Hayashi rice

A brown stew built on tomato and red wine with no spice at all, thickened by a dark roux.

Beef, Fish. Not vegetarian — contains beef, beef stock, fish.

Ingredients

the roux

• 50 g butter
• 50 g plain flour

the stew

• 700 g beef, in thin strips
• 3 onions, thinly sliced
• 300 g mushrooms, sliced
• 200 ml red wine
• 4 tablespoons tomato purée
• 2 tablespoons tomato ketchup
• 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
• 900 ml beef stock
• 1 bay leaf
• 2 tablespoons butter

Method

1. NO SPICE AT ALL. Not a pinch of curry powder, no paprika, nothing. That absence is what separates it from the Japanese curry on this site, which uses the same technique -- a cooked roux stirred in off the heat -- and goes somewhere completely different with it. Here the depth is tomato, wine and long-cooked onion.
2. TAKE THE ROUX DARKER THAN FOR CURRY. 20 to 25 minutes over a low heat, stirred constantly, until it is the colour of milk chocolate and smells nutty. With no spices to carry it, the roux is doing more of the work.
3. Watch it from twenty minutes. Dark roux goes from right to burnt in under a minute and burnt roux cannot be used.
4. Onions sliced thin and cooked 25 minutes over a medium-low heat until genuinely brown, not merely soft.
5. Beef browned hard in two batches and lifted out. Thin strips, so they go back at the end.
6. Mushrooms in, 5 minutes, until they have given up their water and it has boiled off.
7. RED WINE IN AND REDUCED BY HALF before any stock. Added with the stock it never cooks out and the finished dish tastes raw and sharp.
8. Stock, tomato purée, ketchup, Worcestershire and bay in. Simmer 40 minutes.
9. HEAT OFF. A ladle of the hot liquid beaten into the roux, then that back into the pot. On the heat it lumps.
10. Beef back in, 5 minutes on a low heat. Butter stirred in at the very end off the heat, which gives it its gloss.

Our own recipe. This one was written for this site rather than taken from anywhere, so there is no source to point you at. The quantities and the order of the steps are choices, not the only way to do it.

Filed under Japan · All recipes