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Sukiyaki

Closeup of bowl

This article refers to the food. Sukiyaki is also another name for the song Ue o muite arukō by Kyu Sakamoto.

Sukiyaki (Japanese: 鋤焼 or more commonly すき焼き; スキヤキ) is a Japanese dish in the nabemono (Japanese steamboat) style.

It consists of meat, vegetables and other ingredients, slowly cooked or simmered in a shallow iron pot in a mixture of soy sauce, sugar, and mirin. Before being eaten, the ingredients are usually dipped in a small bowl of raw, beaten eggs. A common joke in Japanese comedy is that making passable sukiyaki can be done with a very tight budget, especially if one is poor.

The standard ingredients are thinly-sliced beef, tofu, ito konnyaku (a type of noodles made out of konnyaku corm), negi (a type of scallion), Chinese cabbage, and enokitake mushrooms and other ingredients. Boiled udon noodles are sometimes added, usually at the end to soak up the broth.

Generally sukiyaki is a dish for the colder days of the year and it is commonly found at bōnenkai, Japanese year-end parties.

Like other nabemono dishes, each Japanese region has a preferred way of cooking sukiyaki. The key difference is between the Kansai region in western Japan and the Kantō region in eastern Japan. In Kanto (Tokyo) region, the ingredients are stewed in a prepared mixture of soy sauce, sugar, sake and mirin, whereas in Kansai (Osaka, Kyoto region), the meat is first grilled in the pan greased with tallow and then flavoured with soy sauce, sugar etc. and the rest of the ingredients added.

In Thailand, the term "sukiyaki", or simply "suki" refers to Thai Sukiyaki, a steamboat dish only vaguely resembling the Japanese version, where diners dip meat, seafood, noodles, dumplings and vegetables into a pot of broth and dip it into a spicy "sukiyaki sauce" before eating.

In the 1960s a restaurant chain called Coca opened its first branch in Siam Square, Bangkok, offering a modified version of the Chinese hot pot under the Japanese name of Sukiyaki. (Although it only vaguely resembled Japanese sukiyaki, it was a catchy name for it because of a Japanese pop song called "Sukiyaki" which was a big worldwide hit at the time.) In this modified Thai version, diners had more options of ingredients to choose from, each portion being considerably smaller in order to enable diners to order many more varieties. The spicy dipping sauce was catered for Thai tastes too, with a lot of chilli sauce, chilli, lime and coriander leaves added. This proved to be a massive hit, and it wasn't long before other chains started opening "suki" restaurants across Bangkok and other cities, each with its own special dipping sauce as the selling point.

Today the MK chain is the most popular in Thailand with 180 restaurants across the country and 20 in Japan. Coca is making a rapid spread abroad too, already serving Thai suki in 24 outlets across Asia and Australia and further outlets planned in the US and Europe.

• Kantō-style sukiyaki recipe
• Miracle Shirataki Noodles - Online source for traditional non-tofu shirataki noodles used in sukiyaki, there is also a forum with more information.