Japanese Savoury Pancakes

The other night I was feeling brave and decided to have-a-go at a recipe that a lovely friend shared with me a few months ago. My family do love Japanese food, so while brave I made these up for dinner.

The thing I personally found about these pancakes was that they had some flavour, but most of the flavours came from the toppings. Traditionally I believe a lot of toppings are used, we did tone that down a little so it wasn’t too rich, but there was still lots of flavour.

Now I don’t have the original recipe that my friend shared with me, but I did find this recipe and pinned it that is very close to what I remember. (Original link) Please note: I have shared this recipe as a reference for you, I did make some changes to suit our taste.

Ingredients:

Directions:

Mix 2 cups of flour with 1 cup of water or dashi stock (Japanese stock). It’s not the smoothest dough at this point. Since you’ll be adding a lot of wet ingredients it is better to leave it on the dry side at this point.
Next add your shrimp (marinara mix can be substituted), then the Panko. (I actually didn’t add the Panko crumbs as my friend hadn’t and the recipe was still delish.)
Add the cabbage finely chopped, making sure to mix well through after adding each item.
Next, add the chilli powder (alter to your taste).
Then add the pork (can use chicken too), it is best if cut into thin strips to help with cooking it evenly.
At this point you mix everything together really well. If you need to add more water to get everything to stick do it now; the batter should glue everything together and shouldn’t be too runny.

                                           At this stage it doesn’t look too pretty.

Then I make into small pancakes in a lightly oiled pan or flat grill. Remember to make sure that you flatten them down as much as you can (so they cook evenly through). Brown evenly on both sides.

While you are cooking them, place the cooked ones in a warm oven so they are all ready to serve at the same time.
The pancakes are traditionally topped with bonito flakes, furikake, tonkatsu sauce and Japanese mayo. If you can’t find these products just use some BBQ sauce and crumble some seaweed on top. Japanese Kewpie mayo however is available in the large supermarkets and you may be lucky enough to find the other toppings there too.
As I mentioned earlier, we didn’t have all the toppings and also found that soy sauce and Japanese mayo are nice toppings together too.

The best part ENJOY!