This column comes from the Eat Voraciously newsletter. Sign up here to get one weeknight dinner recipe, tips for substitutions, techniques and more in your inbox Monday through Thursday.
Column by G. Daniela Galarza
In this new salmon recipe, I’m giving summer corn and shishito peppers an opportunity to steal the limelight from salmon slathered with miso, honey and butter. It’s a riff on a dish from Hokkaido, Japan.
After setting a goal to learn more about Japanese cooking techniques in 2022, last December, I spent two spectacular weeks with friends in the country. There were many wonderful tastes: new-to-me shellfish, exquisite wagashi, half a dozen types of ramen, fresh tofu skin, plump gyoza, sweet potato soft serve. I could go on and on.
One day in Tokyo, hungry and wandering around solo, I popped into a small restaurant and impulsively ordered a dish from a digital kiosk based entirely on the photograph of the food. (Unfortunately, I don’t understand or speak Japanese.) Only after taking a bite did I ask someone what it was. “Chan chan yaki,” the man behind the counter said with a patient smile.
Later, I looked it up. It’s a dish from Hokkaido, the grassy, mountainous island prefecture in the north that is well-known as the heart of Japan’s dairy industry. At every hotel we stayed at in Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, the breakfast buffets featured little round packets of butter labeled as being from Hokkaido. I hoarded them, convinced that it was the best butter I had ever tasted — simultaneously light and rich, with a faint sweetness — determined to find a way to sneak some back to the States with me. (Alas, this was not to be.)
Cooks in Hokkaido use that butter in all sorts of ways — one of which is chan chan yaki, a homey dish of miso-butter salmon. Many cooks know that miso and salmon are an easy match. The salty fermented soybean or grain paste stands up well to the fish’s rich flesh, as in this riff on ochazuke, this corn chowder and this simple grilled salmon. In Hokkaido, the miso gets blended with butter, creating a sauce with depth and umami that melts into the tender fish, no matter how it’s cooked.
In this spin on chan chan yaki, I’ve added honey and garlic to the miso-butter mix. I like to broil the fish on a sheet pan alongside corn kernels and sweet and sneakily spicy shishito peppers for a meal that takes me back to Japan — and makes summer linger just a little longer.
