onsen tamago

I don’t know when the obsession started, but I began dreaming about hot spring eggs (onsen tamago) a week or so ago. I blame Amy and all her wonderfully documented meals in Japan. Even more so when I discovered that it was so simple to make yourself at home. Short of a hot spring in your backyard, an onsen tamago is only ever a few short steps away (as long as you’re making rice in a rice cooker in the first place, that is).

Backtracking a bit – some of you might be wondering “What the heck is onsen tamago anyway?” The short answer is that it’s a gorgeous egg dish that’s commonly served as a breakfast item at hot springs hotels in Japan. The reason being that the temperatures of the hot springs (ie below boiling point) are perfect for poaching these eggs so lightly that they just become ethreally silky and just slide lusciously down your throat. It also works so that the yolks are set on the outside, but the whites are only loosely set and creamy. Essentially, the eggs are ‘poached’ inside the shells; when they’re ready, you crack it open into a bowl filled with a mixture of dashi, mirin and soy sauce, sprinkle over some spring onions, and slurp it all down. It’s fascinating that such a simple dish can be so satisfying (though those of you who feel squeamish at the thought of semi-raw eggs should turn away, now!).

So how do you make it? First thing would be to get the ‘broth’ ready for your egg. All I did was use a teaspoon of dashi powder dissolved in about 4 tablespoons of water, a teaspoon of mirin and a teaspoon of soy sauce. Mix together and leave to chill in the fridge until needed.

Clearly, it’s important to make sure you get the freshest eggs you can, and make sure they’re at room temperature (run under warm water if you take them straight out of the fridge and want to use immediately). Then, all you need is a rice cooker that’s just finished cooking some rice, and some kitchen paper. Because I was steaming rice for dinner anyway, this all worked out fine.

Once the rice has finished cooking, the rice cooker will automatically switch to the handy ‘keep warm’ function – which coincidentally maintains the perfect temperature for making onsen tamago. All you need to do then is wrap the egg in a layer of kitchen paper (this is just to make sure the eggs aren’t heated directly) and set it gently on top of the cooked rice. Cover, and leave to ‘cook’ for one hour. When time’s up, gently crack your egg open and let it slide into the dashi/soy sauce/mirin mixture you’ve made in advance. Sprinkle over some chopped spring onions, and, if you’re feeling particularly decadent, a few bonito flakes. Slurp it all down in one go a la prairie oysters, or eat the egg white and yolk separately in spoonfuls. The egg whites take on a super silken tofu-like texture, which is extremely yummy and even better when eaten with the broth.

Too bad I didn’t get to experience the entire egg yolk, considering I dropped it after taking the first photo on the left! I managed to salvage half. The things I do for this blog…

The much harder way to make onsen tamago is to keep a pot of warm water going at the constant temperature of 65C for 20-30 minutes while you cook the eggs, but that requires way too much patience and a thermometer (both of which I do not have). Another way, I’ve heard, was to fill a thermos full of hot water and keep the egg in it overnight, so you can have it the next morning! Not so sure about that one though, it seems like leaving a semi-warm egg overnight and then eating it seems like you’re just asking for food poisoning.

i choo choo choose tuna

There are only two things in life that can get me up early in the morning, and that is food, or obligation. The people who know me well probably think that rising in the early morn to the crow of a cockerel is far beyond my capability, but on at least one occasion, I proved them wrong. One of the highlights of my trip to Tokyo in the winter of 2006 was the trip to Tsukiji market, which meant getting up at 4am (though, in reality, having slept at 2:30am we ended up dragging our unhappy, unconscious bodies out of our snug, warm hotel beds at 5:00). It wasn’t all bad though. There’s something very satisfying about getting up at such an ungodly hour in pursuit of food… it gives you bragging rights and a smug look on your face as you recount the story to your friends (or, they could just look at you with a raised eyebrow and think you’re mad).

We missed the tuna auction, but rest assured we had loads of fun dodging death at every corner (slippery surfaces and people shouting at you to get out of the way as their fast-moving karts loom towards you), photographing all the strange and wonderful seafood, and watching young apprentices being taught how to handle a sashimi knife. It was also the first time I actually realised how massive a whole tuna was. At the end of it all, we congratulated ourselves (especially me) for making the effort and sacrificing a few zees to come to this amazing place. Because seriously, who needs sleep when you get to have this for breakfast?

It doesn’t look like the greatest piece of tuna in the world, but I remember how pleased we were as we chowed down on our bounty, as a kindly obaa-san watched us with a bemused look on her face. This is what travelling is all about – screw sleep!

So if you haven’t guessed it by now, I’m a bit of a tuna enthusiast. A bad time to be one, considering the over-fishing of bluefin tuna, but in the end my gut won out – I had to visit Doraya, a Japanese restaurant specialising in just that (er, tuna, not my gut). It sounded like a dream come true. Also, it was recommended not only by my own mother (queen of good recommendations), but my (Japanese) boyfriend who usually snubs most Japanese restaurants in Hong Kong. So after a happy reunion with friends, we trooped over to the restaurant just a bit before 7pm.

We went to the branch in Causeway Bay (there’s also one in Tsim Sha Tsui), which is a seriously modest restaurant on Lockhart Road where not many people really go. Doraya, thus, is pretty much a hidden gem. It looks like any other Japanese joint you get around this town, but there are no flashy signs or clean-cut modern menus. It looks ordinary. Inside, there isn’t a lot of space either, it probably seats around 30 people at the most, with a tiny kitchen in the back. Their menu is a tattered, laminated affair, a few pages listing various incarnations of tuna dishes – there’s fatty tuna, seared tuna, tuna steak, minced toro and a smattering of other dishes (I think I remember seeing swordfish and mackerel). Prices for the dinner sets range from around $78HKD to around $200 for the most expensive one – It’s been a week since that dinner and I don’t have a menu, so my memory is a bit hazy.

I ordered the ‘double tuna’ set, which comes with luscious pieces of otoro as well as akami maguro. All sets come with a small dish of simmered vegetables, egg rolls, pickles and a bowl of miso soup.

The tuna was simply gorgeous. The otoro was, as expected, meltingly tender but without an overpowering fishiness or oiliness – perfection. The akami was the best I’d had for a long time – also melt-in-your-mouth, though obviously not to the extent that the otoro was! Both were rich with what I can only stupidly describe as ‘tuna-y’ – and unlike much of the tuna sold in Hong Kong (especially buffets, gah!), it didn’t taste bloody and metallic. It was fresh and just wonderful. Period. You’d think I could stop there, but no – there was quite a lot of rice and I was worried about being sick of eating all of it. But, get this: it was bloody amazing. Turns out Doraya uses top-quality koshihikari rice, from Niigata Prefecture, thought to be the best rice in Japan. It’s delicious simply eaten on it’s own, and has a tender, but slightly al dente texture and a subtle sweet flavour. I could have easily polished off a plain bowl of that rice. The whole set cost me $128HKD (£8.40!), which is tuppence considering the amount of tuna I got in there, along with the added bonus of the Niigata rice.

So, I wish I had something bad to say so this doesn’t sound like a gushing advertisement for Doraya. If only I could say that the service was rubbish, and that the waitresses wanted us out as soon as possible so they could cram more hungry hordes into the small restaurant and make a fatter profit. But no. Even after they’d cleared away our plates, they noticed our cups were half-empty and offered us some more tea – a small gesture, but an enormous one considering (as we later found out) the queue that was beginning to form outside of the restaurant. We were thankful that we weren’t pressurised to leave the place as soon as possible, and appropriately paid for our bill after we’d finished our tea.

It’s awfully rare to be completely happy with a restaurant here – sometimes it’s like an unbalanced see-saw; good food, bad service, or vice versa. At Doraya, everything was faultless. And the kicker? They open until 2am. Now you know where to get your midnight otoro fixes.

Doraya (定食のどらや)
G/F, 451 Lockhart Rd, Causeway Bay, Hong Kong
Tel: 2834 8851

Basement, Grand Right Centre, 10 Cameron Rd, Tsim Sha Tsui, Kowloon
Tel: 2366 8072

gobbling gyoza

Fed up of having to buy expensive frozen dumplings from the few Asian supermarkets that stock them, Yuki and I decided to make our own. To save time, we bought a few packets of ready-made gyoza wrappers from Centrepoint Supermarket (24 wrappers in a pack, at £1.99 each), fresh chives (£1.99), and a pack of minced pork (£1.18). Soy sauce, sesame oil, salt and white pepper were already available at home, so our raw ingredients came to a total of £7.15, a little amount for the mountain of gyoza we ended up with!

The filling is super easy to prepare, as you’ll simply need to mix in a generous amount of soy sauce, about two tablespoons of sesame oil (for an average 400g pack of minced pork), a pinch of salt, and a generous sprinkling of white pepper. Usually we’d add chopped cabbage as well, but we kept it simple and only added chopped Chinese chives. Crack in an egg to bind, and mix well (don’t be afraid to use your hands!).

Making the gyoza couldn’t be easier, either (especially if you’re not too fussed about making pretty pleats, as we weren’t) – take a piece of wrapper and place a heaped teaspoon of the pork mixture in the centre. Wet half of the wrapper’s edge, and fold in half to bring together. Press together to seal, then pinch in the edges to create ‘zig zag’ folds. Alternatively, you can get a handy gyoza press (from Japan Centre). Place on a flour-dusted plate while you make the rest!

We cooked them two ways (Yuki likes them boiled in soup, I like them pan-fried; but then sometimes it’s hard to decide between the two methods), and both were delicious. The gyoza wrappers we got were great, and held up well during cooking and had a nice, chewy bite to them, as it should! The ’soup’ was simple – just soy sauce, white pepper and a bit of sesame oil with the water used to boil the dumplings. We cooked some choi sum (Chinese flowering cabbage) to go with it, too (using the same liquid for the soup as to not lose out on the vitamins!).

Pan-frying worked really well, too, though they didn’t look very pretty due to the flour burning slightly in the pan and ’staining’ most of the dumplings during the steaming process. I’d recommend tapping off all the flour you can (though Yuki was a bit overzealous with the flouring in the first place… :P). The process is easy – heat a bit of oil in the pan, and add the dumplings when hot (it helps to flatten the bottoms a bit, so they don’t topple over). Fry until the bottoms are golden-brown, then pour water into the pan to come up halfway over the dumplings. Cover with a lid and allow to steam until most of the water has evaporated. Take off the lid and let the rest of the liquid evaporate. Serve with a soy sauce and vinegar dipping sauce.

All in all, a great dinner was had… though I think I’ll have to wait a while before I eat another dumpling!

hazuki

I’ve been noticing a pattern here. Every time I choose to go out for dinner, I find myself gravitating towards asian and oriental food. Korean, Thai and Japanese in one week – luckily for me the quality of such cuisines in London are far from terrible. Unfortunately though, a large part of my criterion for eating out is whether or not it’s affordable (meaning, £20 or under these days – it’s lucky I rarely ever have alcohol with my dinner), which can make it sometimes a bit tricky when dining out in London.

So, I was pleasantly surprised by Hazuki – even with its quality central location in Charing Cross’ Chandos Place (and next to the buzzing Harp pub where a friend of mine works), the printed prices didn’t make me want to commit harikiri upon contact with my retinas.

hong kong food expo 2007

Or rather, the annual junk food parade and venue of agonisingly slow taste testing. It took us nearly three hours to navigate the sea of people surging throughout the convention hall, in all I think I only managed to sample about 10 things. Somehow, I’m just not convinced that hanging around a stall that is already five-deep with people to sample instant noodles passed out in a thimble like vessel (and eaten with two toothpicks) is worth it. I waited for the dumplings instead (served WHOLE! Not cut up into mice-like portions! In a watercooler paper cone!), salivating each time the girl manning the boiling pot lifted the lid away, allowing my nostrils to be filled with the steamy aroma of meaty stock. That was worth it. Maybe.