究極の朝食丼の簡単レシピ

What does “一かけ” (hitokake) mean in a recipe?

This fried-egg-rice recipe calls for melting バター一かけ (“one hitokake of butter”) in the pan. 一かけ isn’t a precise unit like a tablespoon — it’s an approximate counter for a roughly bite-sized piece broken off a larger block, the kind of amount a home cook eyeballs rather than weighs on a scale.

かけ comes from 欠ける/欠けら (kakera, “a fragment,” “a chip broken off something”), and the same counter covers a knob of butter, a clove of garlic (にんにく一かけ), or a square of chocolate (チョコ一かけ) — anything naturally broken or cut from a larger whole rather than counted as a full, standalone unit. Japanese recipes lean constantly on approximate counters like this (ひとつまみ for “a pinch,” 少々 for “a little”), which is part of why home-cooking videos read as casual and conversational rather than like lab instructions.