5 minutes and 3 ingredients is all you need for Tamago Kake Gohan, a wonderful and comforting Japanese dish of hot rice, egg, and soy sauce. We love to make this easy rice dish for breakfast or lunch, and even afternoon snack!
Whether you call it Tamago Kake Gohan or TKG, this dish is delicious!
Not everyone is interested in eating raw eggs, but if you give it a try, I think you will really love this ^_^
You only need 3 ingredients. And there's no actual cooking involved! Beat the raw egg into a bowl of hot rice and top with soy sauce. It's a quick and satisfying meal. And so simple! What more can you ask for.
Tamago Kake Gohan is Japanese comfort food. You can find it on the menu of local Japanese restaurants around town but it's easy to make at home. So we do.
The final dish is almost risotto-like. The rice becomes creamy and fluffy. It's savory thanks to a drizzle of soy sauce. It's so simple but also feels complex in taste. Ahh the magic of eggs!
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Ingredients
Here's what you'll need:
- Cooked rice, hot - Fresh rice is best, but this recipe also works with any leftover rice you have in the refrigerator. Heat it up before making the dish.
- Egg - Make sure the egg is super fresh! We'll be eating it practically raw. On Oahu, we love to get local farm fresh eggs from OK Poultry in Waimanalo.
- Soy sauce - The most popular brand is Kikkoman. It's always reliable, we use it for a lot of cooking and it works well for this dish. But because this recipe is so simple, we use "nice" soy sauce when we can. We most recently used "Ohana Soy Sauce" from Aloha Tofu Factory, our favorite local tofu shop.
See recipe card for quantities.
Instructions
Let's get cooking!
Place the cooked rice in a bowl. Make sure the rice is hot.
If you just scooped the rice from the rice cooker, great! If the rice came from the refrigerator, microwave it for a minute until the rice is hot.
Use chopsticks to make an indent in the center of the bowl (this is where we'll put the raw egg).
Carefully crack open the egg into the center of the bowl (where the indent is located).
Use chopsticks to quickly stir and whip the egg into the rice. This should take about a minute.
The egg and rice mixture should turn nice and frothy. It should be a little fluffy and light yellow in color.
Drizzle the soy sauce on top. Taste and feel free to use more soy sauce if you'd like. Some people like less soy sauce and others like more.
Then it's ready to eat! Enjoy ^_^
Substitutions and Variations
There are many options:
- Furikake - sprinkle furikake on top right before eating.
- Spicy - add a dash of shichimi togarashi (pick simple or fancy).
- Nori - Sprinkle precut strips of nori (also called shredded nori) on top of the rice. Or you can tear up a sheet of nori to use.
These are just a few easy ideas, the options are truly endless.
Storage
This dish does not keep. Make it only when you are ready to eat it ^_^
Top Tip
If you're confident in your egg cracking skills, feel free to crack the egg directly into the rice bowl.
I like to "play it safe" and crack the egg into a separate bowl. Then I pour the egg into the rice bowl. Why? Two main reasons:
- In case the yolk breaks. You can use the broken egg for another dish, and start over with a new egg without "wasting" the rice.
- In case some of the eggshell breaks. It's easier to remove any eggshell bits when the egg is in a separate bowl.
FAQ
Use chicken eggs for this recipe.
Make sure the eggs are pasteurized and as fresh as possible. You are eating the egg raw so get the eggs from a source that you trust. The heat of the rice warms the egg, but it's still a raw egg.
Here on Oahu, we purchase eggs from OK Poultry. It's a popular egg farm in Waimanalo. Go early in the morning because they often sell out.
On occasion you can find OK Poultry eggs for sale at Japanese markets. They're even labeled as TKG eggs! They are still super fresh and sold with making Tamago Kake Gohan in mind ^_^
For breakfast, I like it plain. Just like that.
To make a more complete meal for lunch, I'll pair this with Octopus Hot Dogs (when you want a simple and low effort side dish) or with Stuffed Tofu (if you have more time) ^_^
Tamago Kake Gohan Recipe
Tamago Kake Gohan
Ingredients
- 1 cup cooked rice hot
- 1 egg
- 1 teaspoon soy sauce
Instructions
- Place the cooked rice in a bowl. Make sure the rice is hot. If you just scooped it out of the rice cooker, great! If the rice came from the refrigerator, microwave it for a minute until the rice is hot.
- Use chopsticks to make a little indent in the center of the bowl.
- Gently crack open the egg into the center of the bowl (where the indent is located).
- Use chopsticks to quickly stir/whip the egg into the rice. This should take about a minute. The egg and rice mixture should turn nice and frothy and fluffy. It should be light yellow in color.
- Drizzle the soy sauce on top. Taste and feel free to use more soy sauce if you'd like. Then it's ready to eat!
Nutrition
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Kathy, you never cease to amaze me. Your recipes really bring back memories and are what I call old school kinds of food. When I was a kid, we used to eat this dish often; we just called it tamago gohan. We seldom had furikake, but we always had musubi nori so we just use a pair of scissors and snip up the nori over the rice. We used to always eat either spam or vienna sausages as a side protein whenever we made this. Lol!
Thank you so much, Alan! Definitely have had this with spam as the side protein hahaha. It's just so good 🙂
- Kathy
Yup, for a young person, you know, and make, a lot of old school dishes that most younger people these days probably never heard of! Just goes to show you the range of your interests and knowledge!!