Hayashi rice (ハヤシライス) is a popular Western-syle dish in Japan. It is made with thinly sliced meat (usually beef), onions, and button mushrooms, simmered in a thick red wine, tomato, and demi-glace sauce. The sauce is served atop or alongside steamed, buttered rice.
Demiglace sauce is one of basic sauces for western-style meals in Japan, based on the French sauce adapted to Japanese the palate: fruity and rich, with plenty of umami possibly due to such unusual ingredients as dried sardines. It is available, ready to use, in cans.
I bought a package of Hayashi Rice Sauce Mix, imported from Japan by S&B. Very convenient? I don’t know: one still much chop three-quarter pounds of onions, a half-pound of meat, do all the browning and stirring… The roux in the package contains palm oil, canola oil, wheat flour, vegetable powder (onion, tomato, Chinese cabbage, carrot, and celery), starch, sugar, salt, caramel, msg, mushroom bouilon, banna sauce powder, soy sauce, spices, chicken bouilon, sucrose, fatty acid esters, paprika oleorsin, artificial flavor, disodum etc of unknown chemicals…
The result? It might have been better had I used thinly sliced tender beef, but the mini beef meatballs tasted pretty good. The problem was that there were not quite enough of them to feed a hungry husband, so the freezer provided a slice of pork loin and a half package of frozen firm tofu. Freezing tofu changes its texture, making it into a flavor sponge excellent for adding to soups. I would not have served this melange of a stew to guests, but it was an adequate quick dinner.
It would be delicious to make a meal like this from scratch, as some of the related posts below suggest:
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| Hambaagu is served with a sauce that can be made with demi-glace. | Gyutan Stew, veal tongue cooked Japanese-style. | Hiroko Shimbo’s story about her mother’s tongue stew. | Cream stew, another mix popular in Japan: kurimu shitu! | Hiroko’s Japanese-style lamb stew: another French influence. |
I’d love some more info on how to freeze tofu! Does it make it firmer? Do you drain it well first?
No it does not exactly make it firmer, though it sort of does.
If you start with firm or extra firm tofu it makes it like a kitchen sponge with big holes in firm material.
I don’t drain it first, but once it’s thawed there is a lot lot lot of water to squeeze out. You want to do that so there are lots of places for your broth or sauce to absorb all the flavor in your pot. You end up with a squishy chewy bite sized piece in your broth.
With the softer tofu, it does get a bit firmer but if you stir-fry it, then it breaks apart. Like a finer sponge. I’m not explaining this quite well, but I hope you know what I mean?
But somehow if you freeze it for only an hour or so, then it does get more firm.
I usually cook for only my husband and me, so a whole block of tofu is more than we need for a meal. I should try a more scientific approach to what happens to frozen tofu.
I can tell you very well what happens to bad tofu when one neglects to freeze it…