This Japanese meat and rice recipe (Takikomi Gohan beef) is a great addition to your Takikomi Gohan collection. It is very easy to make and the rice is full of meat flavor. It’s so delicious that you don’t need anything to go with it.
I had this beef Takikomi Gohan at my sister’s house in Tokyo. The aroma of the meat cooked in the soy-based sauce was so good that I had to go to the kitchen and find out what was going on there. Before eating the cooked rice with beef, which was delicious, he had already decided to publish this dish.
When you hear “beef and rice”, you can imagine Gyū-don – Japanese Meat Bowl. While Gyū-don is a bowl of rice topped with slow-fired beef and onion, Japanese Beef and Rice is rice cooked with flavored beef.
Three names of
dishes for Japanese beef and rice
Today’s dish is known by three different names in Japan. I used one of them in the title of the post, that is, Beef Takikomi Gohan. It makes sense because the definition of takikomi gohan is rice cooked with ingredients.
The dish is also called ‘gyūmeshi’ (牛飯) in Japanese, which means beef rice. The word ‘gyū’ (牛) means beef or beef, and ‘meshi’ (飯) is rice cooked in this context.
As I often use in my mixed rice recipes like Gomoku Gohan, Takenoko Gohan, cooked rice is also called ‘gohan’ (ご飯). Using this terminology, it is also called ‘niku gohan’ (肉ご飯) and this is the third name. It means rice cooked with meat and that’s what my sister calls it.
The name ‘niku gohan’ does not accurately represent the dish. The word ‘niku’ (肉) means meat, so you can use pork or even chicken to cook rice.
The kanji character for cooked rice is 飯 and can be read as ‘meshi’ (the accent is on ‘shi’) or ‘han’ (Japanese kanji characters can often be read in two ways). The word ‘gohan’ is made of ‘han’ with the prefix ‘go’ (ご) denoting courtesy.
By the way, ‘meshi’ and ‘gohan’ can also mean food. In this case, ‘meshi’ is the word used only by some men, while women and the rest of the men call the food ‘gohan’. It sounds rough when you call food ‘meshi’.
Japanese Meat and Rice Ingredients (Beef Takikomi Gohan) In addition to the
seasonings to add to the flavor, all you need is rice, sliced beef, and minced ginger.
- Rice – I used short grain rice. If you’re fond of mochigome (sticky rice), you can mix some into the short-grain rice to give the cooked rice a sweeter taste. Long-grain rice may work, but cooked long-grain rice will not have a sticky texture like short-grain rice and it can be difficult to pick rice with chopsticks.
- : You need thinly sliced beef with a little fat, cut into large bite-sized pieces. I used thinly sliced wagyu beef suitable for Sukiyaki. Some marbled fat melts into the rice when cooked and gives Takikomi Gohan a great flavor. If you’re not using Wagyu beef, try to get premium meat with a little fat.
- Ginger – Chop ginger, but if you enjoy ginger’s distinctive flavor, you can julienne it thinly.
- Flavoring: The flavoring sauce consists of 2 parts soy sauce, 2 parts mirin and 1 part sake for cooking. No dashi broth or meat broth is required.
Beef
If you are mixing mochigome and short-grain rice, you should adjust the amount of water to cook the rice, as sticky rice does not require as much water as other rice grains. Please visit my post Gomoku Gohan (Japanese mixed rice), which explains how to calculate the amount of water required.
Cooking Japanese meat and rice is easy Cooking is
as
simple as the ingredients
.
- Sauté the ginger and meat with a little oil
- Add flavoring to the meat and cook until the meat changes color
- Drain the sauce and set aside.
- Put the rice, water and sauce in a pot or rice cooker.
- Spread the meat over the rice and cook the rice as if cooking plain rice.
.
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Please use my recipe, How to cook rice the Japanese way to cook rice and calculate the amount of liquid required. The only difference is that the amount of water is made up of the sauce and water, and the pieces of meat are in the rice.
Japanese meat and rice (Beef Takikomi Gohan) are so tasty that I always eat too much rice. It’s a great rice dish and is perfect for a bento box too.
Yumiko
