Takoyaki… inspired

This whole pandemic thing has definitely had me down recently. I really miss going to restaurants, and part of that is because we have a group where my partner and I would go to lunch with friends every Friday. One of our frequent restaurants had Takoyaki, and it was amazing. I had never had it before this restaurant and I have really been craving it hard core.

I had bought some cooked octopus at Costco the last time I went for us to use when we made sushi, but we had leftover that needed to be used anyways. As I looked on the internet for how to make Takoyaki, I learned that to make the balls be so perfect there is a plate. Guess what… I didn’t have one. I thought maybe I could deep fry it. That didn’t work out, it looked more like an octopus floating in the oil.

When I looked for a recipe to use, it was important to me that I found a somebody who might actually know the culture where the food came from. I did not want a recipe that was taken by a white person and then put forth as their own. With that being said. This is by no means my recipe. I got it from Hungry Hoy https://www.hungryhuy.com/takoyaki-recipe/, but had to edit the process because I did not have all the proper tools.

I started by gathering all the materials I needed for the takoyaki. What is missing from this picture is the two eggs that I put on the shelf and forgot about when I was taking the picture.

The next step was to combine the Dashi flakes with the water, soy sauce and two eggs. I whisked them until they were well combined and then was able to move on to the next step.

This is me mixing the dry ingredients together… I’m still working on my photography skills. The focus should have been on my hand mixing the baking powder and flour together not on my watch…

A trend you will notice is that in our kitchen we have very very few one trick ponies. I can only think of 1 actually, and that is just the apple slicer because it is so much easier for our kids to slice apples on their own with it… Anyways, so I used our sieve as our sifter to get the baking powder and flour in the right ratio without small pieces into the liquid mix.

This is the point where I diverged from Huy’s recipe. As I said earlier, we do not have a Takoyaki plate. Because of that I combined the ginger and the octopus into the batter itself rather than trying to figure out how to put those in the center of some partially cooked batter. My first thought was to try to fry the mixture in a pot of oil.

That didn’t work too well…. It still tasted very, very good though.

The next thought was that I would go dutch baby style large thick pancake kind of thing. This worked much better.

To complete dinner I made a simple dumpling soup with some frozen dumplings, miso soup broth and bok choy.

After I made this, we had a tiny bit of octopus left over still so my partner made some super delicious takoyaki inspired waffles for dinner on that Friday. 🙂

What is the last thing you made just because you had been craving it and didn’t want to, or couldn’t go out to a restaurant to get it?