Mackerel pan fried with miso sauce

 Hi there!

I moved from Vietnam to Japan since April, and from then until now I have been learning to cook Japanese food, or food in the Japanese style. I have bought many Japanese cook books and tried cooking different dishes. Some dishes are really good and I would like to introduce them in my blog here so that you - my readers - can also try and find out how good they taste.

I am a person who likes to eat vegetables, especially Vietnamese herbs. I like my meal to have many types of vegetables. Even stews should be decorated with leaves and flowers. I love pickles and salads, and do not like too much sugar or cream in my diet. I especially like spicy and tend to add fresh chili to my dishes, or at least chili flakes or dry chili. I think my taste for food is very much related to my origin which is of course Vietnam.

With that bit of description, I hope you get somehow what it's like when I say "delicious" for a specific dish. It is a balance of spices but subtly biased towards hot spicy, sour, and quite salty to some extent. It must be fresh and new. It cannot be greasy even just a bit. If someday I praise a creamy dish, it means I have eaten not so much but apparently seen the balance in that bit.

Today I want to introduce a special dish: Mackerel pan fried with miso sauce. It could resemble "Stew fish in fermented soy bean" (cá kho tương), but the fermented soy bean in Vietnam tastes stronger than miso and we usually cook fish longer than Japanese people do.

However, I think Mackerel pan fried with miso sauce tastes fantastic. The fact that fermented soy bean in Vietnam is saltier than Japanese miso results in milder taste in this mackerel fish, but this fish is tender and sweet in sake flavor, so I would prefer it to even our traditional fish. Don't get me wrong! I love our Vietnamese food, but as a young modern person, sometimes I find our traditional food quite strong to eat. In the past, we love strong-flavored food because we were in a hard time and we need a lot of rice to have a lot of energy to work, which is why food tends to be quite salty to go with large amount of rice. I would be objective that nowadays we are more focused on the food itself rather than the rice going along with it, so we should also be more open minded with a new way of seasoning.

Step 1: Prepare 200g of mackerel. Sprinkle salt on both sides of the fish, let it sit for 15 minutes so that the unami can get up. Then, wipe off the water and put it in a hot pan with olive oil, skin down. When the skin gets golden, flip the fish for the inner meat to get fried, then flip again for the skin to be down again. You can decide how long these flips should take, but my standard is that the fish meat should not be hard, so a little fried on the meat is enough. The skin should be shiny and glossy, so make sure it's not burnt but just golden brown.

Step 2: Prepare the sauce. Combine the following in a bowl: 50ml of sake, 20ml of mirin, 2 tbsp of sugar, 1.5 tbsp of miso paste, 2 tsp of soy sauce, 50ml of water, some slices of ginger and fresh chili.

Step 3: Pour the sauce onto the fish which is still being fried in the pan. As soon as the sauce simmer, cover with aluminum foil and the lid, leaving a little room on the edge of the lid for steam coming out. This step can last 10-15' depending on whether the sauce has thickened or not. I love to see it's condensed to a half compared to the start, then it's fine to turn of the heat and dish out.

You can add some leek at 2 last minutes to give it more flavor and as a nice garnishing item.