Making Aji (horse mackerel) Sashimi for Weekend Lunch

When I woke up this morning, I found it's raining outside, and my hope for enjoying the mildness of early spring sunlight is gone. So, I quickly ran to the neighboring supermarket for commiting to my at-home pastime favorite: cooking. My challenge this time is to work on a whole raw fish, forming it into the eatable state without any heat or preserving condiment: the technique called sashimi in Japanese.

So, here's my input - one whole aji:

Aji, called horse mackerel or jack mackerel in English, is one of the most popular kinds of consumable fish in Japan. For most parts of the coastal Japan, it is not difficult to find sashimi-quality whole aji at supermarkets in any time of the year. And, it's cheap as roughly about 1 USD / piece. Unlike it's price, this fish has rich and fatty taste, and good in fried, grilled, and in sashimi.

To fillet aji into sahimi pieces isn't so difficult as you imagine once you try for a few times. The processes briefly are: 1) chopping off head and fins, 2) taking organs out and washing blood away, 3) taking bones apart from meat, 4) peeling off skins and 5) slicing the meat small as eatable pieces. For the detailed work instructions, there are number of visual examples you can find on the internet.

And, here's my output:

 



Edgy pieces on left side are sashimi as-is. A dumpling-like batch on the right side is called "namerou"; sashimi finely chopped with miso, mirin (a kind of rice wine for cooking), and ginger. Namerou gets along with the sticky Japanese rice very well. (And now, after making namerou, I have to confess that I used preserving condiment, miso, despite I said I cook this fish without preserving condiment at the beginning of this post)

Also, I utilized perishable parts (such as chopped head and fins) except organs,blood, and tiny bones for making broth. Simmering them in kombu dashi for 10 minutes, and mixing it with a tiny bit of salt and usukuchi soy source makes soup du jour.

At last, I'd like to leave a tip for how to distinguish the fresh fish in the easiest way. Fresh fishes have fresh eyes, eyes look as they live. Ones not fresh has reddish eyes, like blood flowing into their white of eyes.