Gyunabe (literally “beef pot,”), a simple stew of sliced beef, onion and miso paste, quickly evolved into more well-known dishes like sukiyaki (“spade grill,” so named because farmers used their spades as makeshift simmering pots while working in the fields) and gyudon (“beef rice bowl”), which are each made with thin-sliced beef simmered in a sweet-savory sauce flavored with soy sauce and mirin, just like niku udon.
So where does niku udon fit in? I could find out surprisingly little about the dish’s origins. To my mind, it seemed a logical leap that the beef that topped the popular rice bowls at chains like Yoshinoya (founded in 1899) would eventually make its way to a bowl of noodles, but Mrs. Chen was skeptical of this theory. Restaurants in Japan tend to be extremely specialized, she reminded me. Typically, you would not be able to order rice dishes at an udon restaurant or vice versa, and udon is traditionally served in a seafood-based dashi with vegetable or seafood toppings, like fried tofu, tempura shrimp or seaweed.
Mrs. Chen pointed to a single restaurant, a long way from the gyudon shops of Yokohama, called Niku Niku Udon in Fukuoka, which has served niku udon for more than 45 years. Niku Niku’s version is made with chunks of beef cheek stewed in a soy-mirin mixture, but Mrs. Chen says the dish’s recent popularity as a home-cooked meal stems from the increasing availability of inexpensive kiriotoshi, thinly sliced beef trimmings.
For a dish that’s so technically easy (if you can boil water, slice an onion, and use a strainer, you can make niku udon), finding ingredients like kiriotoshi outside Japan is the biggest barrier to entry. If you live near a well-stocked Japanese, Korean or Chinese supermarket, you can most likely find beef cuts (rib-eye or chuck are common) thinly sliced for hot pot, Korean barbecue or Japanese sukiyaki or shabu-shabu. Any of these will work for niku udon. At Western supermarkets, I’ve found that thin-shaved beef for Philly cheesesteaks, Italian beef sandwiches or even rare roast beef from the deli work just fine. (Just avoid deli beef or frozen shaved beef products that contain additives, which give the meat a spongy texture and an off flavor.)
Some notes about ingredients and preparation: Though the meat for niku udon is often prepared with just negi (Japanese spring onions), I like to include a combination of scallions and Spanish or yellow onions, ingredients I always have at home. As to whether to brown the beef or onions in oil before simmering them in broth, I’ve found that, because the reduced simmering mixture has such an intense flavor, an extra browning step is not worth the time for the incremental difference it makes.
