Tobiko, Flying Fish Roe

Alright here is another posting coming up tomorrow.

Besides sweet, sour, salty and bitterness, there is umami. Such a interesting word is Japanese standing for freshness. According to wikipedia, “Umami is a Japanese word meaning “savory” or “deliciousness” and thus applies to the sensation of savoriness, specifically to the detection of the natural amino acid, glutamic acid, or glutamates common in meats, cheese and other protein-heavy foods. ”

Basically the “hearty” feeling is generated by MSG(Monosodium Glutamate) in some form.

One thing that quite a lot of people are not aware of is MSG exist in natural food. Meat product, Chesse, potato, tomato, mushrooms, eggs are natural MSG sources. And these natural food do possess a high amount of natural MSG – that is why they all taste so good most of the time. In Japanese cuisine, miso paste are widely used (and in other variation, konbucha is also used). Most of the miso paste is added with MSG, and usually the MSG is extracted from seaweed. This is also one of the open secret why Chinese food taste so good. It is because of the MSG.

MSG can either be extracted from meat or vegetables. In meat, pig protein is used as a cheap means of extracting MSG. While to make the MSG kosher, it can also be extracted from plants like seaweed.

My view on MSG is that it doesn’t really harm you. Added MSG and natural MSG are the same. It is not neccessarily unhealthy to have MSG as long as you are not eating excess amount of it. And having some MSG in food (natural or not) will sometimes reduce the urge for salt. The good side is you will consume relatively less salt and might yield a better option if your diet has a constraint in daily salt intake. There are certainly people who are intolerant to MSG, but the occurance of such events are actually not especially high, and unfortunately most of the processed food will use MSG as a form of addictive to make their product taste better.
What is umami? Look below!

There are so many different variation from the original spelling in Japanese, but I believe the best one is “Konbucha”, directly translated from the Japanese word 昆布茶.

It is not to be confused with Kombucha, which is a fermented tea drink.

Definition from Wikipedia: Kombucha is the Western name for sweetened tea or tisane that has been fermented by a macroscopic solid mass of microorganisms called a “kombucha colony,” usually consisting principally of Acetobacter-species and yeast cultures.

Japanese people drink that as a kind of tea, but personally I don’t really think it is a tea or a drink at all. Sounds pretty eerie to me

Back to Konbucha powder, I used Konbucha powder (dried seaweed powder) as a kind of herb, which usually I add when I was cooking a clear broth and sometimes you can add in konbucha powder when you are making seafood omelet. There are a few recipes that I have seen recently that made good use of Konbucha as a key ingredient. I think it brings out the savoriness out of the food, and is an alternative form of MSG (umami). One of the recipe that I can share.

Recipe

Crab Omelet with Konbucha (serves 4)

Ingredient:

1 can of crab meat (~60g)
grounded chicken meat(~120g)

Condiment A :

• cornstarch 2 teaspoon
• salt 1/4 teaspoon

Condiment B:

• sugar 2 teaspoon
• light soy sauce

6 Eggs
Soy Milk (80 ml)

Sauce:

• Konbucha 2 teaspoon
• light soy sauce
• cornstarch 2 teaspoon
• water 1 1/2 cup

Step 1:Mix crab meat, chicken meat and Condiment A in a bowl.

Step 2:Beat eggs and mix soy milk with Condiment B together, then mix all the food from Step 1, mix well.

Step 3:Heat a pan and add oil afterwards, add 1/4 of the mixture into the pan, flip after seeing the egg batter transform into semi-transparent state. Repeat the process to make 4 omeletes.

Step 4:After finishing, put the sauce to a boil in the pan and add in some black pepper when needed. Pour sauce over the completed crab omelete.

Step 5: Serve with rice/pasta.

Above is of the brand that I use, and it seem to be pretty prominent in Japense shop. This version of it doesn’t add the plum flavor, and I like it because it is more managable.

Common misconception about wasabi is people think wasabi is Japanese horseradish. It is completely wrong! Wasabi is actually the gratings from the roots of the wasabi plant.

Unforunately, in a lot of the places you are being served imitation wasabi.

But real wasabi is really expensive. You have to pay probably 3-4 dollars for 1 wasabi plant which might only be able to serve 2-3 people in such amount. Not to mention it is hard to find in the US and you have to buy and serve it fresh. Real wasabi should look like the profile picture, it should look like some gratings from a yellowish green plant, but not the solid translucent green that you see everywhere in all sushi restaraurants.  Real wasabi don’t taste that spicy or pungent to the nose (those are effects from the mustard in imitated wasbi paste), but  a rather mild with a pleasant minty after taste.

Most of the wasabi you see are fake. Probably you should grate your own wasabi from the market if you really want to try. You can buy them in Japanese Supermarkets. Nijiya Markets in the West Coast sells them, at a highly inflated price!

THIS is wasabi:

Pickled ginger should look pink in colour although I have seen other variations of white and light yellow.

I like to eat gari and it taste really good with sushi. My habit is to eat 1 piece of it between sushis and it taste pretty good in that way. Actually when you are served a plate of nigiri sushi, ginger is always served (usually wasabi might not be served in real japanese restaurant, because it is already added to the sushi). The ginger(gari) is more than a decoration itself, it serves as a tool of dipping soy sauce! (that is somethine a lot of people don’t know, including me in the past). You are suppose to dip the soy sauce with the ginger and apply it to the top of the nigiri sushi before eating the sushi. It is the “proper” way of eating the sushi and I think it make sense because 1. you wouldn’t contaminate the soy sauce with the fish , 2. you won’t mix different flavors of fishes together, and 3. you add in the flavor of ginger into the fish. Hmmm, that is a good way of serving food.

This is the only good clip I saw on teaching how to do pickled ginger.

Homemade Pickled Ginger: