out delicious it comes out especially the ships if you do it with the pumpkin so this is powdered pop powder dashi the Brandes one dashi it's great stuff everybody every Japanese household I know uses it by the way over the course of this video I am definitely going to be putting spoons into that sink and then using them again so I'm doing it specifically because it bothers some people and I know how clean my sink is sake you can add some water to make that bring that broth up you know I'll probably do is I will simmer this and then I'll use the exact same broth to simmer my beef that way I don't have to dirty two pans and you know the brothel get a little bit of flavor from the pumpkin but I don't really mind that going with my beef so we're all good all right oh so far our cucumber let's do let's do like mustard Dijon mustard and me so you try mustard and Mesa and olive oil I think it'll all be good together what do you think this is our psyche miso soup white miso this is the stuff you would like marinate cod in black cod I look at that one this one has a new head - door closes softly all right just a little bit of miso a little more I know my daughter's why he's gonna eat this with a spoon so come on today there you go my mini whisk I like these little whisks um oh not much left in there I like this little whisk because you can get stuff out of jars I guess but not when there's nothing left in the jar that's nice too big what I need is a perfect spoon my daughter's yogurt spoon get the stuff out of the edges we did this stuff off the bottom huh I should start using these more often it's like a mini spatula I love specialist all kinds of spatulas fish spatulas spoon spatulas these are actually so my favorite spatulas so these guys from the crew say they're like nylon but they have a silicone tip so you can use them to scrape things but they also stir things well um all right so that water's at a simmer that's coming down I don't know where you can get those you can get them online or you can definitely you got a neighborhood a specialist city specialist city you can get a bed specialist city that's gonna want a splash of soy sauce also and it's probably gonna want a little touch of sugar hmm I think we need some huh not a got a nectar huggy whatever this I don't know why we have this teeny honey sorry my fingers are they look dirty but I swear that's just because I've been doing a lot of gardening and they kind of got stained by the dirt we're redoing I've been a Heather in shelter-in-place I've been digging up the whole front yard here's the first time I'm gonna raise a spoon from the sink alright honey so we got a little bit of a sweet savory mustardy thing going on here I think that'll be delicious with this cucumbers hmm yeah that's gonna be good I'm gonna taste the balance of flavor I'm there so when you taste things like this you gotta remember it is going to reduce so when things reduce sweetness in saltiness tend to get more concentrated acid does two to a degree but you don't notice it as much so like reduced vinegar doesn't taste much much more acidic than regular vinegar but salt and sugar you definitely noticed so you want to make sure there's not too overbearing at this point which they're not they're good all right so this and we're gonna do our cucumbers in here no what I can do let's get a spoon [Music] my daughter made this bracelet for me all right so the other the only other things we need for that beef well we got the sliced beef so I bought this at the Japanese market if you can't so this is a sliced chuck chuck roll if it doesn't have to be chuck roller can honestly be any thinly sliced beef so you'd want to go to a Japanese market and look for stuff that's labeled specifically for either shabu shabu or sukiyaki which is the thinly sliced tender beef if you can't you know what you can do is you can either well if you have a good butcher you can ask them to slice it for you I'm at the butcher department or what you can do is you can buy cheese take me like even like frozen cheese take me will work fine for this dish so like you know like the steak comes that you get um yeah they work they work just fine for this you know obviously not the highest quality meat and those things so you know if that concerns you which it does concern me to a degree like that's why that's why I go to the Japanese market to get this instead of buying the stinkums oh I want to show you a little trick so one thing I I noticed when I'm slicing especially cucumbers is if I slice straight up and down like this what sometimes happens and it's not gonna happen now because I'm video but what sometimes happens is that the AIDA cucumber rides up the knife and then falls off and sometimes it falls onto this side and then I end up axe on the cutting it and that happens frequently when you slice like that so when I slice I do it at a very slight angle so I don't know if you can see this so I'll I'll show you what the first slice so it was vertical before now I did at a very slight angle to this so this is vertical that is about the angle that I go up maybe a 10 degree angle and by doing that as they right up the knife they fall down for sure onto the right side and sometimes they still roll back over you know but the odds that you're going to like accidentally cut pieces in half because they're in the way of your knife are much lower so that's a little trick that I do [Music] in case you're wondering that is the the theme from the end of Super Mario World after you beat the game I don't know why it's stuck in my head but it is just a little bill got a sheen here this is a Japanese seven spice almost like videos when you get taken down for you making Super Mario Brothers noises with my whistling cucumber and miso dressing and how's our pumpkin doing so pumpkin is one of those vegetables you don't want it to be the pumpkin potato you don't want them to be al dente at least I don't I don't like having to shoot with rare exceptions sometimes potatoes get al dente like there's certain Chinese recipes where potatoes sort of meant to be that day and it's good that way but in general I don't like my potatoes all dente I like them like I'm soft the same as I like my pumpkin let's get I know that one has spoons of soap in it now okay I won't I won't show you that bad I'm not gonna eat soap just to just to troll you guys and gals I'm sorry I do need to get out of the habit of saying guys when I mean people of both sexes although I looked at my analytics and like chances are if you're watching this you are a guy like there's like a 93 percent chance or something like that at least a 93 percent chance that if you're if you're watching it via a YouTube account and not just non what if you're logged into a YouTube account and you're watching this you are most likely a guy that cannot deny alright and I'll pour a little bit of the broth over save just enough for you for the beef and onions that's done onions in those are those onions I had leftover from the other day when I made a Spanish tortilla which I will link to here that is assuming the videos up sometimes I put these up out of order so I don't know if that video will be up yet but I'm guessing it will be because I already accidentally put another video up before it the Spanish tortilla video I think we're supposed to go up before the chilaquiles did but I put the two the scheme's chilaquiles at first I'm not gonna apologize for it that could use a touch more sake I think one thing about wine alcohol when you're cooking with it so a lot of people ask me if the wine all burns off and the answer is no it's very difficult to get all of the wine in a in a wine alcohol in an alcohol and water mixture to burn off because so even though the boiling point of alcohol is lower than the boiling point of water when you combine the two at a suit at a certain ratio actually the lower the boiling point of the combination of them is actually lower than eat the boiling point of either one of them alone and alcohol and water form what's called an azeotropic mixture an azeotrope is when so the the gas that the gas that's coming off the vapors that are coming off are not just one or the other it's a mixture of the two and so that that is why actually it's impossible to distill alcohol I think past like 95% or so without adding without adding something like benzene or something something that's going to break that azeotrope so when waters when when your alcohol is boiling off of here there's always going to be a little bit of alcohol left in the pan until the cocaine is completely dry which point both the water and the alcohol are going to are going to burn off but as long as you're as long as you're is it still wet there's still going to be alcohol in there that said the amount of alcohol changes depending on how you cook it so if you cook it with an open lid it will be tend to be burn off faster and if you cook it with a closed lid if you bring it to a boil it cooks off faster than if you just simmer it and uh let's see oh yeah so all that said in most dishes the amount of alcohol that's left at the end the percentage that's left is very very low so you know unless you are you know you can even make your own decisions as to why you want to avoid the alcohol but if you're worried about like your kids getting drunk off of cooking with wine or cooking with anything even cooking with hard liquor you don't really have to worry about that if you avoid alcohol for other reasons then that's up to you the amount of alcohol that you're gonna get like after reducing a sauce on the stove top for a little while is it's less alcohol than you would get in like then the yeast would formed like a loaf of bread you know so you don't really have to worry about getting your kids drunk or giving your kids liver damage or any of those things as for my yeah my board setup people sometimes ask me so this board I got it from my old chef Barbara Lynch I talked about it in some video I can't remember which one but I got it from her when Boston when Boston stopped allowing wooden boards to be used in restaurants I was in like 2002 I think like that 2002 or 2003 so I've had this for a long time this one's from fou 52 this one is from early wood it's gorgeous it also goes I have a bunch of early wood products that one you can get online I think this one I got it like Target these two I got at Target those are like my the ones that these are the ones that I just made okay these are the ones I stick on top of my other board when I'm handling meat and stuff they're things that I don't want to mess up my main board for like this board I would basically only put things that I'm gonna serve that are ready to eat or that I would be able to serve raw on it alright so the onions are soft rice is almost cooked now in goes the meat you do want to kind of let it break up a little bit so you don't need to get these perfect slices that this is this is meant for sukiyaki and they tend to give you these really nice slices and I just break them up it you're lucky you can my Japanese market at least sometimes you'll find like they'll sell trays of like the the ends like the bits that don't look beautiful and those are perfect for this dish for use on because they're cheaper because it makes no difference whether they look good or not simmer down you want it to be kind of wet but not soupy because you don't want the rice to get like completely saturated you want the rice you want to be able to at the very least you know pick up the rice bowl and bring it to your mouth and shovel it in you know if not being able to pick it up individually with chopsticks I'm having so much trouble with these islands because my chopsticks are warped come on come on yes you are welcome to make fun of my extra-long chopstick skills all right that's about done you want the beef just to cook through let's taste it for let's taste it for seasoning delicious mmm good stuff all right I think I get a whole lot already I did this bowl is from Heath ceramics Ron based out of San Francisco make beautiful stuff that is also extremely expensive but people love giving it as gifts and people seem to enjoy giving us bowls as gifts and we love getting bowls especially when they're beautiful ones from Heath so I'll work it out now this all just goes right on top if I had some scallions I would probably put them on there too good I don't if you had uh oh you know what I do have and what I have I have some Nita some Japanese Japanese like big chives I don't know I don't know what your translate them is Japanese chives Anita anyhow I'll show you what I got then you show that this is pickled ginger make it look too much hmm take the rest of this relator just matter this I like it I know Alysia likes it I know Audrey likes it too I also took a [ __ ] here it is time for dinner let's try a little bite of each of these yes yes good I prove hmm I actually really like that sauce I'd write that one down might do it again no no finish off with some shaved shaved bonito mm-hmm also approve of that one let's take this one over to the window to do it shall we and that's what I guess that's what this bit of video is gonna be titled let's get a smaller piece hmm okay shoplifts it go oh yes someone you haven't you have some - no she'll back up here you go good boy all right it's time for dinner I heard you really see at dinner time

Channel: J. Kenji López-Alt

Views: 381,287

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Id: tW_r3AkPBjA

Length: 23min 35sec (1415 seconds)

Published: Fri May 08 2020