Food and Fancy: Cooking Adventure: Tamagoyaki

I tried another French toast recipe and failed. Hard. I am bound and determined to make good French toast. Until that glorious day, I made another egg-based food. Tamagoyaki!

Anyone familiar with Japanese cuisine (or manga and anime) has seen or tasted this. It's a rolled omelet. I'm not sure why it's called an omelet, because it's not filled with anything. It's just egg and sugar and salt. It's also tasty! "Tamago" means "egg" and "yaki" means "fried". I think.

Ingredients:

4 large eggs
1 tbsp sugar
1/4 tsp salt
Optional: 1 tbsp soy sauce and 1 tsp mirin (sweet cooking sake)

I don't use mirin in my tamagoyaki because I'm already using sugar, and I omit the soy sauce because I use it as a dip rather than an ingredient.

Three ingredients. I can't possibly screw this up. Right?

Beat the eggs with the salt and sugar. Some people like to only beat them until the yoke is broken and things are a little stirred up, claiming fully-mixed eggs become tough when cooking. Some people want the eggs well and truly beaten. I belong to the latter group.

I used an immersion blender. Anything worth doing is worth overkilling.

You'll need a nonstick skillet for this. You need one. First, oil it up with a thin coating. Dipping a paper towel in some vegetable oil and giving the pan a thorough wipe-down will do the trick.

The heat isn't on.

Turn on the burner to medium-high and let the pan heat up for about 30 seconds or so, just enough to get it a bit hot. Then turn it down to medium and pour in some egg mixture. You want just enough to spread out over the bottom of the pan. If it's too much, the top will stay raw and the bottom will burn.

Mmmm, that looks really gross.

Once the egg has just about set, but not quite yet, start rolling it up with a spatula.

More accurately, start flopping it over on itself.

Flop, flop, flop, rip, curse, flop.

Once it's all rolled up, or at least mostly rolled up because of the curvature of the pan, oil the bit without egg, then pour in more egg mixture. Swirl it around to get the pan evenly-coated and lift up the rolled bit to get some egg mixture under it. Then let it cook until nearly set and roll it back the opposite way.

It smells like baking pastries.

Try to roll it as tight as possible.

Be careful not to cook the egg too long before rolling it up. It won't stick to the roll and when you ultimately cut it up, it'll be a loose spiral that comes undone.

Proud and unflinching, the tamagoyaki stares down the cook.

Now you need to let it cool down. The egg will set further while this is happening. If you want, you can wrap it tightly in saran wrap during this cooling-off phase to make its signature rectangular shape even more rectangular. You can also just cut right into it, though the layers might be a bit loose.

First, you'll notice that the ends are tapered. Go ahead and cut them off to even the whole thing out.