Monday, May 04, 2009

CSA Wrapup - Kasuzuke Pompano

So between finals and a visit from the Sisters In Law I've been busy. But here's a couple things that became of the last of our CSA veggies. Or were just tasty.

The corn was grilled, along with some Poblano Sausages, bell peppers, poblanos, and spring onions. Topped with cherry tomatoes and cilantro. Corn was served with some roasted garlic compound butter. Served in some leftover whole wheat pitas. Good but not great, the spring onions were still a bit gritty. :(

We had a big Japanese dinner when the sisters were in town. Unfortunately no really good photos but here's the spread. On the left are some amazing quick pickles, using CSA cucumber and neon red cabbage. They are great sides, and only take a couple hours! On the top is some of the last of our bok choi, steamed and dressed with garlic oil and soy sauce. Bottom is a large plate of rice with kokumotsu. It's a collection of other grains and seeds used to spice up plain ol' rice. Here we used 10 koku, which has, duh, 10 various grains and seeds. You can get packets of it at Lucky Mart. To cook you just throw it in the rice cooker along with the rice.

The real star of the meal was Kasuzuke Pompano on the right there. Three pompano fillets went into a marinade based around sake kazu for two days. Kasu is the lees leftover from making sake, the spent rice goo that is pressed at the end. It has a really cool taste, like yeasty sake. Youhei brought some back from Japan on his last trip, but you might be able to find it around if you looked hard enough. It's used as a popular marinade for fish, and works well with salmon and black cod, neither of which are local enough for our tastes here in Miami. So we tried pompano, and it was GREAT! Sweet, sake-ey, a bit salty, great texture on the fish. The broiled sweet crispy skin is the best part! Served with an amazing dai-ginjo sake.

The recipe was from Tom Douglas' Seattle Kitchen, and is basically the recipe that Uwajimaya uses for their awesome Black Cod Kasuzuke. Which is:
Black Cod/Salmon Kasuzuke

4 (6 oz.) slices of fish fillet (Choose from: Black Cod, Salmon, Snapper, or Chilean Sea Bass)

Marinade:
  • 1/2 cup Kasuzuke (Sake Kasu, a by-product of the Sake making process)
  • 2 Tablespoon sake
  • 3 Tablespoon mirin, sweet cooking rice wine
  • 1/4 cup of water
  • 3 Tablespoon brown sugar
  • 2 Tablespoon miso (optional)
Preparation:

Salt fish, refrigerate overnight, and wipe dry. Prepare marinade, add water as needed to make a paste. Coat fish with marinade, cover, refrigerate 3 days (or may be frozen at this point). Scrape off marinade & broil both sides until nicely browned (approximately 4-5 minutes each side). Save marinade to use again.
You can save the marinade and use again a few times. I'm going to try snapper sometime soon I think.

2 comments:

billjac said...

If you can't find sake kazu locally, try Momokawa's Pearl sake (which I've found at Whole Foods). It's only roughly filtered so there's an inch of kazu at the bottom of the bottle. I drink it as a dessert wine and usually use the more refined stuff for marinating. I'll try using the Pearl next time.

Russell Hews Everett said...

Hmm interesting point. You could probably use nigori sake, but you might want to run it through a couple layers of cheesecloth first though, the kasu is really a sortof thick paste. Kasu is way cheaper though...

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