The Secret to a Savory, Umami-Packed Meal In Minutes Is Instant Hayashi Rice Sauce

Laurel Randolph
Laurel Randolph
Laurel is a food writer, recipe developer, and editor. She is the author of four cookbooks, one of which was a #2 best-seller of 2017.
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published May 4, 2022
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Hayashi Rice Instant Remix
Credit: James Park

Hayashi rice is comfort food at its best. The popular Japanese dish consists of a rich demi-glace sauce often combined with onions and beef and served with rice. Instant versions package the sauce in little bricks that look just like chocolate, and you simply add it to a pan of simmering beef and onions, let it melt, and serve.

But that’s not all you can do with Hayashi rice. In the new video series for The Kitchn, Instant Remix, Video Producer James Park is taking his favorite instant products and remixing them into totally new creations. And first up on the list is Hayashi rice. Park describes the dish as “if beef bourguignon and curry rice had a delicious baby,” and who wouldn’t want to eat that?

For the first remix, Park prepares the Hayashi rice sauce and tosses it with Taiwanese noodles. The slightly curly noodles cling to the sauce especially well, but any noodle will do. Spiraled on a plate, the dish really looks like a super-rich pasta ragù. Don’t let the name Hayashi rice trip you up — it’s a simple but clever riff to serve the beef mixture with a fun noodle instead of rice. But Park doesn’t stop there. He tops the noodles with cheese, melts it with a torch, and plops a fried egg on top. The dish looks like a delicious umami bomb.

The second remix is a take on the French dip. After sautéing the onions and beef, Park adds the sauce directly to the pan. He adds just a splash or two of water to deglaze the pan, leaving the mixture thick. This is a handy technique if you want to use the beef and gravy as a filling for any kind of sandwich or other non-drippy applications. The flavorful beef is added to toasted milk bread with Kewpie mayo and melty cheese and served with a jus made from the thick sauce cooked with beef broth (I’m not drooling, you’re drooling!).

Park’s incredibly fun Instant Remix has me rethinking the instant products in my cabinet as well as shopping for a kitchen torch. I think I’ve found my new favorite method for melting cheese.

Check out the full video below.