Unique and Affordable Japanese Salmon Products
One of the healthy and sustainable tricks no one really talks about Japanese food: it uses meat trimmings a lot. Leveraging the “mottainai” (the sense of regret for the act of wasting) spirit, many Japanese food mince meat trimmings and use them as ingredients good as side dishes or condiments.
Japanese love salmon, and they make many products that leverages salmon trimmings and scraps.
Salmon chazuke
茶漬け (chazuke) or お茶漬け (ochazuke) is Japanese comfort food. It’s really simple: you just pour hot water or green tea over leftover rice with some condiments that have some saltiness and umami. Salmon is one of the most popular flavor for ochazuke. Salmon in ochazuke is more for flavors (concentrated umami).
Traditionally, Japanese would make ochazuke at home as mid-night snack.
They would add condiments such as pickles, seaweed, furikake
or leftover meat or fish and pour hot water or green tea over it.
Today, there are many packaged ochazuke products.
You add the ingredients in the packet (left),
pour hot water and eat.
Sake Flakes (Salmon Bits)
“Sake (salmon) flakes” is a popular Japanese condiments that goes well with plain/white rice. It’s simply small and loose pieces of salmon meat (not really “flat and thin”).
Most Japanese grocery stores would carry salmon flake products, although the quality can vary quite a bit. As is the case with many fish products, quality matters: low quality products have diluted flavors or extra fishiness.
MUJI’s salmon flakes are pretty good. It only contains salmon and salt:
No artificial flavors, no MGS.
Shiohiki Sake (Dried Salmon)
塩引き鮭 (Shiohikijake) is traditional Japanese method to preserve salmon. First you salt-cure salmon for about a week, then wash off extra salt. After that, you dry it for several weeks. The meat ferments slowly to produce concentrated flavors. Because of the condensed flavors, a small amount of shiohiki salmon products can provide a good accent to go with rice.
