Japanese cuisine has been very popular in recent years, but the problem is that not everyone understands it well enough to make the right order in a restaurant or discuss its menu with friends. For example, only a few people know that sashimi is not even sushi at all, but a completely independent dish.
Sashimi is a very popular dish in Japan, consisting of slices of fish fillets cut in a special way and with a special knife, and you can take any fish. A prerequisite is that the fish is very fresh. Some progressive chefs also use a variety of seafood instead of fish, even meat fillets. Sashimi is served with vegetables, ginger, wasabi and soy sauce.
Sushi or sashimi?
Sometimes sashimi is confused with sushi, considering these two words to be just variations of the name of the same dish. In fact, sashimi is a completely independent dish, moreover, the Japanese themselves love it even more than sushi. The main feature of sashimi is that they are eaten without rice at all, whereas in sushi, rice is one of the main ingredients.
And just because rice is not served with sashimi, the freshness of the fish is very important - after all, in this case, rice cannot "mask" any flavors that fish fillets acquire during storage. By the way, although you can take any fish at the discretion of the hostess for cooking sashimi, it is still better not to take river fish, since it is very bony and gives off noticeable slime when fresh.
How to cut fish for sashimi
First of all, you need a long and very sharp knife, ideally a Japanese knife for slicing fish. You will also need a pair of tongs to remove bones in order to very efficiently clean the fillets from the smallest bones.
The fillet should be placed on a cutting board and cut lengthwise into two halves. Thus, you get two pieces of fillet, each of which will have an uneven thin edge. This edge should be carefully cut off, slowly passing the edge of a knife along the entire length of the piece of fish. Cut the half of the fillet processed in this way into thin slices - the sausage is cut in almost the same way.
Serving food on the table
Sliced fillets should be placed on a plate - it is important to remember that in traditional Japanese cuisine there must be an odd number of slices on the plate. Add vegetables to them: lettuce, sweet potatoes, radish, cucumber, tomatoes. In general, everything that can be found in the refrigerator, and that the hostess herself likes to eat with fish. Light white wine is served with sashimi, sake or sweet Japanese liqueurs can also be served. Those who do not drink alcohol can be advised to serve green tea with lemon and no sugar with sashimi.
The main thing in sashimi, as in any Japanese dish, is the decoration. The Japanese are generally very sensitive to the appearance of food and are always very concerned about giving the dish an unusual look. To decorate sashimi, you need to show quite a bit of imagination: cut the vegetables figuratively, arrange them beautifully with the fish, try to create an original color scheme on a plate.