Salmon Pilaf

Putting grilled salmon into the rice pot is one of our favorite takikomigohan recipes. Especially when we have some ikura or sujiko in the house. But I wanted a change-up on our our standard salmon takikomigohan. This recipe is great if you find small bits and pieces of salmon for sale at your fishmonger.

In this version, I grilled the salmon and added it to the rice pot as usual (see recipe above). And, after the rice was cooked, flaked the salmon, removed any bones and the skin and returned the flaked salmon to the rice pot. This time I threw in some butter, salt, and pepper and incorporated the salmon into the rice. Easy and something that we'll make again and again.

Hotate Takikomi Gohan 帆立ご飯 Scallops and Rice

Takikomigohan is rice steamed with different ingredients. It can be as simple as green peas or as complicated as several different ingredients such as a gomokugohan. Gomokugohan would have five different ingredients in the rice pot with the rice like chicken, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, hijiki, and gobo, for example. The rice is steamed with water, sake, mirin, and soy sauce.

As Shinji is a fishmonger we often make our takikomigohan with seafood. If you are working with raw fish like a whole sea bream or a filet of salmon, the fish needs to be salted and grilled before adding it to the rice pot. If the fish is not grilled the rice will be very fishy. I made the mistake once and will never do it again.

This is a very simple recipe. The scallops are pre-cooked. The amount of liquid to rice is still one to one, as when steaming white rice. The only difference is that a bit of sake, mirin, and soy sauce is added to the cup before being topped off with water. Steam as normal.

Takikomigohan

Scallops

Japanese Rice

Zakkokumai 雑穀米

Brown rice was featured in a blog on the New York Times recently. Here is the link:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/eating-brown-rice-to-cut-diabetes-risk/

Whole grains are naturally more nutritious than white rice. I tried eating just brown rice for several months while living in Japan but was often disappointed. A great alternative for me was to add zakkokumai (a variety of grains) to the rice pot when steaming white rice.

In this blog is a photo of Kagayaki 6-Grain Rice, premixed zakkokumai. I just added a Tablespoon of this to one cup of uncooked white rice and steamed it together and the results are in the rice bowl. The six grains are black rice, purple barley, hull-less barley, rye berries, MG red rice, short grain brown rice.

Following is a list of zakkokumai ingredients popular in Japan:

Zakkokumai 雑穀米 are beans, grains and millets that can be added to a pot of rice before it is steamed. The result is colorful flecked and spotted rice, but most importantly, essential vitamins and minerals are added. These grains can be purchased separately or already pre-mixed. Following are some of the popular zakkokumai ingredients:

Amaransu – amaranth
Awa – foxtail millet
Azuki – dried azuki beans
Daizu – dried soybeans
Hadaga mugi - rye
Hato mugi – Job’s tears
Hie– Japanese barnyard millet
Kibi – common millet
Kinia - quinoa
Kuromame – black beans
Maru mugi – uncracked grains of barley
Mochi – sticky rice
Oshi mugi – rolled barley

Japanese Rice