Okonomiyaki from the Tomb Raider Cookbook

Okonomiyaki is a cabbage fritter from Japan, using shredded cabbage that's dipped in a batter with bacon, scallions, pickled ginger and/or other flavorings, then pan-fried until crispy and served with toppings like a soy ketchup sauce, bonito flakes, kewpie mayo, scallions and furikake. It's a dish I've made before, but from a non-Japanese chef, so when I found its recipe in the Tomb Raider Cookbook, I was excited to try it made in a more traditional way.

As discussed in my Seaweed Salad post, Lara Croft visits Japan, specifically Tokyo in Tomb Raider: Legend, and the fabled island of Yamatai in Tomb Raider (2013) and its 2018 film adaptation. She's more likely to have access to Okonomiyaki in Tokyo than Yamatai, but cut her some slack. She was shipwrecked on the latter. You use whatever you have in that case.

This recipe has you cook bacon on one side of the Okonomiyaki, ensuring that it both cooks, crisps up the pancake and renders its own fat so you don't have to add more. You need 4 cups of shredded cabbage for the recipe, which for me came from a quarter of a head. I kept the rest of the cabbage head to use in other dishes. For this one, I had to buy dried bonito flakes and a second pack of seaweed sheets; the latter for garnish. I used the rest of that to make another Seaweed Salad.

You use dashi as the liquid in your Okonomiyaki batter. I couldn't find some, so I had to synthesize it with a cup of water and 1/2 cup of the bonito flakes steeped in it, before I strained the stock. Traditional dashi recipes have you add konbu as well as the bonito flakes, but I didn't have any or know where to get it. Once the batter is mixed up, you pour it into the cabbage and some chopped scallions and celery, and then you're ready to fry it.

This recipe makes two Okonomiyaki, so I decided to make the dish when having dinner with my mother. She didn't want bacon on hers, so I omitted it, but that meant there wasn't any fat on the underside to cook in it. When I flipped it back over, it was a little more black than mine. I cooked my Okonomiyaki with 1 1/2 slices of bacon and it got very crispy and crackly, in spite of my mom thinking it would be flabby and I should cook it separately to crumble over. Nope!

The pancakes turned out to be crispy, although mine could have been flatter to ensure it was firm all around. However, I actually like a softer pancake. Whereas my mom only used a bit of the ketchup sauce and a dab of mayo on the side of her Okonomiyaki, I wanted to make mine look like the picture in the book, so I pulled out all the stops, topping it with a piece of pickled ginger, chopped scallions, the ketchup sauce, a drizzling of kewpie mayo (which I made myself), bonito flakes and a crumbled seaweed sheet.

When I told a group of friends I was doing this, one of them asked which type of Okonomiyaki I was making. There are different styles of making it depending on where you are in Japan. The cookbook doesn't explain, but we determined this recipe is most likely Osaka style. They make it more like a frittata with all ingredients mixed together before cooking.

There’s also Hiroshima-style, which is built layer-by-layer like a pizza; Modan-yaki, which is served with fried yakisoba or Udon noodles on top; Negiyaki, which is thinner and has more prominent scallions like Chinese scallion omelets; and Monjayaki, which uses more dashi in the batter so it’s looser and has a melted cheese-like texture. I'd like to try all of these variants, eventually.

If you want to make this recipe for Okonomiyaki yourself, you can find it in Tomb Raider: The Official Cookbook and Travel Guide.