Okonomoiyaki, the Japanese pancake, in a vegan version – 05/29/2023 – Terra Vegana

I have always been fascinated by Japanese cuisine, and when I tried okonomiyaki —a pancake prepared with a lot of cabbage—, he immediately wanted to know the recipe. I was a teenager, I was at the house of a friend of Japanese descent and I made the whole family laugh with my question.

There is no recipe. Eggs, flour, lots of cabbage, yams and whatever else you want to include in the pancake. That’s basically the answer I got. It was the beginning of the 2000s, we were experiencing the height of Japanese all-you-can-eat food, and okonomiyaki had no place among the boatloads of strawberry and cream cheese sushi.

The dish is quite popular and, in Japan, there are okonomiyaki houses, in which customers receive the ready-made pancake batter and sauces on the table and venture onto the hot plate. It is, therefore, a dish of simple execution.

Traditionally, okonomiyaki takes the yamaimo tuber, which in Brazil was replaced by yam due to its image and similarity. Yam and cabbage, these two vegetables, are the stars of the Japanese pancake; the other ingredients are structuring and can be easily replaced in the preparation of a 100% vegetable version of this delicacy.

The eggs give way to chickpea flour, which, when mixed with water, under the heat of the frying pan, forms a dough with a texture similar to that of an omelette. The taste of the egg yolk can be represented by kala namak (Himalayan black salt), but this is a detail that is not necessary for the execution of the recipe.

For those who want to replace wheat flour, my suggestion is to use rice flour and tapioca. The rice flour gives structure to the dough, while the tapioca acts as a unifying agent for the ingredients, a function that would be performed by the wheat gluten.

I confess that I deviated a little from tradition in the recipe for the sauce, which resembles a barbecue sauce and is sold ready-made in Japan. In Brazil we don’t find this sauce ready in supermarkets. I learned an easy substitution from Marisa Ono: a mixture of ketchup, mustard, soy sauce, mayonnaise and Worcestershire sauce (pay attention to the ingredients list, which may contain anchovies and/or meat extract). The sauce recipe? There’s no recipe, but intuition is worth it.

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JAPANESE PANCAKE (OKONOMIYAKI)

Performance: 3 pancakes.

Ingredients

½ cup chickpea flour

¼ cup rice flour

¼ cup tapioca

2 tea spoons of yeast

1 cup of water

200 g of cabbage

100 g of yam

2 garlic cloves

4 sprigs of chives

1 teaspoon of salt

Black pepper, to taste

Neutral oil or olive oil, as much as needed

Preparation

1. Mix the chickpea flour with the rice flour, tapioca, water, yeast and salt in a large bowl until all the lumps dissolve.

2. Finely chop the cabbage and add to the bowl. Cut the chives into rings, add to the bowl and mix well.

3. Heat a non-stick skillet with a drizzle of oil and pour a ladle of the dough into the center of the skillet. With the help of a spatula, hit the contours of the pancake circle. When it is well cooked on one side, turn and cook on the other side.

SAUCE

Ingredients

2 tablespoons neutral oil

2 tablespoons of lemon juice

1 teaspoon cane molasses

1 tablespoon of soy sauce

½ teaspoon pepper flakes

1 teaspoon grated ginger ginger

Preparation

1. Mix all the ingredients and serve next, over and next to the pancakes.

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