Korea and Japan · Volume 52, The Koikuchi Line, the Kombu Coast and the Kaiseki Counter

Sukiyaki

Name: Sukiyaki
Total time: 30 min
Yield: Serves 4
Cuisine: Honshu and the Kansai-Kanto Spine
Ingredients: 500 g well marbled beef, sliced very thin; 50 g beef fat, or a knob of butter; 80 g sugar; 120 ml koikuchi soy sauce; 60 ml sake; 1/4 head Chinese cabbage, 8 shiitake caps, 2 spring onions, 200 g tofu, 200 g shirataki noodles Chinese cabbage, shiitake, spring onion, tofu, shirataki noodles; 1 per serving raw egg, for dipping

Kansai and Kanto

Sukiyaki, thin-sliced beef and vegetables in a shallow cast iron pan with a glossy soy and sugar glaze: a shallow, dark cast iron pan seen from a forty five degree angle, a few slices of well marbled raw beef glazed dark and glossy at one side of the pan.

An illustration of the dish, not a photograph of it cooked.

Time: 30 minutes

Researched: No outside sources linked
Reviewed: Not yet reviewed from inside the tradition
Cooked: Not yet cooked and reported

Sukiyaki is credited with a Kansai, mid Edo period origin, "suki" naming a repurposed farm implement blade used as an improvised grill plate; the Kanto version instead descends from gyunabe, a specifically Meiji era beef hot pot devised to make raw beef's unfamiliar smell palatable to a population that had not eaten it for over a millennium. The two are not one dish with a regional accent. Kansai sears beef directly in rendered beef fat, then seasons it in the pan with sugar and soy sauce added in sequence; Kanto prepares a premixed warishita sauce, dashi, soy, mirin, sake and sugar, and simmers everything in it from the start.

by Kansai and Kanto

The Meiji Restoration, 1868, opened Japan's kitchens to beef for the first time in over a millennium, and Kanto and Kansai answered the new ingredient in two genuinely different ways, which is why sukiyaki exists in two structurally different forms today rather than one. Sukiyaki itself is credited with a Kansai, mid Edo period origin, "suki" naming a farm implement blade repurposed as an improvised grill plate, the older lineage of the two. The Kanto version descends instead from gyunabe, a specifically Meiji era beef hot pot devised because raw beef's smell was considered strong and off putting to palates unused to it, simmered with green onion and miso or soy to make it palatable, a genuinely newer, beef specific adaptation of older nabe technique built around a premixed warishita sauce rather than direct pan searing. Sukiyaki is not, in other words, one old dish with two regional accents. It is one older Kansai grilling technique and one newer Kanto simmering technique that both happen to share a name and an occasion.

Read the history

As tradition built it

The Kansai method, since it is the older lineage

Serves 4. About 30 minutes.

Ingredients

500 g well marbled beef, sliced very thin
50 g beef fat, or a knob of butter
80 g sugar
120 ml koikuchi soy sauce
60 ml sake
1/4 head Chinese cabbage, 8 shiitake caps, 2 spring onions, 200 g tofu, 200 g shirataki noodles Chinese cabbage, shiitake, spring onion, tofu, shirataki noodles
1 per serving raw egg, for dipping

Method

Render the beef fat in a heavy, flat pan over high heat.
Sear a few slices of beef directly in the fat, just until coloured.
Sprinkle sugar directly over the meat, then add soy sauce and sake, letting the mixture bubble and glaze the meat.
Push the meat aside, add the cabbage, shiitake, spring onion, tofu and shirataki noodles to the same pan, and let them cook in the resulting juices, adding a little more sugar, soy and sake as the pan runs dry.
Serve each piece dipped in raw beaten egg, the egg's own cooling, coating effect softening the pan's direct heat.

What a modern chef changes

Two regional methods run as a deliberate side by side course, not a compromise between them

Rung 1 and the chapter's own regional logic, not a numbered rung

Method

Cook a small Kanto style pot alongside the Kansai pan, a premixed warishita built to the same soy, mirin, sake and sugar logic as rung 6's tare discipline, and serve both from the same table, letting a diner taste the actual mechanical difference between a seared, direct seasoned dish and a simmered, premixed one rather than reading about it.
Extract the warishita's dashi component at rung 1's 60°C, since a poorly extracted dashi is the single most common reason a home Kanto sukiyaki tastes flat against its Kansai sibling.
Serve the dipping egg pasteurised, briefly warmed in a water bath to a food safe temperature well short of setting, a direct, practical answer to raw egg safety concerns a British kitchen reasonably has that a Japanese one historically has not, named here as an adaptation for this reader's kitchen rather than a Japanese practice.

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