Beef rice bowl is a delicious and comforting one-dish meal that is easy to cook. Learn the secret sauce and cook the best braised beef – it’s even better than takeout! Beef rice bowl is a very popular dish in China. Although it originated in Japan (its original name is Gyudon), lots of cafeterias in Beijing have adopted it and put it on their lunch menu. This is quite a special dish for me. When I was living in Japan, it was the only restaurant dish I could afford before I started working a part-time job on top of school. Dining out in Japan is expensive, but a big bowl of beef and rice is really affordable and so delicious. It’s also a great pre-drinking food. We would always go get a beef bowl before any party involving drinks, because ordering food at an izakaya (sake house) can be pricey. The beef bowl is really simple. It uses very thinly sliced beef and onion, braised in a sweet savory broth until tender, and then served on a bowl of steamed rice. Most recipes use soy sauce, mirin, and sugar to create the broth. I’ve tried to recreate this dish a few times by using this combination, and the results were tasty, but not as good as what you’d get in a restaurant.
Then I discovered a secret ingredient – miso. It works like magic. If you add miso into the broth base, it will create a very special umami that makes the dish really taste like the one at Yoshinoya. When you finish cooking, you won’t notice the flavor of the miso, and that’s why you might not think of adding it in the first place. Most of the beef bowl recipes out there tell you to cook the beef for just a few minutes, until it’s just cooked through. Doing this creates a delicious dish, but not one as flavorful as at a restaurant. I tried simmering the beef for 50 minutes, to let the beef get tender and for the broth to thicken. It worked out really great! I sliced the beef myself when preparing this dish. It wasn’t as thin as it would have been, had I bought pre-sliced beef at an Asian market, but close enough. If you have access to thin pre-sliced beef, you might not need to braise it for quite so long. Check on the meat in 20 to 30 minutes, and stop cooking when it gets tender. If you cook more than you can finish, store it in the fridge and serve it for lunch the next day. The flavor only gets better!
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