Moshio seaweed salt ✦

Sel d’algues moshio

What it is

Before Japan had salt pans it had moshio: seawater steeped with hondawara seaweed, then boiled down in clay pots. Excavated shards around the Seto Inland Sea let salt-makers on Kamagari island rebuild the method in the 1980s, and the beige crystals carry the seaweed's glutamate along with its salt.

In the kitchen

Use it where soy sauce would darken the plate — a pinch on white sashimi, tempura or chilled tofu supplies the salt and the savour together. Do not dissolve it into a stock; nothing survives that a cheaper salt would not do.

Goes with

Silken tofu (kinugoshi) Gilt-head bream Squid Rice Egg Cucumber Scallop Sea urchin

Same species

Hijiki

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