Keto okonomiyaki

Okonomiyaki is a popular Japanese dish, it's like cabbage pancake topped with thinly sliced pork belly, okonomiyaki sauce, mayonnaise, bonito flakes and green onion. It has a savory and intense umami flavor with a little sweetness.

There are several types of Okonomiyaki, the Hiroshima style is my favorite, but I must say that my kitchen ends up being a mess after making it. Instead today I'm sharing a keto and gluten free option to make Okonomiyaki. You can make Hiroshima style if you want, but you better get some shirataki noodles, because I really don't think you can use zoodles here hehe.

INGREDIENTS I CHANGED

Okonomiyaki sauce

This sauce is almost the same as the original sauce made with sugar. I'd say you can't tell the difference between this sauce and the commercial one when it's mixed with the other okonomiyaki ingredients. This sauce is savory and sour with a touch of umami.

To make the okonomiyaki sauce I did some research and found how to make it from scratch in a Japanese recipe blog, I changed a few ingredients to my personal taste and replaced sugar for sweetener. I got the recipe from here Just one cookbook, I decreased the amount of worcestershire sauce and added a little soy sauce.

Tenkasu or agedama

Another batter ingredient that is completely Japanese is tenkasu or agedama, which is fried tempura batter. Once again, the gluten and high carbohydrate content made me think in another ingredient, it had to be crunchy but with less carbs and gluten free... what came to my mind was friend onion!

Pancake batter

Obviously, I had to change the batter because the original one is made with wheat flour. Since okonomiyaki is a pancake, the pancake batter should be the most important feature of the recipe. I was worried to change it for a keto friendly flour because one of the problems of these flours is that they don't absorb water as wheat flour does. I fixed this adding psyllium husk, this ingredient is used to make keto bread, because it has some properties similar to gluten, it absorbs a lot of water and it gelatinize. I eyeballed the amount of psyllium husk and it worked wonderfully! Coconut flour flavor can be an issue depending on the brand of the flour.