Gyu Don (Japanese Beef Bowl)

Many fast food restaurants have that one item that put them on the map - for Panda Express, it's the orange chicken, and arguably for McDonald's, it's the fries.  For Yoshinoya, a fast food chain founded in Japan and scattered across the US, that dish is unequivocally the beef bowl. 

While the rest of their dishes amount to somewhat below average teriyaki, the beef bowl is the one item that's both unique and perfect in its balance.  Sweet and savory beef cooked with tender onions lies atop a bed of rice that's soaked up the delectable gravy, and in a relatively homogeneous Asian fast food landscape, it's flavor that's truly unique and distinctly Japanese.

Just about the only flaw to the bowl in my mind is that the beef is usually unreasonably fatty.  It honestly might not be so much a flaw as a matter of preference, as plenty of other diners enjoy the texture and mouthfeel of the fat, but as someone who's grown up eating lean meats, I find myself picking these parts off.  Luckily, the dish tastes just as good with a lean cut of beef, but it's critical that it's thinly sliced, either by freezing it slightly before cutting to firm it up, or better yet, buying pre-sliced beef from the market.

I followed Just One Cookbook's recipe pretty closely here, but since I found the result a bit overly sweet for my tastes, I'm recommending a couple of tweaks to the proportions below.  The red pickled ginger is a near essential component here, as the spice and tartness balance out the sweet sauce perfectly.  Best of all, the dish comes together in just about 20 minutes!

Gyu Don (Japanese Beef Bowl):
1 lb thinly sliced beef
1 yellow onion, sliced into strips
1 green onion, thinly chopped
1/2 cup dashi
1 tbsp sake
1 tbsp mirin
1 tsp sugar
3 tbsp low sodium soy sauce
Shichimi togarashi
Red pickled ginger

Add dashi, sake, mirin, sugar, and soy sauce to a wide pan, and bring to a boil.  Once sauce is boiling, add onions and cover.  Cook until onions are soft, 3-5 minutes.

Add beef to pan and cook, uncovered, until the beef is cooked through (since it is sliced thin, it should only take a couple of minutes).  Add to a bowl over rice and top with green onion, ginger, and shichimi togarashi to serve.