Make delicious yakisoba rolls you can stuff into your maw, without the use of chopsticks or cutlery!

As a committed gamer, there are times when you should really take a break and feed yourself something that has seen a vegetable or two, even if only at a distance. Eating something delicious and nutritious like yakisoba in front of the screen would be the best of all possible worlds, if only you didn’t have to try and simultaneously juggle a controller with a knife and fork or pair of chopsticks. That’s where, according to Japanese Twitter user @rekaka, rice paper may be your gaming diet panacea.

Yakisoba, the scrumptious combination of meat, vegetables and noodles in a rich sauce that’s somewhere between Worcestershire sauce and barbecue sauce in taste, is a proper meal, but with some wrapping wizardry can be prepared in advance to fuel your gaming session without getting sauce all over your hands, controllers, and nearby furniture.

In this video, popular Hokkaido-based YouTuber Kyoichiro, who’s a food reviewer and anti-diet proponent, not only gives his opinion on this new superfood, but ends up making it, along with a cheese, egg and sausage alternative as well. While the video is all in Japanese, hang on in there and be rewarded with how to make it (around the 1-minute mark) and watch Kyoichiro’s attempts at wrapping it up. His is not the most expressive face in the world, but he seems happy enough snaffling them down.

▼ To save on washing up, you can make a crater-like bowl in the pile of noodles to pour the eggs into and mix them there.

Ingredients:
Noodles
Yakisoba sauce or flavour powder (or make your own with a mix of soy sauce, Worcestershire sauce and ketchup)
Meat (optional)
Vegetables (cabbage, onion, carrot)
Eggs (optional)

Recipe:
1. Pour some oil onto your hot plate or heated frying pan.

2. Add the meat, vegetables and noodles, keeping them moving so they don’t stick.

3. Add yakisoba sauce powder (as in the video) or bottled sauce (if you don’t have access to either then barbecue sauce also works well, or if you’re feeling adventurous you could try making it yourself from scratch).

4. Once the meat is fully cooked and the vegetables have softened, form a bowl in the noodles into which to pour the eggs. Once the eggs have started to cook, mix them into the rest of the yakisoba.

5. It’s ready to eat! But if you want to make it into finger food, there’s one more step.

6. Take a sheet of rice paper (the kind used for Vietnam-style raw spring rolls) and dip it into a bowl of room-temperature water for a few seconds. Lay it out on a plate and add some of the yakisoba to the centre. Roll up the yakisoba spring roll as best you can, and you’re good to go!

▼ There is of course one problem with this recipe; it relies on you not eating the yakisoba as soon as you finish cooking it, which is a big ask.

While it probably wouldn’t be worth making yakisoba for this specially, (it’s so, so good hot and fresh) but for us, the rice paper method proved perfect for having leftover yakisoba as a snack the next day. And if you’re looking for another Japanese finger food taste sensation, it goes really well with fried tofu pizza and ‘gaming eggs’.

Source: Twitter/@rekaka via jin115
Featured image: Twitter/@rekaka
Insert images: Wikipedia/221.20, YouTube/恭チャンネル