Mefun (salted salmon kidney) ✦

Mefun

What it is

The dark line a cook scrapes from a salmon’s backbone is not blood but the kidney, and Hokkaidō salts it and matures it for months until it is near-black and glossy. The word is Ainu in origin, and the product is made almost only from autumn chum, the one run in which the strip is thick enough to be worth taking.

In the kitchen

It is intensely salty and faintly bitter — a few grams on hot rice or beside sake, never a spoonful. If it is too strong, rinse it briefly in sake rather than water; water carries the flavour off with the salt.

Goes with

Rice Junmai sake Daikon Nori Cucumber Negi

Same species

Ikura Trout roe Sujiko

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