Jump to: the food / recreating the food / trying it out / recipes
The scene
Suzu's friend Miho's family is involved with the fishing industry in Kamakura. One day Suzu, Fuuta and another member of the football team have fun taking part in preparing freshly caught whitebait.
The mass of tiny fish is washed and then cooked.
When the work for the day is done, Miho's friends get a couple of bags full of whitebait to take home.
Later that day the sisters are about to have dinner. Yoshino has agreed to take a new position at her bank. It involves meeting with clients with her boss so she's bought some new clothes which she excitedly parades in front of her sisters.
Sachi asks if she is really that serious about her new attitude of living for the job. Could this change in attitude be only because Yoshino got dumped again? Yoshino in return takes a jab at Sachi's dedication to her job as a nurse but before Sachi has time to get mad, Chika and Suzu cut the argument short by loudly proclaiming "itadakimasu". No arguing when it's time to eat!
The three older sisters are eager to find out what Suzu thinks of the dish, a speciality in Kamakura.
It's delicious! Suzu digs in with gusto.
The food
We get a good look at what's in Suzu's bowl.
That's most certainly a bowl of rice topped with some of the whitebait Suzu brought back home, plus some kind of greens on top.
We also see Yoshino add soy sauce to hers.
When I was first watching the movie, I had no idea what I was looking at here. Whitebait, meaning recently hatched, immature fish, is not something that's part of the fishing culture in every part of the world, including here in Finland. However, it didn't take me long to find out what it was because another whitebait dish is an important detail in the film and gets mentioned a lot in reviews. But what exactly is this particular dish?
It soon turned out that a rice bowl topped with whitebait is actually a bit of a specialty in Kanagawa prefecture where the seaside city of Kamakura is located. There are two basic versions of the dish, shirasu don and kamaage shirasu don, the difference being whether or not the whitebait is raw or cooked, respectively (there are also other varieties of shirasu that can also be used). The basic gist of the dish is that it's a bowl of rice topped with raw or cooked whitebait and grated daikon radish, although different variations can add more toppings like ginger, green onion, shiso leaves and more.
Recreating the food
There are a few different recipes for shirasu don out there, so I just had to pick a suitable one. I went with this recipe on the blog Create Eat Happy since it was quick and simple and for the most part looked like the dish in the film. Basically: steam rice, top with whitebait, grate some daikon radish, add soy sauce, finish with shiso (perilla) leaves.
However, the whitebait was going to be a problem. Whitebaiting isn't exactly ecologically viable and thus isn't really done in large parts of the world, including in Finland, so Finnish whitebait wasn't going to be available. And, as a honestly pretty exhaustive search through pretty much every Asian grocery shop and fishing vendor in Helsinki would reveal, neither is whitebait from anywhere else for that matter. Whitebait just isn't available here. It was thus necessary to find something to substitute for the whitebait. I did some digging and apart from some really out there ideas (bean sprouts flavoured with dried and crushed fish?), the best suggestions were simply other seafood, namely squid or scallops cut into thin strips or shrimp. I decided to go with the most easily available option, shrimp. I bought the usual kind of pre-shelled shrimp you can find anywhere here.
Another issue would be the shiso. Shiso or perilla is a relative of mint and a common ingredient in Asian cuisine - and also not available in Finnish grocery stores. The logical place to look for it were of course the various Asian markets, although my hopes for finding specifically Japanese shiso were low. And, indeed, I didn't find Japanese shiso. Alternatives suggested online were Thai basil or a combination of basil and mint, but I didn't really want to just use basil and mint and the first shop I went to was out of Thai basil. The Vietnamese shop Vii Voan had something very promising, however: something that was labeled as "perilla" on the shelf! The bag itself told me it was "la tia to":
It turned out it was indeed, perilla, just a Vietnamese variety! It's not the exact same as the Japanese kind as it has smaller leaves and a stronger flavour, but it was certainly as close as I was going to get. Into the shopping cart it went, along with a nice big radish.
Then it was just a matter of assembling the dish. Take the frozen shrimp out to thaw well in advance, then eventually steam the rice in the rice cooker, top with the "whitebait", grate some radish (some recipes suggest squeezing out excess liquid from the grated daikon, which is what I did), add soy sauce, top with thinly sliced shiso leaves. I also threw in some green onion.
Here it is!
Trying it out
This is, simply put, an excellent little dish. The simple flavours of rice and shrimp make the dish airy and fluffy, the grated radish flavoured with soy sauce provide a nice, umami-rich contrast with the rice and shrimp, and finally the shiso leaves give it a cool, refreshing edge. Definitely recommend giving this a try.
And what's more - this is such a simple, effortless dish that I could see it easily being modified to suit your tastes and available ingredients. Use whitebait if you can get it (and are alright with the ecological problems of whitebaiting, I suppose), some other seafood like I did here, or maybe even go with tofu or something else to make it vegan. Add other toppings or side dishes as you fancy.
Recipes used
Kamaage shires don (rice with whitebait): Create Eat Happy
Comments
Post a Comment