Beef bowl king Yoshinoya to start serving ramen this summer with new beefy mazesoba
There's no dish Yoshinoya is more strongly associated with than gyudon (beef bowls), and no restaurants is more strongly associated with beef bowls than Yoshinoya. The mental connection between the two is so strong that it's not uncommon for people in Japan to mash the words together and refer to the chain and its flagship food as 'Yoshigyu.'
But this summer Yoshinoya is stepping out of the beef bowl box, and while they're not ditching beef in their newest offering, it'll have no rice, because it's beef ramen.
Specifically, this is mazesoba. The 'maze' part comes from mazeru , meaning to stir or mix, and while 'soba' by itself usually refers to buckwheat noodles, it can also indicate ramen noodles (as it does in the stir-fried ramen noodle dish yakisoba). Mazesoba is a type of non-soup ramen where instead of the noodles floating in liquid broth they're placed in a bowl with sauce and other ingredients, and you stir everything together just before eating so that the flavor mixes throughout.
For its Gyutama Stamina Mazesoba, the key co-star for the noodles is the same strips of simmered beef that Yoshinoya fans know and love from the chain's beef bowls. Accompanying them are sliced onions, diced leeks, tempura flakes, an egg, and a thick-consistency spicy garlic sauce, which is served on the side so that you can add as much or as little as you want.
Yoshinoya says the result is tasty and satiating, but surprisingly describes the flavor as 'rich yet refreshing.' Considering that just about every ingredient in Yoshinoya's mazesoba is meaty, pungent, or fried, it's probably best to take that 'refreshing' claim with a grain of salt, but the bold and filling parts of the promise definitely sound plausible, and with Japanese folk wisdom holding that garlic is supposed to boost physical endurance, the Gyutama Stamina Mazesoba, priced at 767 yen (US$5.30) is set to go on sale July 4, right as the midsummer heat starts showing up.
Source: Yoshinoya (1, 2)via Hachima Kiko
Images: Yoshinoya
● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter!
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Mainichi
2 hours ago
- The Mainichi
BTS will return in spring 2026 with a new album and world tour
NEW YORK (AP) -- Their reunion? It's smooth like butter. The K-pop septet BTS will return in spring 2026 with a new album and world tour. Members Jin, RM, V, Jimin, J-Hope, Jung Kook and Suga made the announcement Tuesday during a livestream on Weverse, an online fan platform owned by BTS management company Hybe. It was the first time all seven members have broadcast live together since September 2022. "We'll be releasing a new BTS album in the spring of next year. Starting in July, all seven of us will begin working closely together on new music," the band said in a statement. "Since it will be a group album, it will reflect each member's thoughts and ideas. We're approaching the album with the same mindset we had when we first started." According to a press release, the band will be in the United States this month to begin working on new music. The 2026 album will mark their first since 2022's anthology, "Proof," their 2021 Japanese compilation album "BTS, the Best," and their last studio album, "Be," released in 2020. They also announced a world tour, their first in nearly four years. The news arrives a few weeks after BTS superstars RM, V, Jimin and Jung Kook were discharged from South Korea's military after fulfilling their mandatory service. In South Korea, all able-bodied men aged 18 to 28 are required by law to perform 18-21 months of military service under a conscription system meant to deter aggression from rival North Korea. Six of the group's seven members served in the army, while Suga, the last to return, fulfilled his duty as a social service agent, an alternative to military service. Jin, the oldest BTS member, was discharged in June 2024. J-Hope was discharged in October. South Korea's law gives special exemptions to athletes, classical and traditional musicians, and ballet and other dancers if they have obtained top prizes in certain competitions and are assessed to have enhanced national prestige. K-pop stars and other entertainers aren't subject to such privileges. However, in 2020, BTS postponed their service after South Korea's National Assembly revised its Military Service Act, allowing K-pop stars to delay their enlistment until age 30.
![Podcast [English World] Episode 104: Karaoke recognized as tech milestone](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fenglish-kyodo.ismcdn.jp%2Fmwimgs%2F0%2F7%2F1200x%2Fimg_075a328e2df41555a6054a0592ab8c031120869.jpg&w=3840&q=100)
![Podcast [English World] Episode 104: Karaoke recognized as tech milestone](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fall-logos-bucket.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fkyodonews.net.png&w=48&q=75){kind=small}
Kyodo News
3 hours ago
- Kyodo News
Podcast [English World] Episode 104: Karaoke recognized as tech milestone
Do you know what the word "karaoke" means? Three Kyodo News reporters -- Junko Horiuchi, Ellessa Yamada and Donican Lam -- talk about the Japanese invention of karaoke being recognized as an entertainment tech "milestone." Listen as they discuss the evolution of karaoke and other Japanese inventions that have taken the world by storm. Article mentioned in the podcast: First karaoke machine recognized as entertainment tech "milestone" Kyodo News presents a bilingual podcast for English learners about the ins and outs of news writing and how to translate tricky Japanese phrases into English. Have fun listening to journalists discuss recent articles as they occasionally go off on unrelated tangents.
SoraNews24
4 hours ago
- SoraNews24
Donuts with seaweed and soy sauce — Is Japan's Mister Donut idea too Japanese for its own good?
Traditional mochi treatment puts a spin on the Pon de Ring, but is it an unrecoverable tailspin? Mister Donut is the Japanese donut chain. Though it originally started out in the U.S., it's risen to greater success in Japan than it ever did in its home country, and was pretty much Japan's only high-profile donut chain for several decades. Even now, with Krispy Kreme and Randy's Donuts having opened locations in Japan, there's still a perception that Mister Donut is the one that's really tapped into Japanese sweets fans' tastes. But a recent suggestion from Mister Donut had even us thinking that maybe it had gotten a little too Japanese. First, let's set the stage/dessert table. On its official website, Mister Donut has a list of what it calls 'at-home donut arrangements.' They're basically mini recipes for ways to spruce up our Mister Donut treats once you get them home, things like cutting an Old Fashioned into slices and serving it in a dish with ice cream as a donut parfait, or adding whipped cream and banana slices to turn your donut into a fancy high-tea kind of snack. And then there's this suggestion. Yes, that's a Mister Donut donut wrapped in seaweed. Why? Because this is their arrangement for Pon de Isobemaki, which will require some quick linguistic side dishes to explain. First, Pon de Ring is Mister Donut's most popular donut, a ring made up of bite-sized spheres of dough. ▼ You could say that the Pon de Ring is a chain of donut holes that forms a donut with a single non-donut-hole hole in its center, if that sort of word wrangling doesn't make smoke come out of your ears. Meanwhile isobemaki is a traditional Japanese dish in which a mochi rice cake is grilled, dipped in dashi soy sauce (soy sauce with bonito stock), and wrapped in a sheet of dried seaweed (or nori, as it's called in Japanese), It's a not entirely uncommon misconception that Pon de Ring is made with mochi flour, since they're chewier than other donuts. However, this extra chewiness actually comes from tapioca powder that's mixed into the dough. There's no mochi in Pon de Ring, which means there's also no culinary precedent for dipping a Pon de Ring in soy sauce and then wrapping it in some crisp seaweed. Honestly, it sounds like the sort of insane idea you'd get if you were looking for a way to justify eating some dessert when you haven't even had dinner yet. If the suggestion was coming from anywhere else, we'd be tempted to dismiss it immediately, but this recipe is straight from Mister Donut themselves, and it wouldn't be in their interest to present us with a way to make one of their products taste worse, right? So we headed out to our local branch, though still with our hearts full of more confusion than hope, to pick up a Pon de Ring and give this highly unorthodox idea a try. Almost immediately, we ran into a hiccup, because Mister Donut sells multiple kinds of Pon de Ring, At the most basic stage of division, there's the glazed Pon de Ring and the non-glazed Pon de Ring Plain. However, since Mister Donut's Pon de Isobemaki recipe just says to use a 'Pon de Ring,' we went with the style simply called Pon de Ring, the glazed version. The first step of the recipe is to heat the Pon de Ring in the microwave for 15 seconds. Next, dip the donut in dashi soy sauce, making sure to get the condiment on both sides. Mister Donut's recipe calls for roughly 30 milliliters (approximately one ounce) of sauce, but you probably don't really need to be too precise with the measurement. We honestly felt a little guilty doing this to one of the absolute all-stars of the Japanese sweets scene. Sure, we had Mister Donut's explicit permission to do so, but if a parent said 'Go ahead, slap my kid in the face,' that still wouldn't make it something we could do without it weighing heavily on our conscience. Once the dipping is done, grab a sheet of nori and wrap the donut in it. Its time in the microwave had made our Pon de Ring a little droopy in consistency, so we had to use a delicate touch to make sure we were gripping tightly enough so that it wouldn't slide free from its seaweed sheath, but not so tightly as to smoosh our sweets. Then we lifted the Pon de Osobemaki up, took a bite, and… …were startled by how delicious it is! For as bizarre as the concept had sounded, there's very little in the way of distracting drama once you taste it. The sweet and salty notes of the donut, glaze, and soy sauce prove that they can in fact play very nicely together, and while the texture of the nori is a bit discordant, its slightly salty contribution to the flavor profile makes for nice clean finish. Despite its name, the Pon de Isobemaki actually reminded us more of another traditional Japanese food: mitarashi dango. These dumplings, which actually are made from mochi, are brushed with a glaze made from sugar, mirin (sweet cooking sake), and soy sauce, producing a flavor that dances gracefully on the sweet-savory line. When the glaze on the standard Pon de Ring meets soy sauce, it creates a similar sensation, and that's probably why Mister Donut's recipe ostensibly wants you to use the glazed version of the donut. Getting back to isobemaki itself, though, the flavor tends to be different depending on whether you eat it in the Tokyo or Osaka area, since Osaka favors a sweeter-tasting soy sauce than east Japan does. That has us thinking that maybe the non-glazed Pon de Ring Plain has potential with the isobemaki-style treatment too, so we might have to experiment with that as well, provided that we can resist the urge to just repeat the very satisfying as-is recipe from Mister Donut. Reference: Mister Donut Top image: SoraNews24 Insert images: SoraNews24, Mister Donut ● Want to hear about SoraNews24's latest articles as soon as they're published? Follow us on Facebook and Twitter! [ Read in Japanese ]
