Kyoto & Kaiseki · Main
Sawara no Saikyo-yaki
- Intermediate
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with savory depth stacked from the pantry’s bass notes, ferment tang with real depth behind it, with a bitter-edged char at the rim.
Ingredients
- 4 sawara fillets, 120g each, skin on
- 5g fine salt
- 400g saikyo miso, the sweet pale one
- 60ml mirin
- 40ml sake
- 4 hajikami pickled ginger shoots
- 1 sudachi, halved
Equipment
Grill · Sheet pan
The skills inside
Brining & curingSalting to draw the water out
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
- Salt the fillets lightly and leave them half an hour, then blot away the beads of moisture that rise; the fishy note leaves with them.
- Beat the miso with the mirin and sake to the thickness of soft butter.
- Spread half of it in a tray, lay muslin over it, the fish on that, muslin again and the rest of the miso; cover and refrigerate two to three days.
- Wipe the fillets clean with the back of a knife and a dry cloth. Do not rinse them, or you undo the cure with water.
- Grill skin side first, set well back from a moderate heat, until the surface is mahogany in patches and the flesh springs back, about four minutes a side. Rest two minutes and serve with hajikami 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.
Salting to draw the water out 41 recipes
- Salted evenly over every surface rather than tipped on in one place and tossed once.
- Laid out so the water has somewhere to go: a colander, a rack, or a sieve over a bowl, never a flat dish where it sits back in what it gave up.
- Given real time, and there is visible liquid to show for it: a pool underneath, a drip, or a wrung handful.
- That liquid is removed. It is squeezed, blotted or poured away, and the food is dry to the touch before it goes anywhere near heat.
- The dish is seasoned knowing salt has already gone on, tasted before any more is added.
Where it goes wrong It went into the dish still wet, and was salted again out of habit. The water it was carrying dilutes and steams whatever it meets, so the result is watery and over-seasoned at once, and those are two faults that cannot be corrected in the same direction.
Brining & curing 88 recipes
- Fully committed either way: in a wet brine nothing floats clear of the liquid, and in a dry cure every face carries salt, seams and cavities included.
- The time was measured against the weight and the thickness rather than the recipe’s convenience, and it stayed cold for all of it.
- The change is visible and can be felt: the flesh is firmer than raw and its colour has deepened or gone more translucent, rather than still being slack and pale.
- Rinsed and dried as the recipe asks, and anything meant to crisp afterwards has a surface dry and tacky to the touch before it goes near heat.
- Cooked and tasted, it is seasoned right through to the centre rather than merely salty at the surface, and not so salty that the dish cannot be eaten.
Where it goes wrong It sat in the brine well past its time because a few extra hours seemed harmless; the surface is over-salted and the texture has gone from firm to spongy and wet, and no cooking takes salt back out.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Vermentino or Sauvignon Blanc
- Also Right
- Albariño
- From the Taps
- Witbier
- Zero-Proof
- Sparkling water with citrus
Lean fish, bright acid, done: coastal whites built beside the same boats; the fresher the fish, the leaner the pour.
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