Epic Japanese comfort food is easy to make with just the push of a button! 

There are a lot of ways to cook food in Japan, but for a lot of people, there’s nothing quite as easy and satisfying as cooking meals in a rice cooker. All you have to do is toss a few choice ingredients into the machine, press a button, and when the melody sounds, you get to pop the lid on a delicious meal that delivers maximum taste with very little effort.

Case in point is this meal created by Twitter user Jika Jika (@1BbptGdEeWBR7MR) recently. It’s a giant okonomiyaki — a savoury pancake made from flour, water, egg and ingredients like meat or vegetables — and though it’s usually cooked on a tabletop grill by diners as they eat, Jika Jika shows it’s just as easy to make in a rice cooker with a lot less fuss.

▼ And that’s something that easily deserves over 208,000 likes

It didn’t take long for the “Giant Cheese in Okonomiyaki” to go viral online, with people eagerly requesting the recipe. Surprisingly, this meal is so easy to make that Jika Jika says there is no real recipe — they simply poured some okonomiyaki batter, mixed with ingredients, into a rice cooker and pressed the regular “cook” button.

However, after a little prompting from okonomiyaki lovers online, Jika Jika revealed some more exact details, so all you need to do to make the epic meal follow these four simple steps:

1. Lightly oil the rice cooker pot

2. Prepare okonomiyaki mix as you usually would, placing the wet batter and ingredients together into a bowl

3. Pour the mix into the pot gradually, layering it with slices of cheese

4. Press the “rice cook” button on your cooker as you usually would when making rice

And that’s it! Jika Jika says the meal wasn’t thoroughly cooked through after one cook cycle, so if you find that’s the case with your pancake, don’t worry; simply press “rice cook” again for a second cycle, like Jika Jika did, and you’ll have the same result below.

▼ A savoury pancake this size can be made in a three-cup rice cooker with a four-serving okonomiyaki batter pack.

Okonomiyaki literally means “grill as you like”, and refers to the fact that as long as you have the flour-and-egg batter as a base, whatever you add to the batter to make up the savoury pancake is entirely up to you. So if you don’t like meat, you can stick to fresh ingredients like cabbage, corn, shallots, mung beans…whatever takes your fancy. If you’re hankering for meat or seafood, pork slices, octopus and roe are popular options. The only limit to your pancake ingredients is your imagination and taste buds!

If you’re outside of Japan and don’t have easy access to a bag of pre-made okonomiyaki batter, check out our basic recipe for okonomiyaki here. Once you have all the ingredients prepared in a bowl, you’ll be ready to pour it into your rice cooker and get cooking!

▼ Then you just have to add okonomiyaki sauce, aonori (green laver sprinkles) and a criss-cross mayonnaise pattern on top to get that distinctive okonomiyaki look.

All okonomiyaki are good, but when they’re filled with a rich, umami melty cheese, they’re next-level fantastic.

And to really get our mouths watering, Jika Jika even shared a video of the moment the delicious beast is cut through.

That’s all the convincing we need to give this recipe a try! And we might even get a little adventurous and use trial and error to attempt some of Jika Jika’s other ‘no-standard-recipe’ creations, like this lasagna…

And, well, any of these…

If you’re inspired to get cooking with the rice cooker, there are plenty more recipes to try! Check out these epic matcha pancakes, this recipe for Oreo rice, and this hack to make KFC rice. Happy rice cooker cooking!

Source: Twitter/@1BbptGdEeWBR7MR via Jin
Featured image: Twitter/@1BbptGdEeWBR7MR
● Want to hear about SoraNews24’s latest articles as soon as they’re published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!