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Grilled eel rice is known as a summer poem in Japan. Every Year in July, Japan has a special eel Festival, a single day as a festival to celebrate eating grilled eel, which shows how popular grilled eel rice is as a classic dish among the Japanese people.
Eel rice, as a classic dish, involves many specific cooking skills. Many Japanese restaurants are limited by their unfamiliarity with the cooking skills and procedures of grilled eel rice, and their level is also uneven.
Therefore, this article will let you go from a foodie to a technical foodie from 7 aspects, and teach you how to distinguish the level of eel rice in a Japanese restaurant.
In Japan, there are three years of learning how to make skewers, eight years of learning how to kill eels, and a lifetime of learning how to roast eels, which is used to describe the difficulty of eel cooking.
No matter how the kanto school of Japan cuts the eel in the back or the kansai school cuts the eel in the belly, the first-class eel shop has the first-class knife skill.
It only takes three cuts to kill an eel. If the eel is cut more than three times, it is easy to see the knife marks when eating the eel.
The specific differences in knife skills are as follows: each knife is cut quickly rather than slowly, and the appearance of eel must have the same thickness and neat alignment of the left and right sides of eel flesh as shown in the picture, without redundant knife marks and scraps of meat.
At a first-class Japanese restaurant, eel rice is served with eels in exquisite lacquerware.
3. look at the eel species using river eel
Established Japanese restaurants occasionally use wild eels as ingredients, but wild eels are so rare that even the eel god who opened his restaurant insists on using only wild eels almost went out of business.
Old-line eel shops definitely use Japanese eels as raw materials. Some restaurants may use European eels or American eels to grill eels, which can be hard to tell apart for those who don't eat them often.
Because the oil distribution of The Japanese eel is different from that of the European eel and the American eel, the oil of the Japanese eel is mainly concentrated in the meat.
Therefore, the specific taste difference of the Japanese eel from other river eel species is that the oil blends with the lean meat, and the taste is more delicate.
High-end Japanese food stores will definitely use the eel roasted on the spot. However, no matter the methods of kanto or Kansai schools, the eel is required to be roasted properly. If the eel is shallow, it will not be scorched enough and the flavor will not be good.
Therefore, how the eel is roasted can be determined by the skin of the eel, which requires the eel: the skin spot is small and more uniform without foaming, which is excellent.
The eel kabayaki has to be repeatedly smeared with soy sauce. If ordinary soy sauce is used, the grilled eel in this eel restaurant has no soul. A high-level Japanese food restaurant must use its own secret soy sauce to roast eel. Secret soy sauce is the soul of a bowl of eel rice.
The rice cooked with eel is evenly and plump, neither too dry nor too wet, so it can keep certain water absorption and fully absorb the oil of sauce and eel itself. If you taste the rice, the grains will not be hard. Pour a little of the sauce into the rice. The rice will absorb it immediately.
7 how to eat
One way to eat eel is to eat eel three times. One way to eat eel is to taste the flavor of eel cooked by charcoal fire, and the other way is to add half of the ingredients (such as sesame seeds, nori, scallions, and wasabi) to the eel rice.
Make eel rice for three meals. Add the stock made by each Japanese food store to make eel rice not greasy and fragrant. Good sauce can enhance the taste of eel.
However, this three-eat method is only a method in central Japan, which is not accepted by the old brand restaurants of Kanto and Kansai schools in Japan.
They think that three-eat method is putting the cart before the horse, but makes people forget to taste the pure taste of charcoal grilled eel.
Established restaurants generally only follow the traditional kanto or Kansai style of eating.
