Happy Donabe Life

Tag Archives: Seafood

Dashi Chazuke

Chazuke (or Ochazuke) is a simple bowl of comfort. It’s basically a bowl of plain rice with your choice of topping(s), and tea or dashi is poured over. During the summer, I eat cold chazuke (with cold rice and cold tea/ dashi) a lot and keeps me cool. Once the weather getting cooler, I enjoy freshly-cooked steamy donabe rice with seasoned hot dashi over it. So soothing! My go-to toppings are canned oil sardines which I always stock in pantry with shio-kombu. Wasabi can add a nice accent, too.

Happy Donabe Life!

Easy Crab Rice

Kani Meshi

Crab and rice are always a great combo for me. Here’s a super easy and delicious donabe crab rice I’ve been making quite often. For a casual supper during a week, there is no need to go for a premium kind, like Dungeness crab, but it’s important to use a high quality crab meat, so you can savor the natural and clean sweetness of it. Luckily, I find a reasonably priced tinned kind from a local fish market. I like to finish with some snow peas and herbs, but feel free to change or omit the toppings. Happy Donabe Life!

Halibut & Daikon Hot Pot

Mizore Nabe

Here’s my healthy seafood hot pot, Halibut Mizore Nabe – Halibut (or your choice of fish) is quickly simmered with vegetables and finished with a generous amount of grated daikon on top. With the addition of the glass noodles, this dish makes a very satisfying one pot donabe meal.

Seafood Chirashi Sushi

Bara Chirashi

My donabe Seafood Chirashi Sushi (Seafood scattered over sushi rice) is really simple to make, and it always comes out so festive and delicious! Double-lid Donabe Rice Cooker, Kamado-san can make the perfectly shiny sushi rice, and you just need to decorate the rice with your choice of sashimi quality seafood and vegetables. That’s it. I normally buy extra amount of seafood so I can serve any remainder on the side.

For those who want to know where I buy my seafood from, I love Kai Gourmet! They have the sustainably sourced premium sashimi quality seafood and deliver to your door, anywhere in the US. I can order by midnight and get my order overnight. I have been a huge fan of Kai Gourmet for many years.

This time, I partnered with Kai Gourmet and have a promo code for you. Visit their website and enter the below code to receive 10% discount for your order (full priced items only). Hope you will try their seafood!

Website: https://kaigourmet.com/

Promo Code: ToiroKai10

Garlic Black Cod

Super simple and super good. I’ve been making this dish in different kinds of donabe and the dish is always a great success. It’s a sizzling dish of generous amount of garlic etc. and oyster sauce marinated black cod, finished in the oven. Minimum effort is required to execute the dish, so it’s a perfect dish to cook for your guests at a dinner party. And everybody loves it!

The tagine-style donabe , Fukkura-san, with its flat skillet bottom, cooks the ingredients most effectively. Or, you can also use other kinds of donabe (dry-heating capable is preferred), too. For a small serving, I also like to use my compact one-handle donabe , Izakaya Nabe. Happy Donabe Life!

Sea Bream Shabu Shabu

Tai Shabu

Spring really makes me want to eat Tai (sea bream) every day. I enjoy it in sashimi, carpaccio, sushi, etc. And, here’s another Tai dish I love, which is Tai Shabu. It’s basically a simple fish shabu shabu and always so good. If you can save enough broth, hope you enjoy the shime (finishing) noodle course, too.

Sea Bream Rice

Tai Meshi

One of my favorite dishes to eat during the spring is Tai Meshi (Sea Bream Rice), made in a donabe. I cook the rice with a whole Tai (sea bream), so it’s not only very flavorful but the dish is perfect for festivity. I usually cook this dish with my double-lid donabe rice cooker, Kamdo-san, but since the fish I got this time was much bigger than my 3 rice-cup size Kamado-san, I decided to make it in my large-size donabe (I used my donabe steamer, Mushi Nabe, without the steam grate). By bending its tail, I could barely fit it in my donabe! To garnish, kinome (sansho leaves) are typically used in Japan. But since it’s hard to find kinome here in LA, I used dill and it paired with the rice beautifully.

Baked Foil-Wrapped Seafood

Kaisen Hoiru-Yaki

Foil-baked seafood is such an easy-prepping and delicious dish. It also requires basically no cleaning of the cooking equipment. I always make it in my tagine-style donabe , Fukkura-san, as not only it distributes the heat perfectly without getting the bottom burned quickly but also it makes a very nice presentation at the table. The dish is flavored simply with sake, butter, and a drizzle of soy sauce and it’s so perfect! When the foil is gently cut open and the dish is revealed, it brings so much excitement, and also the aroma of butter-sake infused ingredients is so irresistible. Smoked soy sauce makes the dish so special but a regular soy sauce can work just fine, too.

Black Cod Sukiyaki with Grated Daikon

Okisuki

Okisuki is basically a seafood sukiyaki dish (“Oki” means ocean and “Suki” is short for Sukiyaki), and I love making this dish with black cod, as the buttery texture and rich flavor of this fish goes so well with the sauce. But, feel free to substitute fish or any other ingredients with your choice of seafood and/ or vegetables. Making this dish is as simple as just piling up the ingredients, pour the sauce, and let them cook in the donabe. It’s so tasty! If you can save the broth after enjoying all the ingredients cooked in it, you can add udon or ramen noodles to make the “shime” (finishing) course.

Spicy Soy-Marinated Tuna Rice Bowl

Spicy Maguro Zuke-Don

When I get really fresh fish, I enjoy eating it straight as sashimi, or I also enjoy creating a quick one-bowl meal by topping it over rice. It never goes wrong. You can make it with sushi rice or just plain rice. I also like to quickly marinade the sashimi in soy-based sauce to top over the rice. It’s called Zuke-Don. Zuke means “marinade”, and Don is donburi rice bowl. Here’s my really tasty Spicy Zuke-Don with fresh tuna.

Steamed Black Cod with Soy-Negi Sauce

My large donabe steamer, Mushi Nabe, works so hard all year round. Among my favorite preparations with this donabe is a steamed fish dish. This is Steamed Black Cod with Soy-Negi Sauce. I layered black cod with tofu and shiitake mushrooms in a bowl and steamed in the donabe steamer, and poured this aromatic soy & scallion sauce (with a great kick with la-yu oil) over it to enjoy. This dish takes little effort and is really flavorful,and it also keeps your body so warm. Feel free to substitute with different kinds of fish.

Salmon and Daikon in Garlic Butter Miso Sauce

Garlic, miso, and butter…they make a brilliant combination of flavors. The main ingredients to cook in the sauce are salmon (or you can use your choice of high quality rich flavor fish) and daikon, and they are piled up with a few other ingredients and quickly simmered in the sauce. The dish has a nice rich flavor with refreshing accent with the yuzu juice. I used cilantro and daikon sprouts as a garnish for this recipe, but dill is also a nice alternative.

Shrimp Wonton Hot Pot

Ebi Wantan Nabe

This recipe is always popular among friends, and I often involve my guests in the wonton making. Everybody makes her/ his own shape of wontons. They are easy to shape and fun to do. My shrimp wontons don’t contain ground meat (such as pork or chicken), so you can really enjoy the natural sweet flavors of the shrimp and its bouncy texture.

I introduce two kinds of dipping sauces for this recipe. The Yuzu & Ayu Dipping Sauce has the beautiful aroma and it’s quite light. The Sesame Dipping Sauce has the nice rich flavor. The soup is also very tasty, so you can simply enjoy this dish just with Yuzu-Kosho or Kanzuri on the side.

Tuna Hot Pot

Negi-Ma Nabe

One day, a very good customer of ours stopped by at our shop to give us a block of fresh tuna he just caught from fishing in the Pacific Ocean. How sweet of him! It was super fresh sashimi quality, so we tried some as sashimi with different kinds of soy sauces we have, then for the remaining, I decided to make a donabe hot pot with it. Tuna hot pot in donabe is a popular dish in Japan, and it’s typically made as a combination with negi (Japanese green onion). It’s called Negi-Ma Nabe. The name is short for Negi (green onion) Maguro (tuna) Nabe (hot pot).

This dish is very simple, and all you need is good quality dashi, tuna (obviously!), green onion (for the name’s sake) and any other ingredients you like to add. I like it with my ponzu.

For the shime (finishing course), I like making quick ojiya (porridge) with freshly-cooked donabe rice. 

Black Cod Hot Pot in Saikyo Miso & Soymilk Broth

Saikyo Miso to Tonyu Nabe

Saikyo miso is a traditional white miso from Kyoto, Japan. The color is pale and it has a natural umami-rich sweet flavor due to the higher content of koji rice (malted rice) in the miso. The sodium level is also much lower than other types of miso, so you can use a good amount of it to enjoy its rich flavor in a soup, etc. without making the dish too salty. This hot pot dish has the combination of dashi, soymilk, and Saikyo miso in the broth, so the flavor is rich and complex. Make sure to use the real Saikyo Miso from Kyoto and pure rich soymilk (with no additives) such as Banrai Soymilk.

Buttery fish like cod is perfect for this broth, other types of seafood or even chicken would certainly work in this dish, too.

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