Hayashi Rice

This dish comes from the Japanese yōshoku tradition, where Western dishes were taken and reworked through a Japanese lens, eventually becoming staples of Japanese home cooking. It’s a tradition I love. You see it all over the world. The Vietnamese took the French baguette and turned it into bánh mì. The Goans took the Portuguese carne de vinha d’alhos and gave us vindaloo. Cultures sticking two fingers up to the colonisers by taking their food and making it better. Hayashi rice sits squarely in that lineage. This version is built around hayashi sauce blocks, which you’ll find in most Asian supermarkets. If you can’t get hold of them, you can loosen a little of the sauce, mix it with cornflour, and stir it back in to thicken everything up. Finish with a few cubes of butter whisked in at the end for that glossy, demi-glace-like finish. For the beef, I use thinly sliced ribeye from the Asian supermarket, cut for hotpots. If you can’t find it, freeze a steak for 30 minutes and slice it as thinly as you can.