How Japanese Dried Bonito Is Made

I was at a fish ramen place in Tokyo, they had a bonito block with a hand operated shaver, looked like a giant pencil sharpener.

Next to the ramen they would serve the bonito flakes contained in a small net, And suggest to soak for 10 seconds, but no more than 30 because the flavor would be too intense.

Reading this almost put me in that place. Thank you!

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I'm surprised to find out there are actually people who like Oden.

> I'm allergic to fish...

I'd guess that your allergy is to some class of proteins in the fish - and that the production steps for dried bonito (and maybe the time required) denature or destroy those proteins.

By the sound of it, you have a protein allergy. That is, you are allergic to a specific, or set of specific, proteins. When the proteins are denatured, you seem to not be allergic. This can happen at high temperature, low pH, or sometimes through oxidation. There’s a substantial amount of research on this if you want to look it up. But, for it to be particularly constructive, first you would need to determine to which protein you are allergic

There are other types of dried fish from different cuisines. Sri Lankan food uses dried tuna very heavily, and some other types of dried fish in particular dishes. Might be worth trying to see whether you react to that.

Do you react to other fish products such as south east Asian fish sauce? Salted and/or fermented fish?

My wife is also allergic to fish.

She can have bonito and fish sauce, and (most strangely) canned tuna. Any fresh fish makes her violently ill. She had to learn the hard way that many restaurants make their tuna salad with fresh tuna.

Thanks for the extra video, but I think the video in the original post is more informative and higher quality. Did you miss seeing it?

Very Japanese. Process is often more important than efficiency

Also dried fish dishes. There is a shop near where I live in Britain (and not in a big city) that sells both, and dried shrimp.

Is there another way to do it? I suppose you could sort of fillet them all off in the initial cutting operation but you'd lose a large chunk of meat and it might not actually get them all. Deboning after the boil seems like a Pareto optimal time/ease/waste trade.

I’m sure someone over smoked a fish and someone desperate tried to eat it. Then it was gradually improved.

Almost certainly it was an incremental discovery process, first cooking and/or fumigating tuna for other consumption, then extending its shelf life by fermentation and/or sun-drying, discovering that evening out the exterior with paste helps extend it, then solving the problem that extended drying leads to hard consistency by shaving off very thin slices, stuff like that. They didn’t set out with “oh we need very thin dried tuna slices for dashi and seasoning” and then invented a whole process for that.

It’s very easy to make dashi at home with bonito and kombu (dried kelp). From there you can use it as a base for different soups or to cook with.

There are different kinds of dashi but those are the two ingredients I use since they’re readily available and non-perishable.

Delicious, buttery fish. Makes excellent sashimi too.

Some flakes are really good in (dark) miso soup.

This is true of pretty much all smoked food, isn't it?

*1882

Is this supposed to be some insightful criticism? They've been making the same product for 144 years, and managed to retain the technique from an era only 14 years prior. That's an achievement.

If a place started doing the same in 2017, guess what, they could still make it like they did in the Edo period.

Apart from a bit of machinery for lifting, and starting with frozen fish (which they thaw first anyway), it's basically all manual labour, including adjusting the fire temperature.