Rice, Rice, Baby: Spilled Milk #180

Ikura don — a rice bowl with cured salmon roe — makes for a great splurge at home.

A HOLIDAY GIFT FROM AZ 

This year, we're offering a fantastic gift to new paid subscribers to Spilled Milk: Sign up and you'll get a code for 25% off everything from Shun Cutlery, Kai, Kai Housewares and Kershaw Knives, with free shipping for orders over $50. The code will be emailed to you once you subscribe, and then you can fill your cart! The discount will be valid until Jan. 31, 2024, and you just need to create an account on the Shun/Kershaw/Kai site while you shop. The code is valid for TWO uses across all of Shun's brands. 

If you're a free subscriber, you can get this gift by going paid. If you're already a paid subscriber, consider giving a subscription to Spilled Milk as a holiday present: Subscribers receive exclusive recipes and travel guides each week and can participate in my weekly "Ask Me Anything" chats.    

Your subscription means the world to me. I’ve spent over 40 years cooking, traveling and growing my community. The small fee helps compensate my team fairly. What's more, some of the proceeds from this newsletter will go toward charities like World Central Kitchen and Services for the UnderServed.

Brace yourself for your new addiction. AND you are going to learn two new tricks that will make you a better cook: How to make crispy shallots, and how to make cured egg yolks.

Ikura don, also called ikura donburi, is a Japanese comfort food popularized in America by chefs who’ve traveled to Japan over the last decade and found the entire world of rice bowls broad and vastly appealing. Ikura refers to the cured salmon roe on the rice in a bowl (don/donburi), but you can make it with any raw or grilled fish.

I see versions of these dishes on social media every day. As someone who dines out in Japanese restaurants all over America, I can assure you very few of them offer this INCREDIBLE dish on their menu, but many will if you ask for it. These bowls tend to be very expensive in restaurants, so the top tenth of 1 percent of them will offer them as part of an omakase experience. Some higher-end izakaya concepts have tried to offer them, but they haven’t worked very well to date. What you will always see in higher-end sushi restaurants is donburi with sliced raw fish or grilled eel (love it) and I would encourage you to try them — they are excellent.

A bowl like this one makes for a great splurge at home. Why pay $80 for something in a restaurant that you can make at home for 2/3 less, AND you can execute it as well as any restaurant can? I love making larger versions of this for company in and adding sea urchin, sliced red snapper, tuna belly and oshinko (a Japanese pickle) to make a full meal out of it.

I get many of my Japanese ingredients from The Japanese Pantry. Their soy sauces, mirni, togarashi, kombu, kizami nori, etc. are all of incredible quality. The key to ikura don perfection is the cured egg yolk. There are many ways to make these. They’re elegant and simple, but most of all a cured egg yolk is about as delicious as good gets, because the longer the yolk cures the jammier it becomes. I like a short timer for this dish, because I love the yolk running into the salmon roe and the hot rice. For other dishes I tend to leave the egg to cure overnight. Extra yolks I smear on toast. You wont regret having these around on the regular — enjoy.

Recipe: Ikura don