Cured Hamachi

Ever since the man's tasted those gorgeous slices of fish at Ivan's, he's been dreaming about having it again. The fastest way to sink his teeth into it, will be do it ourselves, following Momofuku's cured hamachi recipe. So for the purpose of experimenting to find our groove, we'll be up to our ears in cured hamachi for the next few weeks. Not that I mind. It's going to be yummy.

As it is with all usage of spices in a marinade, there's a difference to the taste and color of the final product in using crushed coriander or ground coriander. We need to try out more variations. I'm also obsessed with tweaking that edamame dip. That's the green blobs in the photo. It's pretty much hummus. It can be complemented with many things, especially when we ate it with other items in a hotpot dinner.

Clearly, our plating skills leave much to be desired. This round, we skipped the presentation for the sake of volume, and dumped all slices onto one plate. It should have been split into two. Anyway. Onward, practise! Certainly, the cutting skills are going to suck. Japanese chefs train for 3 years to slice fish, and that's not even of a sashimi standard. The man's nowhere near that level. While we'll improve on taste, texture and presentation, the slicing is going to take a longer time, even if we use a really sharp sashimi knife. So there's no way we're going to serve this dish to sushi and sashimi purists.