The Other Way I Hurt My Back: Japanese Food!

After the Matsuri Japanese Festival in the Old Port of Montreal where I played big drums and made takoyaki squid balls with other like-minded people, all the volunteers were invited to the Japanese Canadian Cultural Centre for an appreciation BBQ. There were hotdogs, yes, but there were lots of leftovers from the festival – mix for takoyaki, okonomiyaki and the accessories for Japanese hotdogs.

Someone asked me on a post I wrote where they could find good okonomiyaki. In Montreal, it’s hard, but L’Entoilage was determined to be the best bet, and it’s good quality.  Haven’t been there yet, but their food philosophy is very respectable. A small menu of home-made Japanese food – not just sushi – at an appropriate price. This is not a fastfood joint. I’m convinced it’s better quality than what we made at the Japanese Cultural Centre, but that had to be made en masse for the festival. The pickled ginger probably had some MSG in it, and the sauce that goes on top of the pancake was bottled and probably had some intense forms of sugar. These are things I cross my fingers that L’Entoilage wouldn’t use.

Still, it was fun to learn to make these Japanese street foods. Okonomiyaki is made with a pancake-like batter with tons of cabbage and some other bland but crunchy vegetables. Then you can add thinly sliced meat, a lot of traditional Japanese kewpie mayonnaise sauce and sticky sweet teriyaki-style sauce. The tricky part is flipping the messy thing over on the grill.

The takoyaki are a little more nit-picky. These are squid balls. You pour a pancake-like batter over an oiled, special 12-hole (half-spheres) grill pictured above. Then you stick a diced piece of squid in each, and then scatter some pickled ginger, green onions and tempura bits over the whole grill, not just the holes. Then pour over enough batter to cover the entire grill surface without spilling the batter on the counter.

Then the hard part. Take two chopsticks and drag the batter into each of the holes. It looks like a giant, soupy mess, but slowly, as the batter solidifies it’ll shape itself into the holes. Just keep scraping. Of course this is all done by peering over the oiled grill in poor light. It takes a good few minutes of careful scraping, piling and smoothing to get these into rough balls. Then you use the chopsticks to turn the balls around to squish all the dangling ends of the batter underneath the weight of the ball and to brown the other side. Then you just keep turning until you can pick the balls up with the chopsticks, they're not too mushy, and they're not burned. 

That's the tricky part. If you didn't work fast enough in the scraping step then the bottom of the balls may have burned a little. Then when you turn it it may not cook evenly on the opposite side because some of that batter cooked before you scraped it off the grill. It certainly won't brown evenly, anyway. Sometimes it takes an age for the ball to cook through, and if you scraped slowly, you're just extending the amount of time it's going to take to cook. The trick is to get the (probably) frozen squid piece to cook through. It should have thawed before you put it in there, but if it's still slightly frozen you're pretty screwed, since water will seep out of it and make the takoyaki cook much more slowly...and squishily. That's a word.

So I was straining my neck over the grill for a few hours...long enough to know I never want to work a grill. Or at least to know that it's a luxury to have big fat cooking utensils. None of this small chopstick business. Big chopsticks only...and good lighting...and counters at the proper height...and thawed squid...These are things that are are essential in life. I think that makes it an educational day.