鰰

In this blog's grand tradition of posting pictures of fish that I eat, here are some more pictures of fish that I have eaten.


This is a hatahata, which is apparently sailfin sandfish in English. It's kind of hard to tell from the picture, but the skin is almost like a frogs, brown and spotty and very smooth. The body is very soft.

One thing I have learned from eating fish like all the time is that different fish are put together differently, and, as a result, come apart differently. Here's what I mean. To gut kisu, it works really well to cut down the ventral side and use the side of the knife to push the guts out. That also works fairly well for sanma, but not quite as well, as the intestines generally stick a bit. Aji, on the other hand, are all bony and it is much harder to gut them in that way. I don't really have a good method for them, but I haven't eaten any of those in a while. Renkodai are even worse like that. They're very spiny and bony and have hard scales, but I found that it's very easy to pull the meat up off the bones, like opening the fish up as if it were a book, and scraping the meat off from the scales. Then you just have a bunch of loose meat, which I think is good for making fish meatballs, but I couldn't find a recipe for that particular fish, so it was just experimenting. I think the key is the cavity (I forget the term) in which all the guts sit. In kisu and sanma, which are long, skinny fish, the organs are stretched out almost the length of the fish, making them kind of like hoses with fins. Renkodai and, as I found out tonight, hatahata have all the guts towards the front of the fish, right behind the head in a more sac-like cavity. So, for hatahata, which I found worked well was cutting right behind the head cross wise on the dorsal side, guillotine-style, then pulling on the head, which almost magically removed everything else with it. Fascinating stuff!

I found a recipe, which was really simple and followed it. All I did was batter them in a mix of flour, pepper, and a bit of salt (this is Japan, after all), and fry them, which was really quick. The yellow blob there between fish is ginger. 旨い！

On a related note, the counter for fish (at least fish that you are cooking) is 尾, bi. The character is usually read o on its own, and it means "tail." Watch out for sharks!