Friday, July 31, 2020

Red wine "Zuke" tuna and avocado 鮪の赤ワイン漬けとアボカド

This is part of the continuous effort to use frozen items before they get too old. In the freezer I found this sashimi tuna block which was labeled “best used by August of 2019”. (At July 2020 it was one month short of being a year past its “best by” due date—not too bad). This is one we got from the Japanese grocery store. Recently we tried a similar yellowfin tuna "saku" sashimi block from "Great Alaska Seafood" and I noticed it seemed to contain less water than the ones from the Japanese grocery store. I knew this one would have a high water content, so I thawed it on a rectangular plate lined with paper towel, uncovered, in the refrigerator. The paper towel was soaked when it finished thawing. I made "Negitoro" ネギトロ in the evening. The next evening, from the remaining half, I made this variation/combination of "Zuke" 漬け and "Tuna and avocado cubes" 鮪とアボカドの角切り. Using red wine in the marinade was inspired by the recipe I saw on-line  (In Japanese) and similar in idea to chicken liver simmered in red wine.


I garnished it with chiffonade of perilla and some white sesame.



Ingredients: (appetizers for two)
1/2 block of sashimi tuna (in our case, frozen yellowfin), thawed if frozen, cut into small cubes
1/2 ripe avocado

Marinade:
3 tbs red wine (I had an open California cab).
2 tbs soy sauce (I reduced the soy sauce from the original recipe)
1 tbs mirin
1/4 tsp dark sesame oil

Directions
In a Ziploc bag, add the marinade and tuna cubes. Remove the air as much as possible and let it marinate in the refrigerator for a few hours (in my case, it was close to10 hours).
Just before serving, take out the tuna cubes, blot off the excess marinade using a paper towel.
>Remove the stone and skin from the avocado, cut into bite-sized pieces, dress with either lemon juice or yuzu juice (to prevent discoloration, I used yuzu juice from the bottle).
Mix the tuna and avocado in a bowl ( I added a few more drops of Yuzu juice).
Serve on the perilla leaves and garnish with a chiffonade of perilla and some sesame seeds.

This was pretty good especially considering that the frozen yellowfin tuna which was passed its prime. I thought we would add soy sauce when we ate it but the tuna was nicely seasoned and there was no need to add soy sauce. Since it was marinated in red wine, this could have gone well with red wine but we had cold sake.

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