Frozen bluefin tuna block from Great Alaska Seafood 冷凍オーストラリア産の黒鮪

 We have purchased quite a few items from Great-Alaska-Seafood. We tried frozen sashimi-grade yellowfin tuna or "kihada-maguro" 黄肌マグロ blocks which were on a par with the ones we can get at our Japanese grocery store. Recently we received an email from Great-Alaska Seafood about a special offer for Australian aqua-cultured sashimi-grade blackfin tuna, "Hon-maguro or Kuro-maguro" クロマグロ. In general I am a fan of any tuna but I tend to like blackfin a bit more than yellowfin. Great-Alaska’s advertising was pinpointed targeting. They clearly “had-my-number/Knew-where-I lived”/had-me-dialed-in”. I instantly succumbed to the offer and ordered the tuna. If I recall correctly I had to call a special number (rather than order on the internet) and the offer was good for only one day. The offer consisted of a total of 8 lbs made up of 8,1 lb packages,  half-and-half chu-toro 中トロ and akami 赤身.  As you can see below, the blocks were irregular in size and inconsistent in shape. I surmise that because they were not cut like Japanese “saku” blocks which are neatly of equal size and shape they probably could not be used in a Japanese sushi bar for example. 

Each packages are marked either  “akami” (left) or “chu-toro” (right) .

We first tried the smallest package which was marked as “akami”. I served two small dishes.

The picture below shows a dish of straight forward sashimi with cucumber sunomono きゅうりの酢の物 with tomato garnished with “ikura” salmon roe. The akami was certainly better than the frozen yellowfin tuna and good enough but not great.

I also made it into cubes of tuna and avocado 鮪とアボカドの角切りon a bed of arugula dressed with soy sauce, garlic, sesame oil.

So bottom line is that this is not bad. It is certainly better than yellowfin tuna but it was not truly great. Nonetheless we are satisfied that we have this choice and will have absolutely no trouble “choking” it down .