Very crunchy and quite! fishy, yet delicious, expensive kazunoko

Posted on Jan 1, 2012 in Hiroko's Blog

Kazunoko (herring roe): Kazunoko is a reconstituted dried herring roe. I love the popping crunching noise which echoes in my mouth while eating them. Kazunoko is an expensive delicacy and is an indispensable part of Osechi ryori. Without it Osechi ryori is not complete. Tiny eggs of herring roe symbolizes family prosperity, and its golden yellow color represents gold. Herring roe is sold dried or salt cured. For this year’s special New Year’s party I have acquire the very special dried variety at the end of last year. It takes 3 to 4 days to reconstitute it properly. After the roe is reconstituted, I carefully remove thin films which covers tiny eggs, and pickle them in the mixture of mirin (sweet cooking wine) and shoyu (soy sauce) sauce. Every year when my mother was preparing the herring roe, she told us not to use a knife to cut each roe into bite sized pieces, but break it with fingers. The knife smashes tiny eggs and allows fish juice (quite strong) spills out of them. We serve herring roe garnished with little fish flakes.