Beef Negimaki is thinly sliced beef and blanched scallions (negi) rolled up together coated with flavourful special teriyaki sauce for a sophisticated weeknight dinner! So let’s make surprisingly easy negimaki rolls tonight!
What is Beef Negimaki?
“Negi’ is scallions in English and maki means roll as I explained in my Japanese food term post. Therefore it literally means Beef scallion rolls. You can easily cook these at home the same way they are cooked at Japanese restaurants. Wrap blanched scallions with thinly sliced strips of beef, then pan-fry and coat with special teriyaki sauce.
Beef Negimaki Ingredients
Beef
You can readily buy thinly sliced beef cuts from supermarkets in Japan. The most common are shoulder and thigh cuts. If you have a local Korean butcher or Japanese or Korean grocery store you will most likely be able to buy these thin cuts.
If you can not buy thinly sliced beef, simply get flank steak and slice it as thin as you can, then use a meat tenderizer to make it thinner. A little trick I learnt is to half freeze the meat first, then with a sharp knife slice the steak thinly about 5cm (2 inches) wide.
Negi: Scallions
These Japanese beef roll-ups are a popular home cooking recipe in many households in Japan. Japanese not only use blanch scallions but they also use a variety of vegetables such as carrots, green beans, asparagus and capsicums.
Special Teriyaki sauce
Why is this teriyaki sauce special? Because this sauce replaces Mirin with oyster sauce and garlic and sesame oil are added. Oyster sauce gives the basic teriyaki sauce more depth in flavour and the garlic and sesame oil give a delicious fragrance to it.
Perfect for Bento box
Beef roll ups tick many Bento box golden rules. First of all my photo does not justify how pretty they are when cut. They are quite photogenic and look pretty in a bento box. Because it is well seasoned, it is still delicious when cold in the bento box. And also the sauce is thick and coats well, so it will not make other food in the lunch box soggy nor will liquid leak out of the bento box. So they are perfect for Bento box menu.
Beef Negimaki Variations
Actually, thinly sliced pork belly is often used for making Negimaki in Japan. As long as the meat is thinly sliced and can be rolled, you can use any meat you like. Also you can change the filling vegetables as well. If you also don’t have oyster sauce or sesame seed oil, you can just use basic teriyaki sauce too.
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Beef Negimaki
Ingredients
- 300 g Thinly sliced beef *1
- 8 Blanched scallions
- 1/4 carrots Parboiled *2
- 8 green beans Parboiled
- 1 tbs plain flour or potato starch(Katakuriko)
Sauce
- 1 clove garlic mashed
- 1 tbs sesame oil
- 3 tbs Sake *3
- 1 tbs soy sauce
- 1 tbs oyster sause
- 1 tbs sugar
Instructions
- Cut the blanched scallions into 5cm (2 inch) wide strips. Cut carrots into sticks and cut green beans in half then parboil them and set aside.
- Lay the thinly slice beef on a chopping board and place prepared scallions and vegetables on the beef then tightly roll it up. The beef stlip should be about 20cm (8 inch) long. If the meat is shorter than it, overwrap beef slices slightly to make it 20cm (8 inch) long.
- You can secure by using a toothpick to tie the end of the meat (optional)
- Repeat this same process until all the beef is used (I made about 8 negimaki out of 300 g beef)
- Cover the roll ups with flour.
- Heat a little sesame oil in a frying pan over medium heat and place the beef roll ups in the pan.
- Cook one side for about 2- 3 minutes or until browned with a lid on.
- Turn the beef roll ups over and cook the other side for a further 2-3 minutes.
- Combine all the sauce ingredients and pour over the beef roll ups in the frying pan to sizzle.
- Serve with green salad.
Kate Escalona says
Hi I’m Kate, currently living in Japan. I’m very interested to try cooking this, but I’m not quite sure what brand of soy sauce to use. I see a lot of soy sauce in the supermarket, but I can’t even read Kanji. I hope you can give me a suggestion?
Shihoko | Chopstick Chronicles says
Hi Kate, can you take photos of soy sauce shelf and send it to me either email in contact page or through Chopstick Chronicles facebook page, then I can help:D
Bianca H. says
My mom used to make these with carrots and green beans…because my sister and I wouldn’t eat scallions when we were kids. 😉
Shihoko | Chopstick Chronicles says
Hi Bianca, my mother used to make with asparagus or green beans and carrots too 😀
Karen says
Thank you – I do not like scallions either.
Deborah W. says
This looks and sounds delicious! The best part is it’s so simple I think even I could make it!
Shihoko | Chopstick Chronicles says
Definitely Deborah 😀
Emily says
Very scrumptious looking and quite simple.
Shihoko | Chopstick Chronicles says
Hi Emily Yes it is so simple and great for weekday dinner 😀
pablo says
delicious all i have to say!
Chopstick Chronicles says
thank you! xD