Tamago sushi is one of the few cooked sushi entrees.

Simple but nice, it is a pice of rice with a sweet egg omelette on top. Seriously they usually taste more or less the same since it is made from egg and sugar. Nonetheless, this tamago sushi is one of the best way of using an egg and turn it into a delicacy.

Be careful, this cold egg sushi contains lots of cholesterol because it is full of egg(with soy sauce/fish broth)

Best guide I can find for making tamago batter (the sweet egg omelet)

Sometimes when people translate Uni, they would say sea urchin roe, it is not really correct. It is the organs that produce the roe, the gonad. It sounds kind of gross but I think it is really tasty. (Maybe that is why the restaurant name it sea urchin but not sea urchin gonad)

I have heard that the best uni is red in colour, with orange and yellow as the 2nd tier and 3rd tier. Luckily it all taste good when it is fresh. When it is not, it taste rather disgusting like a rotten egg. Sea urchin lovers beware of your cholesterol level too, it is realy high in cholesterol and fat and you should desist after 2 or 3 pieces (probably you can’t afford it anyways, it cost 3-4 dollars for apiece)

Wonder taste and aftertaste, buttery and fatty. Also love-it-or-hate-it kind of food.   Not recommended for first time sushi-eater or people who don’t like fishiness. But it is my favourite seafood so far. Use of sea urchin includes: chirashi(sashimi bowl), nigiri sushi, sashimi served with cucumber or seaweed, fried rice, steam egg with uni, many chef creation rolls etc….. Let me know if you can think of more.

Tai is a commonname containing a variety of different fishes in the Pagellus catagory. The English commonname is (red), (blackspot) sea bream. I think this is not a very prominent fish in the US since I don’t see them being advertised a lot in Japanese restaurants here.

Probably one of the reason it did not get as popular in US is because of its inflexibility in the use of the fish as a cooking ingredient. It is a shiromi (white meat fish) and is mild in taste. Since sashimi in US has to be flash frozen before consumption, the taste would just be quite undesirable to consume as a nigiri sushi or sashimi. It would not be a good ingredient to make a chef’s creation role either. The texture is quite chunky, and since it is not a fatty fish, you can’t really bring in extra flavour in a fish. The next best thing besides making it in nigiri sushi might be grilling it with a sweet sauce.

Probably you should eat this fish either very fresh or don’t bother to eat it at all. It’s hard to find a good one in sashimi grade.

The abalone in the sushi is usually sliced raw in very thin slices (I wonder if it is poached slightly) . The himo (the legs, the overcoat and the ligament) of awabi is usually served as an appetitizer and is also very tasty.

Abalone is one of the more expensive shellfish among all sashimi. Besides Japanese, Chinese people treated abalone as a premium food. Often served in expensive restaurants, abalone is served steamed in a whole shell, or it can be used as ingredients in soups because of its very fresh taste. However due to over farming of abalone by human, the supply of this delicious seafood has dropped and the price of abalone has increased a lot since then. Most of the abalone that you are eating now might have been farm-raised, and these farm-raised abalone taste a lot more inferior than the wild caught ones (who knows what food they are being fed).

Abalone is high in cholesterol and should be consumed in moderate amount only.

One of my favourite seashell sashimi. The Akagai (or “red Shell fish”) is red colour because of its abundance in iron and haemogoblin. It has a chewy texture but it is not at all rubbery. In terms of taste, I think it taste better than oyster (better texture), mussel (fresher), clam (a stronger taste).

The best time to eat it is during summer, after the mating season of the akagai shell.

The parts that you are eating in sushi bar are the legs, the overcoat and the ligament (called the himo, or the fringe). All the rest of the seashell will be discarded(like the intestines and whatever nasty stuff). I think it is rather hard to prepare and cut the seashell well, so I’ll just order it in a restaurant. Maybe I will learn how to do it myself later.

I think this will pair well with hokkigai. You can eat them together and probably you should save these 2 seashells(or seashell in general) to the very last or else you can’t really taste the milder fishes.

*This is how the clam is prepared. This is a Youtube clip on how to open a Akagai shell and how to prepare it into a presentable form.

Ikura is the Japanese word for salmon roe.

The name comes from “ikra” the Russian word for (caviar). It is a high value seafood and people have treated it as a delicacy in different cuisines.

In terms of taste, ikura taste very fishy, and the strong fishy taste would definitely turn off a lot of non-seafood lovers. Caviar (Ikura) is a love-it-or-hate-it type of food. As a seafood lover myself, ikura roll is almost my favourite because of its very strong and pungent afterbreath. Fresh salmon roes should taste like a bit like fresh fish liver oil.

In terms of nutrition value, Ikura (salmon roe) is full of protein, and cholesterol. Since salmon roe is just like a miniature version of a chicken egg, and 1 chicken egg would set you up for 1 day of suggested cholesterol intake, you should seriously think to resist the temptation, although most likely your attempt would be futile if you are a big fan of ikura.

Ikura can be served on the side as sashimi in complement with the other sushis, it can also be a main dish by serving with a bowl of rice (ikura-don). In sushi item, it is usually served in a tekka roll with seaweed and in chef creation rolls it is often used as a premium ingredient.

Bonito is very fishy and sometimes you can say it smells so strong that it seems stale. I would say it is sometimes true. Sometimes I would think eating bonito fish is like eating duck meat. A weird comparison, I know, but that’s what I feel. That is why bonito fish is marinated in a vingeary sauce before serving at times or it will be paired with some ginger to remove its fishy smell.

Another fun fact is bonito fish is used in many flavor enhancing sauces, and the most common one is the soba sauce. That is what my vegetarian roommate told me when I tried to cook him some soba and serve it with soba sauce.

Pacific and Atlantic bonito meat has a firm texture and a darkish color and it is not very fat as compared to the fatty tuna. It is quite a cheap fish and Japanese people will often use bonito(non-sushi grade) for grilling and other uses.

This is one of the few nigiri sushi that is served cooked. In fact you need to cook eel because consumption because see eel is mildly toxic when uncooked. (And you can avoid bei

ng zapped in the mouth) It is almost easiest to make a good anago because it always taste pretty good when cooked and the eel sauce is a tasty thick and rich sauce that will greatly enhance the flavor of the eel. The sauce is usually made out of a combination of soy sauce, sugar, salt, a bit of MSG, bonito extract (sometimes), a bit of sake (sometimes) and other things.

It is not advised that you eat too much eel although it is delicious because it is still quite toxic(makes your taste bud rough and white) if you eat a lot of them, you might get sick from eating too much of it. In terms of its priority in eating, save the anago for the very last since anago sauce has the strongest flavor out of all fishes and seashells.

If you want to try out more eel, try the eel don too. It is a bowl of rice served with strips of egg and a bed of sliced anago.

I am very surprised to see that hokkigai is not so prominent in the US.

Hokkigai clam is a specialty item in Hokkaido Japan and you can buy frozen ones. Surf clam has a crispier texture than the akagai and abalone and the meat that you are served in sushi is the top part of the cleaned surf clam, with all the rest of the meat(the intestines and the himo) detached.

In my experience, the hokkigai surf clam is served raw, but it will taste okay even if you poached it in a hot pot or shabu-shabu. Usually you do that for low grade hokkigai, but you should save it for sashimi for the good ones.

The profile picture to the right shows a natural hokkigai surf clam. The surf clam should look pinkish white in the lower body and it should look dark red on the tip of the clam. I have see some hokkigai with bright red top and a white bottom and I highly suspect they are counterfeits.

Scallop is a simple delicacy compared to the other more exotic seashell options. You will expect them often in a sushi restaurant. I think scallop only taste good when served raw and it loses a great deal of its taste when cooked. You can taste the Unami (rumoured 5th sense of taste, representing freshness, just like eating MSG) of the scallop when it is served fresh. And it tastes very good in that way.

You should look for sushi grade scallop. In the US the sushi grade scallops are flash frozen and thawed before it is consumed as an attempt to kill all the parasites in the seafood. Usually it should do the job, but you can avoid eating them. For I would take the risk in order to enjoy sushi properly. If you avoid sushi, you should avoid oyster in the first place. There are TONS of bacteria in oyster because of the nature of how it thrives. Raw oyster contains the highes amount of hepatitus bacteria and just the sheer thought of it makes me sick. Nowadays I don’t eat oyster raw (or just one) but I eat sushi without any problem. My motto is cooked food can be contaminated also, so it is not the food but the chef that prepares the food.

Unfortunately flash frozen sushi will usually tarnish the taste and texture of sushi fish, but recently it is required by the FDA that all fishes (except tuna!! must be because of the expensive otoro) has to be flash frozen. So go to Japan or elsewhere if you want to try the 100% fresh scallop.

Bigger shrimp has a better texture and usually is me pricey. As some people are not very used to eating meat raw, it might be a good idea to eat these crustacean cooked because they might contain quite a lot of bacterias if uncooked. Actually I always think that raw crustaceans would have more bacteria than raw sea fish. But then eating a piece or two of them is still a delicacy.

Shrimp can also be made in tempura and tempura shrimp appears in a lot of chef creation rolls that I will mention later on. I think it will blend well with almost every ingredient to give a full and rich flavor.

As with other seafood, shrimp is high in calcium and protein but low in food energy. A shrimp-based meal is also a significant source of cholesterol, from 7 mg to 251 mg per 100 g of shrimp, depending on the method of preparation.

You can try shrimp sushi in different sizes:

Cooked Ebi

Raw Ebi

Big Ebi

Huge Ebi

MONSTER Ebi

(no such thing…look for a lobster maybe)

When used in sushi, octopus meat is poached slightly before being used. (You have to because octopus skin is full of bacterias and possibly parasites) Before it is cooked, octopus skin is semi-transparent and it will turn into a solid white colour after being cooked briefly. The cut of octopus meat is especially important because if you made too thick a cut, the sliced octopus will be too thick to chew on. It takes a sushi master to do the job well, because the octopus meat is so slippery and slimy that it is hard to slice it very thin. Another thing is Octopus meat is very hard to digest and it might make the digestion easier if you slice it thinner to begin with.

Octopus babies(little octopuses) is marinated in some salt, sugar, garlic and some other “natura ingredients” (Including red pigments) to be served as an appetitzer. Usually it looks bloody red in appearance and while it taste good in the first few bite, you will lose your sense of taste in a few bites. My thought on the appetitizer: 1 is great, 2 is good, 3 is enough.

Octopus is high in cholesterol but octopus contains a lot of taurine which is beneficial to brian health. Octopus has a big brain and no wonder it is a smart predator in the ocean. But then, yummy yummy.

Mackerel(Saba) is a very fishy fish.

It has a very strong aroma when you sniff it and iit has a strong smell to begin with. For me it is just right. I think some Japanese restaurant would marinate this fish with some vinear before it is served (if the fish is not freshest I think, as to get rid of some of the unpleasant stale feeling of the mackerel).

Due to its pungent flavor, it sells pretty well in the US and it is seen in a lot of the restaurants(good or bad). It made a good addition to a chirashi bowl (sashimi bowl) however I don’t see a lot of mackerel in rolls, because it will steal all the attention and because of its distinct flavor, it doesn’t blend in well with the other sushi fishes. I have never tried it with sake, but I might taste good. (Bear in mind that sake and sushi is not a natural pairing because sake is too strong in flavor; green tea and sushi is probably better)

Try grilled mackerel, it taste very good because of it’s strong fish taste and its texture. I like to eat the fish skin too.

Yellowtail is the English translation for “hamachi “in the Japanese restaurants.   However the Japanese have tons of names for fish, and “hamachi” only means the young yellow tail.

Variants of Yellowtails incluide:

1. Hiramasa: Yellowtail amberjack

2. Inada (very young yellowtail)

3. Buri(old yellowtail)

Yellowtail is a kind of shiromi(white meat fish) and is one of the milder tasting fish among all sashimi fish and you should probably eat it first in a sushi or sashimi meal.     That is why some in hamachi handrolls and hamachi tekka rolls, green onion is mixed with the sushi fish to enhance the flavor of the fish.

Sadly enough, since almost all of the fish in US (except Tuna, I think) are flash frozen*.   Hamachi will taste even blender without being ultra fresh.   In the worst cases, it would taste like watery and you can feel the “iciness” of the flash freeze process.

*According to New Hampshire’s WMUR television station, fish that is suitable for eating raw must be frozen for seven days at negative 4 degrees Fahrenheit, or flash frozen for 15 hours at negative 31 degrees.   This is an effort to kill all the parasites in the fish.    However, the sashimi is tarnished in the process.   I have heard that nowadays they have a better flash freezing technology so it can preserve the fish better in the flash freezing process but I have yet to try some good ones.

Tuna is the twin brother of salmon in US at the very least.   In fact, US restaurants like to “abuse” salmon and tuna in my opinion.  Their creation rolls are mainly made from salmon and tuna.

Regular tuna has a much milder taste, since it does not have a high level of fat like salmon does, however it’s taste is pungent and sharp in a mild way.    Since tuna has a high level of iron, you can really feel the iron in the fish.

Once again, tuna in the US might look bright red and that might not be the best ones that you should eat.  Tunas are not suppose to look glossy red again,  the best ones that I’ve had in Japan are actually darkish red with a watery texture on the outside.   Since regular tuna has quite some iron inside, it should look a bit dull in color naturally.

However, fatty tuna are considered an expensive fish in Japan, especially for its variant blue fin tuna and even more so their fatty part, otoro.   The more expensive variant is almost 5 times more expensive than the regular ones.

Grade S blue fin fatty tuna is not available for export though.   Most likely the otoro that is offered internationally is “chutoro” (mid-section fatty tuna) instead.  You really need to eat it in Japan and right next to the fish market sometimes to make sure it’s ultra fresh.

Tier 3: Regular Tuna

Tier 2: Chutoro

Tier 1: Otoro

Salmon is one of the most common fish in the sushi world.   Its prominence is extremely high in all Japanese restaurants and it can’t really be called a Japanese restaurant if salmon does not exist in that restaurant at all.   Know for its very fishy taste, salmon has a buttery texture and looks radically orange at all times.   In my experience, salmon usually taste pretty good to people who have just started sushi. (Given that they like the complete rawness taste of sashimi)    One extra fact, salmon is considered a cheap(er) sushi fish in Japan.

However, it is easier to fool an amateur eater over the quality of salmon.  It is often hard to see how fresh the piece of fish is, due to salmon’s fresh appearance at all times.   Even though the salmon has not been fresh for a long time, it will still appear to be bright orange most of the time.   Sometimes it doesn’t even taste very stale when it’s not fresh.  Unfresh salmon taste quite bland instead.    Good salmon melts in your mouth.     Stale salmon stays in your mouth like a rubbery gummy-bear, leaving you no choice but to choke it down with some (second tier) soy-sauce.

There are actually things that you can see about how good the fish quality is.  At the very least you should look at how equally distributed the fat veins of the salmons are.   Top-tier wild-caught salmon has fat deposited evenly throughout the whole body and the white stripes should not look very wide.  They should look very dense and thin instead.    And in terms of color, you should be careful if you see the bright orange color on the fish.   In US, since all the sashimi fish are flash frozen, some salmon are extra treated with chemicals to preserve it’s appearance.   The best salmon looked naturally pinkish orange without the glossy texture.