Just Put Chicken Breast and Daikon in a Pot and Leave It for an Hour: Ryuji's "Fall-Apart Chicken Breast and Daikon"

First, a staff member asks whether he's using the top or the bottom of the daikon. According to Ryuji, the top is sweet and the bottom is spicy. The sweet top suits salads and light stir-fries, while the bottom is what you use when you want sharp grated daikon as a condiment. Once it's simmered, though, he says you can't tell the difference in flavor. Since the spicy part has little use beyond being a condiment, his view is that if you have leftovers, you should just simmer them. This time he used the tip end, 400g against a guideline of 300–400g.

He doesn't peel it. His reason: "you can't tell once it's simmered." The daikon takes about an hour to become tender, but you just leave it during that time, so once it's cut there's nothing left to do.

Ryuji says daikon is an ingredient that always ends up left over. Cut pieces are sold too, but if half costs about 150 yen, a whole one is only around 200 yen, so buying a whole one is far cheaper. But even if you use half in a stir-fry, the rest goes unused. That's why, in his estimation, there's demand for simmered dishes that let you use up leftover daikon all at once. He adds that you wouldn't understand this unless you cook every day.

After putting the cut daikon in the pot, Ryuji also added the part at the base of the leaves, saying, "Everyone throws this away, but let's put it in." One staff member says they stir-fry this part and eat it over rice. According to Ryuji, daikon used to come with more of the leaves attached, but because so many people don't want them, they are now often cut off before being sold.

One chicken breast goes into the pot as is. Laughing that this is the only way he cooks lately, Ryuji says he hates cutting chicken. He doesn't mind cutting daikon, but he doesn't want to cut chicken. So he prefers putting it in whole.

The seasonings are 250cc of water, 3 tablespoons of sake (about 45–50cc), 2 tablespoons of soy sauce, and 1½ teaspoons of chicken bouillon powder. He explains that you don't need much water because the daikon releases liquid.

As he adds the soy sauce, Ryuji shares something he recently learned: soy sauce consumption has halved over 30 years. Home cooking used to rely mostly on soy sauce, sake, and mirin, but now people make Italian food at home, and products like shiro dashi, dashi powder, and mentsuyu have proliferated. His own recipes don't use soy sauce every time either. He says this is why the rate of soy sauce use is declining.

He says soy sauce breweries, too, have gone from around 6,000 several decades ago to around 1,000 today. Kikkoman holds the top market share, and while small breweries keep making soy sauce, they have a hard time competing with the big companies. Ryuji himself would like to use soy sauce from small breweries and lesser-known seasonings. But if he uses products that aren't widely distributed, viewers won't know where to buy them and will be stuck. So he says he only uses products from major manufacturers, and he finds that frustrating.

As for the chicken bouillon powder, he explains that the chicken does give off flavor, but it's a little lacking, so he adds it.

Once the ingredients were in, he took a photo for the thumbnail, then pushed the chicken down so it was buried beneath the daikon. You might think he should have just put the chicken on the bottom from the start, but he says he deliberately placed it on top to get an attractive thumbnail shot. The daikon also needs to be submerged in the liquid, though, so he arranges things so both are as submerged as possible.

First bring it to a boil, then once it boils, cover and simmer on low heat for an hour. Ryuji says at this point it's basically done. Quoting a saying often used by cooking teachers, "time is a seasoning too," he emphasized that this is a very simple dish using only ordinary seasonings. He sometimes uses two kinds of dashi, but this time it's chicken bouillon only. He says a purist could skip even the chicken bouillon and use just salt.

That day he used an IH cooktop with an aluminum pot, and the water came to a boil very quickly. He explains that aluminum conducts heat well, so it's fast, whereas something like an iron frying pan is much slower. He says you don't need to worry about any scum the chicken releases. The heat setting on the IH cooktop at the shooting location was around "5."

When he lifts the lid an hour later, the daikon has taken on color and become so tender it crumbles apart. The chicken breast's fibers come apart with just a light press, no knife needed. Ryuji adds that you can make this with either thigh or breast meat. Mixing the shredded chicken throughout finishes the dish.

Ryuji says if you get this dish going, you can be eating dinner an hour later. For a change of flavor, he recommended yuzu kosho or black pepper.

At the tasting, both Ryuji and the staff remarked on how tender and fall-apart the chicken was and how delicious the broth was with the chicken's savoriness in it. Ryuji explains that chicken becomes tender if you either cook it at low temperature or cook it thoroughly for a long time. On the healthiness front, he repeated, "This won't make you fat." A staff member commented that since you get vegetables and meat together, this can be a complete meal, and with a side dish they'd be satisfied. The two agreed that it also goes well with rice.

When adding yuzu kosho, Ryuji said that once you use good yuzu kosho, you can't go back to the tube kind. There was also a joking exchange about whether he would notice if the staff switched it to the tube kind.

Ryuji mentioned that people say his recipes are greasy "man food" full of nothing but garlic and sesame oil, and said he'd like anyone who says that to make a dish like this first. He also says he's become more health-conscious lately. He added, however, that he did use chicken bouillon this time.

During the meal, the conversation turned to the "additive-free cooking" Ryuji has been working on recently. He says he once again made a serious attempt to see how delicious he could make food without using umami seasonings. What he made was a soup curry, finished with nothing but chicken stock, using no Ajinomoto or granulated dashi of any kind.

According to him, if you served this soup curry and asked people to guess whether it contained Ajinomoto, 90% would say "it does." When he had the staff member who is pickiest about umami seasonings taste it, that staff member also said it contained some. Ryuji recalled that it was, if anything, better than a restaurant's, and the staff agreed. He said he plans to make this soup curry in a future video.

In closing, Ryuji praised this simmered dish as well-seasoned and excellent as a meal while dieting. He says people who care about the chicken skin can put it in if they like. He also pointed out again that the daikon he used was the tip end, which is normally spicy, but once simmered it tasted sweet, and he couldn't detect any spiciness at all.

In the final "bonus" segment, Ryuji is shown taking thumbnail photos at the end of the shoot, and a staff member asks why he'd go with a thumbnail showing only the ingredients.

Ryuji's explanation goes like this: a photo of only the finished dish doesn't tell you what it's made with. If the ingredients are visible, people with leftover daikon in their fridge will respond. Chicken breast is also a popular ingredient, and many people buy it in 2kg packs at Gyomu Super and keep it on hand, so people who have it at home will respond to a chicken breast recipe. He says the aim is to show both daikon and chicken breast so that one or the other strikes a chord. He might use a photo of the finished pot as the thumbnail, but he said it's better to have more options.

Ryuji also mentioned that he frequently swaps out his thumbnails, explaining that it's to get higher-quality impressions and raise the click-through rate. He always posts videos at 7 p.m., and afterward watches how the numbers trend on his smartphone to decide whether to swap the thumbnail. Some videos grow a lot after a swap, while others actually drop. He says people often scold him for staring at his phone the whole time at drinking parties, but he's actually looking at data. The episode ends with his words that YouTube won't grow unless you use your head, and that if you can't do that anymore, newcomers will overtake you.