Koufuku Bonkler Week 2 – Tamagoyaki

For this week’s episode of Koufuku Graffiti, I’m gonna try making Tamagoyaki, which Ryou makes for Kirin after she gets all jealous (which was adorable).

Tamagoyaki x Ryou

Tamagoyaki (literally “grilled eggs”), is a sweetened omelette that’s rolled up multiple layers. You might’ve had it on sushi. It’s a pretty common side dish for stuff like bento (which Ryou apparently brings to cram school all the time).

Not lewd (?)

Again for this week, I’ll be adapting a recipe from Cooking With Dog. The main difference is that I won’t be adding the extra vegetables in order to stay closer to the anime version. Also, because I don’t own a nice square pan (called makiyakinabe apparently, you can see it in the Cooking With Dog video), I’ll have to use a normal round pan which is okay but suboptimal.

Ingredients (makes roughly a 1-foot roll):

Eggs – 3

Half-and-half (optional) – <1 tsp

Seasoning:

Water – 3 tbsp

Hondashi (instant dashi stock) – 0.5 tsp

Soy sauce – 1 tsp

Sugar – 1.5 tbsp

Salt – 0.5 tsp

Recipe:

We’ll need two bowls for mixing and a pan for this recipe:

– Take one of these bowls and mix together the seasoning ingredients: water, hondashi, soy sauce, sugar, salt.

First, we’ll make a sweet seasoning sauce with dashi stock and lots of sugar. We’ll be using hondashi again since it’s convenient. You can adjust the sugar to taste, I’d say the 1.5 tbsp that I added is about the minimum for sweetness (since this dish is meant to be pretty sweet).

Dashi stock and lots of sugar

– In the other bowl, add the eggs and the half-and-half creamer. Beat everything together thoroughly.

It’s better than it looks, trust me.

So why add creamer? As far as I know, adding milk/creamer/cream to eggs in scrambled eggs/omelettes makes it smoother and fluffier. To be honest, I’m not sure if it’s a good addition in this particular recipe due to the seasoning sauce but it seemed to be fine when I made it.

– Add the seasoning sauce to the eggs. Beat it.

Beat it.

– Heat up your pan with some olive oil and test the heat by dropping a bit of egg. If it sizzles, it’s good.

Testing the pan

This is as good a time as any to mention that cooking chopsticks are really useful when making this dish. For oiling the pan, it’s nice because you can use a paper towel and the chopsticks to quickly and evenly oil the pan which is nice because we’ll be re-oiling the pan multiple times in this recipe.

– Pour in the egg mixture into the pan until it coats the bottom.

First egg layer

This will be the first egg layer. A bunch of bubbles will pop up in the egg (due to the sugar, I think), pop them if it makes you feel better about yourself. You’ll be looking for the bottom of the egg to firm up via the color change, when that happens…

– When the first layer is firm, roll it up from left to right. When you’re done, move the roll back to the left side of the pan.

Roll em up

This is the hard part. Cooking chopsticks should make this part easier since it gives you more control over the rolling. It’s still pretty hard though because you risk breaking the whole thing when rolling, especially if the egg isn’t firm enough yet.

– Re-oil the pan and add another layer of egg. Try to get it below the roll.

Re-oiling

Next layer

To quickly re-oil, I just used a paper towel coated in olive oil and swiped it over the pan with some cooking chopsticks. When adding the egg, you’ll also want to lift the roll to get the egg mixture under it.

– When the next layer is firm, roll it again from left to right

Making tamagoyaki is hard

It’s at this point that I completely screwed up half of the tamagoyaki. I think it’s because I didn’t wait long enough for the 2nd layer. Either that, or the unevenness of the layers made it hard to roll? Either way, I accidentally destroyed half of my roll. Luckily, the other half was fine.

– Repeat the oiling/layering/rolling process again for a third layer

I think the number of layers is dependent on how much egg mixture you have, the size of the pan, and the desired thickness of the roll. In my case, I just had enough for half the pan, so I added a small layer to my surviving half of the roll.

–– Let the roll cool for a bit then cut into slices

Cutting the tamagoyaki

…and that’s it!

Tamagoyaki

As you can see, my version doesn’t have the smooth, even yellow finish that commercial/Ryou’s tamagoyaki does.

Ideal tamagoyaki

I’m honestly not sure how to get that. It might be finely controlling the heat to prevent the egg mixture from getting too hot and discoloring. The shape will be hard to replicate without the square pan, hence my tamagoyaki’s mound-like shape.

Either way, the result is pretty delicious even if the shape isn’t perfect (or even right like for half of my tamagoyaki), so try it out and eat it as lewdly as possible.