Yesterday my boyfriend put me up to the challenge of making the cabbage pancake he always has on weekends at Brick Lane’s food market. I looked online for recipes only to find that a lot of them required specialist ingredients only available at Asian grocery shops. So I decided to wing it with the ingredients I had at home.
I forgot to take a picture of it, but here is a close online image of how the end product looked like. Although I used a lot less mayonaise and didn’t use any seaweed or dashi flakes.
It turned out so lovely, that I decided to share my simplified recipe. Makes two pancakes.
Ingredients
- 100g of plain flour
- 170ml of hot water
- 2 tbsp of miso soup paste or korean soybean paste
- 1 tbsp of chicken stock powder
- 2 tbsp light soya sauce
- 200g of chopped cabbage (I used Sainsbury’s ready-sliced Cabbage & Leek)
- 1 egg
- 4 tbsp of cooking oil
Homemade Okonomiyaki Sauce
- Mix 2 tbsp Worcestershire Sauce with
- 2 tbsp Tomato Ketchup
Additional Sauce
- 2 tbsp Mayonnaise (I used Hellmann’s Wasabi Mayonnaise)
Method
- Sift the plain flour into a bowl.
- Mix the hot water, soybean paste and chicken stock powder before adding to the flour. Whisk into a batter.
- Once smooth, add the raw egg and soya sauce into the batter and whisk till batter is smooth.
- Add the cabbage (additional mix of carrots and leeks can also be used) and mix till cabbage is coated with the batter
- Pan fry half the mixture in 2 tbsp of oil turning the pancake occasionally over and over until brown on both sides. Note that it is incredibly hard to flip this pancake at times and it is fine if it loses its shape in the beginning. Keep pressing it back into a circle even if it breaks apart.
- Repeat steps 1-5 for second pancake
- Garnish with Okonomiyaki Sauce and Mayonnaise.
My boyfriend also suggested adding grated cheese to it which I thought was a pretty kick ass idea. You can also add seafood, pancetta, bacon – the works. But I prefer to keep things simple.
Good luck and I hope you like it!
