Chicken skin salad with yuzu-koshou 雛皮の柚子胡椒サラダ

This is a variation on the theme of chicken skin. I was going to make a simple chicken skin dish but found out I was out of Ponzu (-shouyu) sauce. So I made the sauce with soy sauce, rice vinegar and yuzu koshou 柚子胡椒. This is a perfect refreshing sunomono 酢の物 salad to start.



Dressing: I made a mixture of soy sauce (reduced salt, 2 tbs), rice vinegar (3 tbs) and the juice accumulated in the container of saka mushi or sake-steamed chicken (2 tbs).  You should taste it and if it is too salty or vinegary, you might want to dilute this with dashi broth if you did not make saka mushi chicken. This dressing is similar to  a Japanese vinegar dressing called “Nihaizu” 二杯酢. I added about 1/2 tsp of yuzu-koshou in 7 tbs of the soy sauce vinegar mixture but the amount of yuzu-koshou is up to your taste.

Chicken skin: This is again the skin from two spilt breasts I made into saka mushi chicken. As usual, after removing any fat layer I could remove I sliced it into a thin julienne and marinated in the above dressing overnight in the refrigerator.

Other items: I just used whatever was available cutting it into julienne of similar size to the chicken skin pieces. From the left, wakame seaweed (1/4 cup after hydration, hydrated and roughly cut, gold thread egg or “kinshiran” 金糸卵 (from one egg), cucumber (one mini-cucumber, sliced on a slant and julienned, and daikon radish, 2 inch segment, peeled, sliced and julienned. The cucumber and daikon were salted, kneaded, and let stand for a few minutes, with the excess moisture squeezed out.



I added the wakame, cucumber and daikon into the container in which the chicken skin marinated in the yuzu-koshou sauce and mixed. I served this in a shallow grass bowl making a small mound in the center and topped them with golden thread egg as seen in the first picture.

This was much better than I expected. The yuzu-koshou gave it a nice zing of yuzu citrus flavor. This is a very nice refreshing sunomono salad. You could easily substitute the chicken skin with ham or any cooked meat. I can also add threads of jelly fish or kurage くらげ to this for the texture. I could also add sesame oil to this but without sesame oil, this is more refreshing.