Benihana Hibachi Vegetables

Home reconstruction

Teppanyaki vegetables look like one dish cooked in one go. On a real teppan they are not — the chef pushes each vegetable onto the hot zone at a different moment and holds the finished ones at the cooler edge.

In a home pan you reproduce that by adding them in three waves, roughly two minutes apart. Everything in at once gives you carrot that is still raw next to courgette that has collapsed.

The three waves

Wave one — onion and carrot. Dense, low water content, slow to soften. They need the longest and they take the most heat without suffering.

Wave two — courgette and mushrooms. Middling. Mushrooms need enough heat to release and re-absorb their water.

Wave three — beansprouts, spring onion. Thirty seconds, effectively just warmed through.

Two minutes between waves. That is the whole technique.

Hot pan, and do not crowd it

The vegetables need to sear, not stew. That means the pan has to be genuinely hot and there has to be room.

A teppan is enormous relative to the food on it. A home frying pan is not, so either use the largest one you own or cook in two batches and combine at the end.

If the pan hisses when a vegetable lands, it is hot enough. If it sizzles gently, it is not.

The soy goes in at the end

Soy sauce is mostly water. Added early it drops the pan temperature, the vegetables start braising instead of searing, and the sugars in the soy have long enough to burn.

Last thirty seconds, tossed through, off the heat if the pan is very hot.

What you need

• 1 onion, cut into thick wedges
• 2 carrots, sliced diagonally
• 2 courgettes, in thick half-moons
• 200 g mushrooms, halved
• 150 g beansprouts
• 3 spring onions, in 4 cm lengths
• 2 tbsp neutral oil
• 2 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp soy sauce
• 1 tsp toasted sesame oil
• 1/2 tsp black pepper
• 1 tbsp toasted sesame seeds

Method

1. 1. Cut everything before you start. **Once the pan is hot there is no time to chop.**
2. 2. Large pan on high, oil in until it shimmers.
3. 3. Wave one: onion and carrot, 2 minutes, tossing occasionally.
4. 4. Wave two: courgette and mushrooms, 2–3 minutes.
5. 5. Butter in. It browns slightly and coats everything.
6. 6. Wave three: beansprouts and spring onion, 30–60 seconds.
7. 7. Soy sauce, sesame oil and pepper. Toss for 30 seconds.
8. 8. Sesame seeds over the top.

Butter and oil together

Oil first, because it takes the high heat without burning. Butter later, for flavour and browning, once the worst of the heat has been absorbed by the food.

Butter from the start would be black by the time the carrots were done.

Cut on the diagonal

Diagonal slices give more surface area per piece than straight rounds, which means more contact with the pan and faster cooking. It is also what the restaurant version looks like.

Thick cuts, not thin. Thin vegetables in a very hot pan go from raw to limp with no useful stage in between.

Storing

Three days in the fridge. They lose all their crispness and become a decent component for fried rice, which is arguably a good outcome.

Reheat in a hot pan rather than a microwave; the microwave steams them further.

Do not freeze — the water content is too high and they turn to mush.