I’m having fun spending time in my American house with my Japanese daughter, although we both tend to get homesick for familiar foods from Japan. The other day she announced she was going to make “Hamburg” steak for me, which is a hugely popular dish from Japan, essentially a Salsbury steak made with ground beef and topped with various sauces. (To the Japanese, a “Hamburg” is a hamburger steak without bread, while a “hamburger” is the same thing with the bun part included; similarly, a “Frankfurt” is a frankfurter by itself, with no bun around it.) She got all the ingredients together — ground beef, bread crumbs, browned onions and an egg — and cooked me some good “Hamburg” steaks, complete with a demi-glace sauce made from that amazing Bull-Dog Sauce mixed with ketchup, and we ate it all over steamed white rice. It was delicious, though it wasn’t quite the same as we’d had back in Japan so many times. Eventually we realized what was wrong: the ground beef in America is 100% beef, but most of the time when you buy it in Japan you’re getting a 50% beef and 50% pork blend called aibiki, which is why the taste was slightly different.
“Hamburg steak” is one of the most popular dishes in Japan (partially because it’s cheap).
