Kyoto & Kaiseki · Starter
Hamo no Otoshi
- Advanced
- 45 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, a sweet edge rounding the corners, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 1 hamo, about 700g, filleted skin on
- 2 L water
- 20g salt
- 1 kg ice
- 60g umeboshi flesh, pounded smooth
- 20ml mirin, boiled to drive off the alcohol
- 15ml kombu dashi
- 5ml usukuchi shoyu
- 4 green shiso leaves
- 1 sudachi
The skills inside
The words inside
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · fish · soy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Lay a fillet skin down and cut straight down through flesh and bone every 3mm, feeling for the moment the edge touches skin and stopping there. Free a piece every 3cm.
- Bring the water and salt to 90C (194F): a surface that shivers, with no rolling bubbles.
- Drop in four or five pieces at a time. In twenty to thirty seconds the flesh turns white and the cuts fan open into a flower.
- Lift them straight into ice water for ten seconds only, then drain skin down on a cloth; any longer and the flesh drinks and goes flabby.
- Whisk the umeboshi with the mirin, dashi and shoyu, and serve the hamo cold on ice with shiso and sudachi.
How to tell it is going right
This dish has no standard of its own yet. It is judged on the techniques it exercises: checked at the pan, while there is still something to be done about it.
Dashi 29 recipes
- It is clear enough to read the bottom of the pan through it. Cloudiness means it boiled, or the kombu stayed in past the first small bubbles, and neither can be strained out afterwards.
- Pale gold rather than brown, nearer the colour of weak tea. A brown dashi has been cooked too hard or too long and will taste of the pan rather than of the sea.
- The kombu came out before the water reached a simmer, and it is supple rather than slimy. A slippery surface on the sheet means alginates have started to leach, and the broth will feel viscous on the tongue.
- Strained without pressing. Squeezing the flakes or the kelp forces out bitterness and fine particles, and the difference is obvious in the finished bowl.
- Tasted alone it is savoury and faintly sweet with no fishiness and no bitter edge. Fishy means the katsuobushi steeped rather than settling; bitter means heat.
Where it goes wrong Heat, or time, or both. Kombu boiled gives up alginates and turns the broth slippery and faintly bitter; katsuobushi left to steep turns it sour and fishy. Almost every dashi failure is an excess of one of the two things the cook controls, and neither is recoverable once it has happened.
Blanching & shocking 76 recipes
- A large volume at a hard rolling boil, and enough of it that adding the food barely interrupts it; a pot that goes quiet has started stewing rather than blanching.
- Timed rather than watched, and short. This is an interruption in the cooking of something, not the cooking of it.
- The ice bath was made and standing beside the pot BEFORE anything went into the water, not started once the timer went off.
- It went straight into the ice water, fully submerged, and stayed until cold at the centre: a piece still warm inside is still cooking, and the arrest has not happened yet.
- Drained and dried afterwards rather than left sitting in water, so it does not carry that water into whatever it meets next.
Where it goes wrong The ice bath was not ready, so the food sat draining in a colander while its own residual heat carried on cooking it. By the time it cooled it was a stage past where it was pulled, and exact arrest is the entire reason for blanching rather than simply boiling.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Junmai or Ginjo sake
- Also Right
- Dry Riesling or Grüner Veltliner
- From the Taps
- Japanese rice lager
- Zero-Proof
- Cold green tea (sencha)
Umami bridges best with umami: sake’s amino depth shakes hands with dashi and soy where tannic wine would argue.
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