Oden Recipe

Oden (おでん) is a classic Japanese winter dish of vegetables, fish cakes, and other hearty ingredients gently simmered in a savory dashi-based broth. You’ll often find oden served as a light appetizer alongside sake or beer at Izakaya pubs, but it’s just as beloved as a warm, comforting home-cooked meal. Slowly simmered and deeply flavorful, it’s the kind of dish that warms you from the inside out on a cold day.

What’s Oden?

Oden features particular staple items cooked in the soup or broth. Daikon radish, Konnyaku, a jelly-like cake, boiled eggs, and Atsuage deep-fried tofu are the ones most always included. Another necessary items are fish cakes. Various fish cakes, from Satsumaage (fried) to Chikuwa (grilled), along with their many variations, are very important in making the oden soup rich and full of umami flavor. There are other ingredients chosen by shop to shop, or from home to home. Some popular items include skewered beef tendon and Kinchaku, mochi stuffed into fried tofu packets. At home, especially with children, sausages and chicken meatballs may also be added.

Regional Oden

There are a few different versions of Oden depending on where it is. A form Oden existed over five hundred years ago main ingredient being tofu, but it became closer to today’s Oden in Edo era around later 17th century. It started from Tokyo area and spread to Kansai (western part of Japan) and other areas. There are different ingredients and flavorings in each regions.　

Tokyo-style Oden

Tokyo-style oden is deeply connected to the city’s Yatai (street-food stall) culture.
It features a darker, more robust broth made with dark, salty soy sauce and is filled with classic ingredients such as Daikon radish, eggs, Konnyaku, and Chikuwa-bu. Chikuwa-bu, made by kneading wheat flour into a dough and boiling it until cooked, is a specialty unique to the Kanto region, including Tokyo, and is known for its chewy, mochi-like texture. Other popular additions include beef tendon, commonly called Suji, and Ganmodoki, fried tofu fritters.

Kansai-style Oden

Kansai-style oden is characterized by a clear, light-colored broth made with lighter-colored soy sauce and a gently sweet, delicate seasoning that highlights the natural flavors of the ingredients. The broth for Kansai oden is typically based on kombu and katsuobushi dashi. As a result, it remains pale and transparent, allowing the ingredients to retain their natural color. While the flavor is light and subtle, it often carries a gentle sweetness that is characteristic of Kansai cooking. Common additions include beef tendon, octopus, and whale skin Koro. Koro is a traditional food made from whale blubber that is deep-fried in whale oil and then dried. In the Kansai region, Koro is especially cherished as an oden ingredient—so much so that people say, “Without Koro, it’s not truly oden.”

Kanazawa Oden

Kanazawa oden is known for its gently sweet, delicate broth made from kombu and katsuobushi, and it is enjoyed year-round, not just winter. It features a wide variety of ingredients unique to Kanazawa, including sea snails, Kuruma-fu wheat gluten, and crab.

Tips and substitutions for Oden

Some of the ingredients may be hard to find locally, but you can easily improvise with what’s available to you.

• If you can’t find Satsumaage fish cakes, you can make them yourself. If that’s not an option, adding a bit of shrimp paste seasoned with salt can help deepen the broth and make it richer.
• If you’re making vegetable-only oden, adding a small amount of oyster sauce to the broth will boost the umami.
• Feel free to use vegetables you can find locally if Japanese vegetables aren’t available.
• You can make oden ahead of time—it’s actually best cooked in the morning and eaten for dinner so the flavors have time to soak in.