Cooking Japanese oden with the Ichiju Issai concept.

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Ichiju Issai is a simplified cooking concept from Japan of having a bowl of rice, 1 soup and 1 sidedish per meal to eat healthy.

Yesterday I wrote about having Tonjiru stocked at home for an easy and healthy habit. It's a special dish for us to put a lot of ingredients, healthy and delicious.
Although miso soup or Tonjiru is probably the easiest Japanese dish to make, I have another that is a good option which is Oden.

Today I want to introduce the simplest way to make oden!


What is oden?

Oden おでん is a Japanese soup dish consisting of ingredients like boiled eggs, daikon radish, konjac, and fishcakes. The soup is usually cooked with fish or konbu kelp dashi. It You might find it seasoned with soy sauce or miso as well.

I’d say it is more of a neutral flavor with simple dashi, then convenience stores in Japan like Seven-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart will give you condiments like red miso and karashi mustard.


How to make oden

Oden can be found in food stalls during the winter, izakayas, restaurants, as well as convenience stores or supermarkets. It's an extremely popular dish during the winter as it warms you, and is a very healthy choice.

Let me attach a video of a chef of Yukari Nihonbashi, Kimio Nonaga, and the way he taught the Japanese how to simplify cooking oden.

Usually, daikon radish is one of the main ingredients of oden, which takes the most time to cook. So he would slice it thinner, which can cut the cooking time to just 20 minutes!

Video by Kurashiru

The reason why the chef slices halfway to many of the ingredients is for the flavor to go into the ingredients. It cuts cooking time, too!

The important ingredients of oden

I had a period when I kept cooking oden, and I found out that there are two ingredients that make great-tasting oden.
  • Nerimono 練り物, usually fishcakes
  • meat (optional)

Nerimono

A must is nerimono, Nerimono means to knead. The fish are kneaded and processed to become nerimono. Kamaboko or kanikama might be the easiest nerimono you can find outside Japan.

This gives off fish flavor that becomes very tasty dashi. Dashinomoto powder and dried sardines work, but my family all say oden suddenly becomes very rich in taste when we put nerimono.

Sausage

The chef in the video looked for gyusuji 牛すじor beef tendon in the supermarket, a typical oden ingredient in the Kansai region, but couldn't find it. So he put an alternative which is sausage, another flavor richening ingredient.

I think Western soups become rich in taste with even just a little bit of sausage, bacon, or other meat. And so does oden. There is even a typical oden ingredient which is wiener maki which is sausage wrapped in fishcake.

The chef said the ratio of the oden dashi should be:
  • Water...700ml
  • Shirodashi...30ml
  • Mentsuyu...30 mil
This ratio can be changed however you like it. If you don't have shirodashi or mentsuyu, you may use dashi powder.

When cooking oden, clay pot is best as it slowly warms the pot, and will cook longer from the heat conduction. The metal pots cool down faster, but it is ok to use.

You can see at the end of the video that the thin-cut daikon is softer and colored, whereas the usual daikon is still hard and closer to its original color. The thicker daikon will need to be cooked longer to be edible. 

*Have this as a base oden. You may add ingredients to heat and eat for about a week, to be stored in the fridge at night. You can separate it to have another pot that is a miso flavor, while the other is more of a soy sauce flavor. If you want to have potatoes in the oden, it will rare out in 2-3 days, so make sure you do not keep it in the oden too long.

Oden→Curry/takikomi rice→Curry udon

I loved how Ichininmae Shokudo cooked oden, then she added curry rouex to make curry, or to cook rice, then to curry udon.

She enjoyed it for 3 days, while arranging the recipes to a different taste.

Video from Ichininmae Shokudo

Japanese do a lot of this. I usually do the same thing with oden but usually don't eat curry udon. Instead, I make it into a gratin. I will take out the ingredients and put them on a gratin plate, top it with cheese, and grill it!

It's so easy if you have the oden cooked beforehand :)

Have oden as a dish of Ichiju Issai

Oden, along with miso soup, can be a good way to have ichiju issai as a healthy diet. It can be cooked in a big pot, which can last you for days.

The dashi can be powder dashi, or if you have a chance to visit Japan or Daiso or Japanese grocery shops for example, there is oden no moto おでんの素 which is oden powder that you can simply mix with hot water to get the broth. An easy way out!

If you don't have to mentsuyu or shirodashi, this article might give you ideas on how you can make dashi from scratch!


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