Gyudon is a Japanese beef bowl. It's more or less sukiyaki with most of the ingredients stripped out until only the beef & onions are left. The result is generally served donburi (on rice) with various garnishes. Every household has its own variations of this. It's comfort food.
You know how you can change "squid" to "calamari" on a menu and suddenly charge more money? Impress your friends by serving something on rice and calling it "X donburi." The only rule is that whatever it is needs to be thick enough that most of it stays on top of the rice, but thin enough that some of it dribbles down and flavors the rice. American-style chili is perfect for this. Serve American chili on rice, call it "chili donburi" and pretend to be fancy.
Anyway, tonight I made the beef and onions and shoved them in a sandwich and everyone was pretty happy with the results. Sorry, but I forgot to take pictures.
Ingredients
The garnishes listed below are if you are serving it over rice traditionally. Fair warning, I'm extra vague about ingredient quantities. Sorry.
1-2 lbs thinly sliced beef or pork
1 medium onion, diced or thinly sliced
(optional) 1 medium or small carrot, matchstick cut or thinly sliced
(optional) Roasted sesame seeds
(optional) (garnish) Thinly sliced green onion
(optional) (garnish) Pickled ginger (the deep red kind, not the sushi kind)
Roughly equal amounts of the following:
Soy sauce (marudaizu [whole bean] if you can get it)
Rice vinegar
Aji-Mirin (sweet rice wine)
Sake
Dashi (or use instant "hon-dashi" if you prefer)
Less than half by volume of white or brown sugar, molasses, or honey
A couple to a few pinches of nanami togarashi or shichimi togarashi to taste
Directions
Brown meat in a cast-iron or non-stick pan. Cook in batches if necessary to assure browning. Set aside.
Deglaze pan with onion. Cook onion until translucent and slightly brown.
If you're adding carrot, do so now and heat up a bit (no need to brown).
Return beef to bowl.
Add sauce ingredients.
Add sesame seeds here if you want.
Simmer and stir until the sauce is reduced. A lot. You want some liquidity left so that it dribbles over the rice, but you also want most of it sticking to the meat. If you have trouble thickening the sauce, use honey instead of any other sweeteners. Optionally, you can make a corn starch slurry and stir it in, but it shouldn't take that long to reduce without using a thickener.
Add garnishes after it's on top of rice in each serving bowl.
Sandwich
Step 8 above can be ignored if you're making a sandwich. Sandwich ingredients:
Meat from above
Submarine rolls
American pickles
Sliced tomatoes (salted)
Fresh spinach
Japanese mayonnaise
Red pickled ginger (the deep red kind, not the sushi kind)
As it happens, I served these sandwiches with frozen gyoza instead of chips. Because I'm weird.
Gyoza Dipping Sauce
Soy sauce (marudaizu [whole bean] is very much preferred for this)
Less than half as much rice vinegar, or fresh-squeezed lemon or lime juice
Splash of Chinese chili oil
Splash of water
I apologize for not taking pictures. It wouldn't have been very photogenic anyway, as I was just hanging out with my brother, throwing together whatever before watching Star Trek and Moon Knight.