Marinated tuna bowl 鮪漬け丼

When we get sashimi items from Catalina, it is not possible to finish everything in two days unless we have guests. To finish up everything in time, I need to plan ahead so that some portions of the sashimi may last into the 3rd day. One way is to make a marinated tuna  or "zuke" preparation. I used this technique often to make a low-quality frozen block of yellow fin tuna more palatable but, of course, this can be applied to good quality tuna.

When I prepared the block of top loin tuna, I separated the red meat "akami" 赤身 and marinated it. Although I posted a few variations of the marinades before, this time I used a very simple marinade of mirin, sake, and soy sauce (2:2:3) ratio. I used this marinade for the chiai with nattou dish as well. I did not do "yubiki" 湯引き or "tataki" たたき preparation for this (for no reason, just a bit lazy).

This was an ending dish for the 3rd evening after we received blocks of tuna sashimi from Catalina.

Making this dish is simple as long as you have sushi rice and marinated tuna sashimi.

Sushi rice: We got a new IH (induction heater) rice cooker a few weeks ago but did not have a chance to use it until now. So, we read the instructions and made the very first batch of sushi rice. This new cooker has a gauge for sushi rice--simply a bit less water. Using this setting, however, the rice came out a bit too dry or hard to our taste. In any case, I made sushi rice by mixing in seasoned rice vinegar (from the bottle). I placed the sushi rice on the bottom of the bowl, put the slices of the marinated tuna sashimi on top, smeared a small amount of wasabi on the tuna and garnished it with chopped chives and nori strips.

This is one of the cannot-go-wrong combinations of sushi rice, nori and tuna.