Ochazuke recipe

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I love Ochazuke… Maybe it’s because I’m always cold regardless of the season but I love how this dish always warms me up. It’s such a simple dish but it tastes so good. For those of you that’s not familiar with Ochazuke, it is a simple Japanese dish made by pouring green tea over cooked Japanese rice. Common toppings include Japanese pickles, umeboshi (pickled plum), nori (seaweed), furikake, sesame seeds, and wasabi

The other day, I made my boyfriend a Japanese themed dinner. This included the following dishes:

I’ve always wondered how people make this – what goes into the tea or broth? How is it so flavourful?  Is it really just green tea over rice because when I drink green tea by itself, it sure doesn’t taste as good as this.

I took a pretty big risk when I decided to make it for the very first time the night of our anniversary dinner as I have no idea how it would turn out. Surprisingly, it turned out better than expected! We even made some slight modifications to the original recipe to try and enhance the flavour of the ‘soup’. The sour taste of the picked plum along with the salty nori, green tea broth, and rice, was a really nice combination. It’s also a good way to use up leftover Japanese rice!

This was the green tea I used for my Ochazuke:

We bought this Genmaicha when we were in Japan a while back and it’s my favourite tea. Alternatively, some people use dashi stock instead of tea so it’s personal preference. We altered the recipe slightly by adding a couple tablespoons of dashi stock to our green tea to enhance the flavour a bit more and the result was really good! So give this a try and let us know how it went.



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