Sunday, November 22, 2009

Monk fish liver "ankimo" 鮟肝

Monk fish liver "ankimo" with orange marmalade sauce 鮟肝のオレンジママレイドソース

Monkfish liver "ankimo" あんきも鮟肝 is one of our top favorite delicacies. We think the best we had was at "Tako Grill". Chef Kudo prepares a monkfish liver in house (he said it was steamed) without making it to a regular cylinder shape. It is so delicate and tasty, when they offer "ankimo" at Tako Grill, we order it without fail. Ankimo is often equated to foie gras. Actually, we like ankimo better than foie gras. The one shown here is a commercial cylindrical-shaped frozen one which came from Catalina Offshore Products (originated in Japan). It is not as delicate in texture as Chef Kudo's but it is quite good.


Ankimo is usually served with "ponzu" (more accurately "ponzu-shoyu" sauce) and grated daikon with red pepper (momiji oroshi) もみじおろし. For a change, we made our version of the Chef Kudo's sauce which he serves with ankimo at Tako Grill. We like this sauce because it has a lovely orange flavor that goes well with the ankimo. Although we did not ask for the recipe, my wife figured that it was made of orange marmalade and soy sauce (She has a very discriminating palate, for sure, better than mine). I experimented with the ratio and found that close to 4:1 ratio of marmalade to soy sauce appears to work best and closely emulates the sauce we had at the restaurant (it was a surprise that we had to use that much marmalade, I started with 1:1 and soy sauce and the taste was too strong, salty with no orange flavor). Initially I heated up the mixture but marmalade dissolves nicely without heat and appears to retain the orange flavor better. I suggest to just keep adding the marmalade to soy sauce until the desired sweetness and orange flavor is reached. One disclaimer; we do not know how Chef Kudo really makes this sauce. So this recipe may be totally different from his, although it tastes similar to us. This may go well with a red wine such as Rhone or Shiraz from Australia since it does not have strong acidity but we had this with cold sake.

1 comment:

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