Rice dishes ── Donburi (rice bowls)

Gyudon

beef rice bowl

Thin-sliced beef and onion simmered in a sweet-savory broth and ladled, broth included, over rice. Thought to descend from gyunabe, a beef hot pot that arose in Yokohama after the port opened, simplified into a form poured over rice.

What it's made of

Thin-sliced beef and onion simmer in a sweet-savory broth until soft, then both meat and broth go straight over rice. The broth, rich with rendered fat and mirin's sweetness, soaks down between the grains, while the onion's melting softness offsets the beef's presence, and pickled red ginger sharpens the whole bowl at the edges.

How it's made

Thin-sliced beef simmers in a broth of dashi, soy sauce, sugar, and mirin alongside onion cooked until soft. Overcooked beef toughens, so many shops add it late and finish quickly. The meat and broth both go over rice, typically finished with pickled red ginger or shichimi pepper.

Why it took this shape

One account traces it back to gyunabe, a beef hot pot simmered in miso or soy sauce that grew up near Yokohama's foreign settlement after the port opened in the closing years of the shogunate — a simplified version of that stew is thought to have moved onto a bowl of rice from there. Working a then-unfamiliar ingredient, beef, into the dashi-and-rice-bowl framework of Japanese cooking is how this dish is thought to have taken shape.