It's the time of year where mullets （烏魚) start traveling down the Taiwan Strait, their roe sacs are at their most full when they past by Taiwan.
It is one of Taiwanese food delicacies (烏魚子）, in Japanese food it is a 珍味 of Nagasaki (からすみ) 🤤 it is served with radish and sliced garlic sprouts
Decided to go the traditional route and prepare this dish at home. First it is cleaned and salted to draw out moisture and then pressed to be dried in the sun for a few days.
Do you dip in soy sauce? Or is it eaten raw without anything else?
There's a few ways of preparing it, the most common is to cover it with highly distilled sorghum wine （高粱） then just set it on fire to let the alcohol cook the outside to give it a nice fragrance. It can be a difficult technique.
Many households these days just use a blowtorch or a toaster often
The idea is to give it a nice firm texture on the outside to make it hard enough to slice thin pieces, and leave it soft on the inside so the roe still retains the freshness to stick to ones teeth.
The radish and garlic sprouts can also be substituted with sliced apples or pears. There's also dishes that incorporate cooked-through roe in things like fried rice or used as fillings for other dishes.
When buying a prepared mullet roe of decent size it can cost from 150k sats to even 350k sats at a speciality store, it is a sought after gift item this time of year
Buying the mullet to diy is only 40k sats at the market 😏 however it is a bit of a lottery to grab a nice piece. Hopefully with more practice picking out the right mullet gets easier
This time of year is also when mullet "shells" are made available at markets, it's basically the mullet without the roe or sperm(?烏魚鰾) sac🤭11k sats ea.
