Last night I made the Tamago-Kake Gohan recipe from J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. This is the first recipe in the second section of the cookbook. This section is centered on rice dishes, and this first subsection is on rice bowls.

Tamago-kake gohan is a completely new-to-me dish: I’ve never had it nor seen it available anywhere. Kenji describes it as a homey, comfort-food dish, so I’m not surprised I haven’t seen it at a restaurant.

An optional ingredient I decided to pick up is hondashi, which is an instant dashi powder. I was able to find it at my local Asian market. The granules look like yeast, but the flavor and aroma is strong bonito flakes. The recipe also has MSG powder as an optional ingredient, which I considered because it was next to the hondashi, but MSG is one of the ingredients in hondashi so I figured that was enough.

The dish is a raw egg with seasonings whipped into hot rice with chopsticks and then topped with additional seasonings. Soy sauce and salt are the only non-optional seasonings. Optional additions listed to whip with the egg and rice are MSG, mirin, and hondashi. The listed optional toppings are furikake and thinly-sliced nori.

Even though I have some established rice-cooking methods, I gave Kenji’s method a try. I chose Japanese short grain over jasmine since this is a Japanese dish. The difference between my usual short grain method and Kenji’s is that Kenji does not call for soaking the rice first, and then calls for more water for the boil. Otherwise it’s the same. I assume the soaked method gets away with less boiling water because of the water absorbed during the soak. The rice came out fine; I’m not sure I would notice a difference between the two methods.

Post-whipping but pre-topping, the dish looks a lot like a yellow porridge. I put soy sauce and mirin on the table alongside the furikake and sliced nori so everyone could top and adjust their seasonings themselves. My daughter looked at the bowl, and declared “just looking at it made me lose my appetite.” My son added extra soy sauce and ate about half of his before deciding that he doesn’t like it. Megan ate hers, but said that she kept adding toppings to make it feel like she was eating more than just a bowl of rice. I thought it tasted fine, especially for the very little bit of work it was to make. The texture added by the toppings felt crucial to me, though.

I might make it again, but just for myself as a breakfast or as a quick meal.

Looking ahead in the cookbook, the next couple of meals are just increasingly complex versions of this. Talking with Megan, we think the additional ingredients will help her, but I’ll probably simplify the kids’ dishes so that it’s more palatable for them.

I am cooking my way through J. Kenji Lopez-Alt’s The Wok cookbook. Read more about it.