By Emily Connor
What do you get when you combine ketchup, rice, eggs, demi-glace sauce and some sort of meat product? Do you even want to know? Even if you don't really want to know, it's my responsibility as a blogger to tell you, and thus I will.
Omuraisu.
What is 'omuraisu', you may ask? The word itself comes from the words 'omelette' and 'rice' cleverly put together, and it is a Japanese cafe dish in which a thinly fried egg is used to encase a variation of ketchup rice and smothered in a sauce. There's not only one way to make this dish-- I've seen it with pork or chicken, with a hamburger on the side, served with genmai rice... But let me tell you, out of all the off-the-wall foods in Japan, for some reason omuraisu scared me the most. If you separate all of the elements there's really nothing too scary about it at all-- lots of people in the States eat eggs with ketchup, so it's nothing too foreign. But for some reason I could never bring myself to try it. Some sort of mental block held me back-- I mean, since moving to Japan I can now easily eat raw egg over rice, so why couldn't I try some sort of silly omelette dish?
No matter what it was that scared me away from this food, it took me two years to finally eat it. I was out with a friend who really wanted to check out a slightly famous omuraisu cafe, so I gathered up my nerve and finally tried the stuff, and was pleasantly surprised-- It's delicious. It may look a little bit odd to my American mind, but the flavors all seem to go together perfectly and make a really interesting Japanese take on Western food.
A lot of Japanese people actually think that omusaisu is from America, which always made me laugh a bit. There's another dish that many Japanese love called 'hanba-gu' (hamburg?) which is basically a version of meatloaf served with a bed of rice... Hanba-gu is also not quite American, although the restaurants that specialize in it always play Country-Western songs and have US license plates nailed to the wall.
It's interesting to see Japanese interpretations of staple Western foods, even if they sometimes seem odd. But then again, think about how a Japanese person must feel when they go to a Japanese restaurant in the States and see fried maki-sushi, 'tempura' shrimp which seem just like normal fried shrimp and half of the menu serving Chinese dishes. It must be an even greater culture shock than what I experienced when I gathered the nerve to eat omuraisu. Anyway, if you're ever in Japan you should give it a try... Just make sure to go to a place that looks halfway decent, or your first omuraisu experience might contain a few broken eggshells.
What do you get when you combine ketchup, rice, eggs, demi-glace sauce and some sort of meat product? Do you even want to know? Even if you don't really want to know, it's my responsibility as a blogger to tell you, and thus I will.
Omuraisu.
What is 'omuraisu', you may ask? The word itself comes from the words 'omelette' and 'rice' cleverly put together, and it is a Japanese cafe dish in which a thinly fried egg is used to encase a variation of ketchup rice and smothered in a sauce. There's not only one way to make this dish-- I've seen it with pork or chicken, with a hamburger on the side, served with genmai rice... But let me tell you, out of all the off-the-wall foods in Japan, for some reason omuraisu scared me the most. If you separate all of the elements there's really nothing too scary about it at all-- lots of people in the States eat eggs with ketchup, so it's nothing too foreign. But for some reason I could never bring myself to try it. Some sort of mental block held me back-- I mean, since moving to Japan I can now easily eat raw egg over rice, so why couldn't I try some sort of silly omelette dish?
No matter what it was that scared me away from this food, it took me two years to finally eat it. I was out with a friend who really wanted to check out a slightly famous omuraisu cafe, so I gathered up my nerve and finally tried the stuff, and was pleasantly surprised-- It's delicious. It may look a little bit odd to my American mind, but the flavors all seem to go together perfectly and make a really interesting Japanese take on Western food.
A lot of Japanese people actually think that omusaisu is from America, which always made me laugh a bit. There's another dish that many Japanese love called 'hanba-gu' (hamburg?) which is basically a version of meatloaf served with a bed of rice... Hanba-gu is also not quite American, although the restaurants that specialize in it always play Country-Western songs and have US license plates nailed to the wall.
It's interesting to see Japanese interpretations of staple Western foods, even if they sometimes seem odd. But then again, think about how a Japanese person must feel when they go to a Japanese restaurant in the States and see fried maki-sushi, 'tempura' shrimp which seem just like normal fried shrimp and half of the menu serving Chinese dishes. It must be an even greater culture shock than what I experienced when I gathered the nerve to eat omuraisu. Anyway, if you're ever in Japan you should give it a try... Just make sure to go to a place that looks halfway decent, or your first omuraisu experience might contain a few broken eggshells.
I don't think I was as skeptical about omuraisu, just dug into it like any other food and found myself enjoying it.