Photo: 663highland · CC BY-SA 3.0
Akashiyaki (Soft Egg Dumplings with Octopus in Dashi)
A speciality of Akashi in Hyogo: a thin batter rich in egg, with wheat starch standing in for part of the flour, cooked round a piece of octopus and dipped in dashi to eat. Much softer and yellower than takoyaki.
Ingredients
- Batter
- eggs4
- ukiko (wheat starch)40 g
- plain flour20 g
- dashi · cold300 ml
- salt1 pinch
- cooked octopus · cut into 1cm pieces100 g
- neutral oil · for the pan2 tbsp
- Dipping dashi
- dashi400 ml
- light soy sauce (usukuchi)1 tsp
- salt1 pinch
- mitsuba · optional1 handful
Steps
Whisk the cold dashi little by little into the wheat starch and flour until smooth, then beat in the eggs and salt. The batter is very thin.
Season the dipping dashi with the light soy sauce and salt and keep it warm.
Heat a takoyaki pan well and oil every cup.
Fill each cup to the brim with batter and drop in a piece of octopus.
- ⏲ 1 min
When the edges begin to set, turn each one half over with chopsticks to gather it round.
- ⏲ 1 min 30 sec
Cook only until the outside has just set. Do not let it brown deeply.
Lay a wooden board over the pan and turn the pan and board over together. Without a board, lift them out gently with chopsticks.
Pour the warm dashi into small bowls, float the mitsuba on top, and dip each one before eating.
Variations
- With conger eel. Some shops use Akashi's other speciality, anago, in place of octopus.
- Cooked in sesame oil. Some shops oil the pan with sesame oil.
- Cool dashi. The dashi was first there to cool the hot dumplings, so serving it warm is the newer habit.
Tips
- The wheat starch is what makes it soft. Flour alone will not give this tenderness.
- Do not brown the outside. Cook it briefly and keep it yellow.
- Chopsticks, not metal picks. In Akashi this spares the copper pan.
- Octopus only. The filling is normally nothing else.
- Turn the whole pan out onto a board. They are too soft to lift one at a time.
More detail and the reasons why (2)
- Takoyaki's mould, with the batter taken the other way. Japanese Wikipedia counts akashiyaki among the roots of takoyaki and sets out the differences: so much egg that it is yellow, a short cook that never scorches the surface, and wheat starch, called ukiko, alongside the flour, which makes the batter very soft. The pan is copper, which conducts heat well, and its cups are shallower, so the result is not a full sphere. Wheat starch is what is left when the gluten is washed out of flour; the translucent wrapper of har gow is made from the same powder.
- The dashi was there to cool it. According to Wikipedia the dumplings were first dipped in dashi to cool them down, and warm dashi began around 1963 at a shop in Motomachi, Kobe, which also started floating mitsuba in it. One story traces the dish to Akashi-dama, imitation coral made with egg white in Akashi, which left a surplus of yolks.
The basics behind this dish
- Deep Frying: Temperature, Batter, and the Second FryFrying is not cooking in oil so much as trading the food's water for it. Two temperatures, what each kind of coating is for, and why the second fry exists.
- Heat Control: Preheating, Oil, and Reading the PanThe same ingredients become a different dish depending on pan temperature. When to add the oil, how to read heat by sound, and which dishes want low heat instead.
- Knife Skills: Grip, Cuts, and Why Size MattersHow you hold the knife matters more than how fast you cut. The pinch grip, the claw hand, and why uniform size is a cooking decision rather than a cosmetic one.
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