Mushroom Donburi (Mushroom rice bowl)

Trying to faithfully replicate the flavours and emotions from a country's cuisine is one thing -and a hard enough task, if you ask me- but creating a decent fusion dish is another one entierely. From working in my kitchen and in finance, and I can tell you : fusions go bad. Merging two entirely different sets of techniques, flavour profiles and ingredients requires a real understanding and knowledge of each party. I'm no genius, so when I give such a project a go, I make sure to follow this mantra : the simpler, the better. French cuisine and Japanese cuisine can easily be a good match. Both go easy on the spices and focus on making the ingredients shine without transforming them much, though tricks like a liberal use of butter in one case, and umami kicks in the other. Here, I borrowed two treasures from each culture : delicious buttery mushrooms from my home country, and an umami bomb from Japan I'm so happy I stumbled upon ; the magic soy cured egg yolk. Let me tell you that this recipe would be worth doing with only one or the other on top of your rice. Combine both, and you get a dish that will make your day -all within 30 minutes. Do take into account that you need to cure your egg ahead -overnight or throughout the day !

Mushroom Donburi - Recipe

Ingredients - Where to find them

Make sure to pick the best season for this recipe, when mushrooms are tasty and found in abundance - where I live, it'd be during fall. The other ingredients are basic Asian pantry items (soy sauce, rice vinegar...). You should be able to find those in traditional grocery stores, without needing to visit an Asian one.

Ingredients - Advice & key points

• Choose your favourite mushrooms ! It's all a matter of what you have on hand. I used a mix of Chanterelles, Trompettes de la Mort (Black Trumpet) and Pieds de Mouton (Hedgehog Mushrooms), which was oh so very flavourful.
• This is a nice recipe for when you work at home. Why so ? Because you can master the curation level of your egg !
  • For best results, the egg needs to be cured in soy sauce for 8 to 10 hours. This way, it'll be creamy and coating, but neither liquidy nor too hard.
  • Don't worry, you can still make it work without being as precise ! I'd recommend marinating it between 5 hours and 14 hours.
  • Even 24 hours would be ok, I've tried it once -but the yolk will definitely be quite hard and you'll have trouble putting it on all your rice grains.
• To make this recipe fully vegan, replace fish sauce with soy sauce and heavy cream with dairy-free heavy cream (coconut cream, oat cream....)
• I recommend using a cast-iron pan for frying your mushrooms, but other pans are fine, too.

All set ? Let's make this amazing Mushroom Donburi !