Takikomi-gohan

[melonpan]

its cold and wet tonight. the chicken and chestnut takikomi gohan and miso soup was comforting!

[nakji]

Here's one I made with shiitake and carrots. It holds nicely to take for lunch the next day. Room temperature okowa is so much nicer than regular rice, and it's even better with the seasonings.

Try as I might, though, I can't keep it from burning on the bottom every time.

[Hiroyuki]

Yesterday, I made takikomi gohan with enoki mushrooms. Photos can be found here with some description. I never would have thought of using enoki in takikomi gohan without these overgrown enoki.

[Salt Creep]

Hello,

I just bought a packaged mix, but I'm afraid I don't read Japanese so I'm not quite sure how to cook it!

Can someone please help? Do I add the mix to the rice after I put in the usual amount of water, or do I add the mix first THEN add water to the level it's supposed to be in the rice cooker? The packaged mix sure seems to contain a lot of liquid. Here are some photos of the outer package:

Also, how much rice per package?

Thanks,

Ken

[Hiroyuki]

Amount of rice: 3 go, or 450 g, or 540 ml

1 go = 180 ml = 150 g (in the case of rice)

Wash rice, add the usual amount of water for 3 go of rice, add the mushrooms (discard the liquid) and the soup (some kind of broth, I guess).

Good luck!

[Salt Creep]

Thank you! I'll let you all know how it goes.

Ken

[Salt Creep]

Well, I told my dad how to do it and so he decides to cook it himself but forgets to add the seasoning! We drizzled the seasoning on top after everything was cooked and it came out great anyway. Now we want to try the other flavors!

Thanks,

Ken

[Hassouni]

3 questions:

1. If I'm adding a bunch of ingredients to the rice, do I use the same quantity of liquid as if I was just cooking rice?

2. Does brown rice work well for takikomi gohan? I have some genmai that cooks about as quickly as white rice.

3. What's the difference between this and maze gohan?

[Hassouni]

Updates:

So I have a 3-cup Panasonic rice cooker, so I used 2 cups of haiga brown and 1 cup of uruchimai. The brown cooks in the same time so I wasn't worried about that.

I added some freshly made kombu+katsuobushi dashi up to the 3-cup line on the rice cooker, and added a splash each of shoyu, sake, and mirin. On top of this I layered (not necessarily in this order) julienned ginger, small pieces of kabocha, julienned gobou, slice shiitake, thinly sliced konnyaku, sliced abura age, and some sliced carrots. On top of this I placed 1 fresh, cleaned, and briefly seared sanma cut in half. All of these additions were piled up to reach the lid of the cooker, which I'm thinking is why I ran into the problems that I did....

I heard the cooker click into the off mode after what seemed like an awfully short time, 15 minutes maybe. Skeptical, I opened it up to investigate. the vegetables were still mostly raw and the rice was VERY al dente. I let it breathe a minute, put the lid back on, and turned the cooker on again, but it went off after another minute.

Giving up on the rice cooker, I pulled down my large Korean ceramic jjigae pot, which by a previously unknown coincidence seems to have as much room as my rice cooker. So I put the jjigae pot on the stove on medium heat, removed the layers of veg and fish from the rice cooker, and dumped the rice into the jjigae pot [wrong forum, but is there a name for these in Korean?], and packed it down to mimic how it was in the cooker. I then put the vegetables back on, and added an additional ladle of dashi. After I while I saw some steam + smoke coming out from under the lid, and I turned the heat to low. At this point it was pretty much done - the rice was fully cooked if a bit soft, and the vegetables and fish suitably steamed. There was even a solid layer of okoge, though I guess the heat was on too high, as it was mostly burnt.

The final taste was nice, but having to switch cooking vessels was a pain. What's the deal for making these in a rice cooker? Use less than the maximum capacity of rice? So, in my case, say 2 cups? I'm guessing that with everything packed up to the lid, there wasn't enough room for steam to circulate or something....

Alternatively, what's the procedure for making one in a pot not dissimilar from a donabe?