Japanese Three-Color Rice Bowl (Sanshoku Donburi)

🥣 Cook the rice
1/ Cook the rice in a rice cooker or pot.

🥣 Prepare the meat soboro
2/ Heat a little oil in a frying pan and cook the ground meat over medium heat.
3/ When the meat changes color, add sake (or white wine) and sugar, and continue cooking. Add mirin and soy sauce, and simmer until almost all the liquid has evaporated.

4/ Turn off the heat and let it cool.

🥣 Prepare the edamame
5/ Bring a pot of water to a boil, add salt, and boil the edamame for 3–5 minutes. Drain and remove the beans from the pods.

🥣 Prepare the egg soboro
6/ Crack the eggs into a bowl, add sugar, and beat well.

7/ Heat oil in a frying pan, pour in the egg mixture, and stir quickly with chopsticks or a silicone spatula over medium heat to scramble into fine pieces.

8/ For a fluffier texture, cook gently over low heat.

🥣 Assemble
9/ Serve the rice in bowls and arrange the meat soboro, egg soboro, and edamame colorfully on top.

🌟Tips for Extra Flavor🌟

⭐️ Perfect for Bento: This dish tastes great even when cold, making it ideal for lunch boxes. My younger daughter’s school friends from various countries love it and often ask her to tell me how delicious it is 😄. It’s a crowd-pleaser across ages and cultures 🌏 truly umami without borders, as I like to say: Umami sans frontieres.😊

⭐️ Easy to Eat with a Spoon：You’ll see chopsticks in the photo, but honestly, I recommend using a spoon — it’s much easier to mix everything together and enjoy every bite!

⭐️ Customize the Egg Soboro: I like to add sugar for a sweeter flavor, but you can also season it with dashi or mirin to your taste.

⭐️ Use Different Green Vegetables: In Berlin, frozen edamame is easy to find, but you can also use snow peas, green beans, spinach, or avocado for a colorful twist. My daughter especially loves avocado🥑 mixed with mayonnaise and soy sauce.

⭐️ No Mirin? No Sake? No Problem!: If you don’t have sake, you can simply use white wine instead — I always make it this way. For mirin, mix 1 tablespoon of white wine with 1/2–1 teaspoon of sugar to create a gentle sweetness similar to mirin. These easy substitutions make it simple to cook this dish even outside of Japan.

⭐️ Time-Saving Tip: I often cook the meat soboro and egg soboro at the same time using two frying pans. While cooking the meat, I boil the edamame and scramble the eggs in another pan. If you only have one pan, cook the egg soboro first, set it aside, and then prepare the meat soboro.

⭐️ A Taste of My Mother’s Cooking: When I was little, my mother used to make this for me. She often added sakura denbu, a fluffy, sweet pink topping made from finely shredded white fish, sugar, seasoning, and food coloring. I really loved this sakura denbu 🌸 the pretty color and gentle sweetness always made me happy whenever I found it in my lunch box. It’s often used to add colour to Japanese lunch boxes.