Takoyaki

The batter is much thinner than a pancake batter: wheat flour, egg and a great deal of dashi, closer to single cream than to a dough. It is poured over a cast-iron plate of hemispherical wells, flooding across the top, with a cube of octopus, spring onion, tenkasu tempura scraps and pickled ginger dropped into each hollow.

Then the technique. As the batter in contact with the iron sets, the cook cuts the sheet between the wells with a metal pick and turns each ball ninety degrees, folding the set edges downward and letting the still-liquid batter run to what is now the bottom. Repeat every thirty seconds or so and the ball builds a shell from the outside inward while the interior never gets hot enough for long enough to coagulate.

The result is a structure, not an accident: a thin crisp sphere containing something with the consistency of hot béchamel, and a piece of octopus in the middle of it. It works for about four minutes. After that the residual heat finishes the job, the inside sets, the shell goes soft, and you have a dumpling.

The rule follows from the physics. Buy from a plate you can see being turned. A stall that is cooking to order can hand you something four minutes old; a stall clearing a forty-person queue on Dotonbori physically cannot, so it cooks in advance and holds trays under a lamp. The product is not dishonest, it is just structurally worse, and it is what most visitors eat.

Wanaka in Sennichimae is the reliable answer at ¥500 for eight, two or three minutes off the canal. Anything charging ¥800 for six pieces on the waterfront is charging you for the sign above it.

Variants worth knowing: akashiyaki, from Akashi in Hyogo, is the ancestor – much more egg, no sauce, dipped in hot dashi, and genuinely different. Negi versions come buried under spring onion and ponzu. Takosen is two of them pressed between prawn crackers.

Standing, immediately, out of the tray, with the picks provided. Bite a small hole in the first one and let the steam out for five seconds before committing, because the inside is considerably hotter than the outside and everybody burns their mouth on the first one anyway.

Do not carry it. Four minutes is the working life of the crust and a walk back to a hotel converts the best ¥500 in Osaka into something you could buy frozen. This is also why takoyaki does not travel as a souvenir and why every attempt to sell it as a sit-down restaurant dish is slightly beside the point.

It comes with sauce, mayonnaise, aonori seaweed powder and katsuobushi, and the bonito flakes will appear to move. That is convection lifting shavings a few microns thick in the steam, it happens to every plate, and it is not a sign of anything.