Welcome to FISH FOOD TIMES
Mar. 2025 issue No.255
blackthroat seaperch
It's small, but...
I got some fresh, but relatively small blackthroat seaperch from Nagasaki Prefecture, averaging 150g each.
At the fish counter I always visit, these blackthroat seaperch were being sold for 780 yen each, so I got a discount and bought three of them, and decided to write an article about them in this month's issue.
FISH FOOD TIMES featured blackthroat seaperch in an article titled "Nodoguro seared figure sashimi" in its June 2008 issue. However, looking back at it now, 17 years later, the article was too one-sided and I couldn't help but feel it was too light for a description of a popular fish that is renowned as a high-class fish.
So, this time I decided to write an article about my own thoughts and methods on how to use small blackthroat seaperch like the one in the image above, which is thought to be affordable even in a general fish section rather than a so-called high-end store, to sell them.
Tsushima, a treasure trove of blackthroat seaperch
It's not that I haven't had the opportunity to handle blackthroat seaperch in the last 17 years. Tsushima Island in Nagasaki Prefecture is famous for being a fishing ground for blackthroat seaperch, and there is a supermarket where I advise the fish section. I have been visiting the supermarket two days a month for 14 years now. Because of this connection to Tsushima, I have had many opportunities to handle blackthroat seaperch.
For example, this image shows blackthroat seaperch that arrived at a supermarket in Tsushima that I supervised in June 2015. I don't remember the purchase price, but each fish was about 450g to 500g.
Some of these were being sold naked in the counter like this. The selling price of 100g is 700 yen, so the selling price of one fish is 3,240 yen to 3,360 yen, so you can understand that just because blackthroat seaperch is produced in Tsushima, it does not mean that you can buy it cheaply.
The remaining blackthroat seaperch was commercialized by the author as follows.
| Blackthroat seaperch usutsukkuri sashimi |
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| Blackthroat seaperch usutsukuri seared sashimi |
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| 2 pieces of blackthroat seaperch nigiri sushi and 3 pieces of seared nigiri sushi |
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It was 11 years ago, so I don't remember what the selling prices were, but I vaguely remember that the selling prices were not cheap, commensurate with the high purchase prices.
It was June at this time, and this is the time when the blackthroat seaperch is preparing to spawn soon and is storing up nutrients, and as you can see in the image below, the liver has become huge and the fish eggs are also about to grow.
The small blackthroat seaperch I bought in late February were still growing and only weighed about 150g, and the fish eggs were also small, but I think they will grow to about 500g in another year or so, but I don't know much about the growth rate. After cooking and tasting the blackthroat seaperch, I felt that "even though they may be small, they have an exceptional taste." I would like to write about the blackthroat seaperch, which has a strong presence despite its small size.
Commercialization of small blackthroat seaperch
As mentioned above, FISH FOOD TIMES featured blackthroat seaperch under the theme "Nodoguro seared figure sashimi" in the June 2008 issue, but I was dissatisfied with the content, and time passed, thinking that I would have to start over on my own. Although I had kept the images shown above, I was unable to create a new version because I didn't have any images of the process or the dish, and I only had half-baked materials on hand.
And although the blackthroat seaperch that I got this time is small, it has a presence because of its deliciousness, and the price is not cheap when converted to the price per kg. A small fish with such a unit price is one of the difficult fish to handle in the fish retail field, so I decided to sell this small blackthroat seaperch and tried to commercialize it in hopes of giving readers some hints about sales.
First of all, since the blackthroat seaperch is small in size, I decided to make a product called ``open fish for grilling with salt'' on the premise that one person would eat one fish by themselves.
| blackthroat seaperch open fish for grilling with salt | |
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| 1，Since the fish meat is soft, do not press the scale remover too hard, but remove the scales gently and carefully. | 7，From the cut, cut along the edge of the dorsal fin and proceed above the centralbone. |
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| 2，Insert the tip of the deba knife above the gills and pressthe the underside of the knife (urabara) against it. | 8，Cut past the backbone and up to just before the anal fin. |
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| 3，Lower the underside (urabara) of the knife downwards. | 9，Use a tool to scrape out the black membrane and internal organs from inside the abdomen. |
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| 4，While holding the gills with the Deba knife, turn the fish while shifting it to the left. | 10，Place on a dry towel and cover with a towel to remove moisture. |
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| 5，Separate the gills from the fish body. | 11，The internal organs, black membrane, and water have been removed. |
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| 6，Make a cut between the head and body up to the centralbone. | Put the fish in the tray and commercialize it. |
One way to open fish is to split the head, but in this case I thought it would be better to clearly show that it was a blackthroat seaperch, so I opened it without splitting the head.
Next, when you proceed with this open fish product to the process of completing salt-grilled dishes, it will look like the following.
| Salt-grilled blackthroat seaperch | |
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| 1，After sprinkling lightly with salt, wrap the head and tail fin in aluminum foil to prevent burning. | 3，Bake until it becomes brown in color. |
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| 2，If using a double-sided grill, leave the cut side facing up. | The salt-grilled blackthroat seaperch is complete. |
The second fish will be commercialized for use in dishes such as sauteing and meunière.
| Commercialization process of blackthroat seaperch boneless open fish | |
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| 1，Make an incision next to the pectoral fin on the lower body. | 8，Make an incision along the anal fin of the upper body, cut past the backbone, and then cut under the centralbone. |
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| 2，Make an incision next to the pectoral fin on the upper body and cut off the head. | 9，Separate the base of the tail fin and the bone. |
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| 3，Use a reverse-handed knife(sakate houcyo) to cut open the abdomen from the anus. | 9，Separate the left and right belly bones. |
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| 4，Wash away the internal organs, make an incision in the film of the lump of the blood, and wash away the blood as well. | 10，Trim with a knife to keep it in shape. |
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| 5，Wrap the fish body in a dry towel and wipe away the moisture. | 11，Remove the dorsal fin. |
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| 6，Make a cut near the anal fin of the lower body, and proceed toward the dorsal fin. | 12，To finish, remove the small bones and the open fish is complete. |
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| 7，Cut past the backbone, over the central bone, and up to just before the dorsal fin. | The blackthroat seaperch boneless open fish product is completed. |
Blackthroat seaperch has an excellent taste as an ingredient and has a good red skin color, so in order to take advantage of this, I thought that sauteing, which does not use wheat, would be more suitable than meuniere, which uses wheat.
| Sautéing process of blackthroat seaperch |
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| 1，Salt and pepper the blackthroat seaperch open fish and place it in the frying pan, skin side down. |
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| 2，When using a spatula, be careful not to damage the skin. |
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| 3，It looks best if you cook it until the skin is browned while still retaining some of the red color on the surface. |
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| Sauteed blackthroat seaperch is complete. |
Sautéing blackthroat seaperch is really easy. Just season with salt and pepper, put in a frying pan and fry with olive oil and you have a really delicious dish. This alone makes me realize the potential of this fish called blackthroat seaperch.
Cutting sushi pieces from blackthroat seaperch searing can be a pain.
It goes without saying that the appeal of blackthroat seaperch is its "rich fat.'' The following graph is part of a document released by the Shimane Prefectural Fisheries Technology Center. This is an investigation and analysis of the differences in fat content of blackthroat seaperch depending on size, fishing method, regional differences, season, etc.
If we take a quick look at what is shown in this graph, we can see that the fat content of blackthroat seaperch is around 10% even for fish under 100g, and averages 25% for fish over 350g.
There's no doubt that having this much fat content makes it delicious, but it can also cause some trouble when working with it. This is something that I have experienced many times and have had the bitter experience of, but this is the phenomenon of ”peeling off the skin'' that occurs when the skin of blackthroat seaperch is seared and then cut into sushi pieces.
A similar phenomenon can occur not only with blackthroat seaperch, but also when grilling fish with a lot of subcutaneous fat. In short, due to the subcutaneous fat, the skin of the seared fish will peel off as soon as it is cut into sushi pieces, ruining the searing process, which is a sad and frustrating phenomenon for the worker.
If you try to cut the koba with the seared skin facing down, as is the basic method of cutting sushi pieces, in the worst case scenario, the skin will slip on the cutting board due to the fat content, causing the charred pattern that was intentionally created during the searing process to disappear.
In this case, the size of the blackthroat seaperch was only 150g, so I thought that using the usual method would be more than just a tragedy, it could be a catastrophe. So I tried the following method.
| blackthroat seaperch seared nigiri sushi modified version method |
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| １，Prepare a tray of crushed ice. Cut the upper body, skin side down, into sushi pieces starting from the tail end, and place them on ice. |
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| ２，For the lower body, cut the upper body, skin side down, into sushi pieces starting from the head side, and place them on ice. |
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| ３，A total of 10 sushi pieces were placed on the ice, five each of the upper body and lower body. |
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| 4，Since the skin is facing out, sear the whole thing with a burner until it is lightly browned. |
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| Since the blackthroat seaperch is small, the sushi pieces are necessarily smaller, so the sushi rice was about 12g. |
So I made a pack of 10 seared blackthroat seaperch nigiri sushi, but this was clearly a mistake. Since the half body weighs only about 30g, they should have cut the half body into 3 pieces and made it into 6 pieces. If one piece of sushi rice is 10g and I made 3 half pieces, I was able to get about 18g of sushi rice. Unfortunately, this is how things ended up, and I regretted it, but it was too late to regret it.
Despite these points, even when searing a fish with a lot of subcutaneous fat, such as the blackthroat seaperch, this method did not cause the failure of ”peeling off the skin'' When searing fish that have a lot of subcutaneous fat, the phenomenon of "peeling off the skin" is less likely to occur when the fish is relatively large. Even if the skin becomes slightly dislocated, it is easy to slip it back into place and hide the problem.
On the other hand, the smaller the fish, the more likely it is that they will make mistakes when "peeling off the skin", which is when you'll want a needle and thread.
Despite these regrets, in this passage the author wanted to convey a method that increases the chance of not failing even if the small blackthroat seaperch is searing, and I think I was able to express it to a certain degree in that respect.
Not a small blackthroat seaperch
So far, I have mainly written about the small blackthroat seaperch, but I would like to briefly explain what kind of fish blackthroat seaperch actually is. In terms of succinctly summarizing the main points, I think the article "Nodoguro seared figure sashimi" from the June 2008 issue of FISH FOOD TIMES, published 17 years ago, is appropriate, so I would like to reproduce it in its entirety in the table below.
| June 2008 issue Nodoguro seared figure sashimi |
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This was the first time for me to eat sashimi of this fish. Most of the fish we receive are caught using bottom trawling nets, and what we often see are those with peeling scales, a whitish color, and not-so-firm flesh, so I've always assumed from the beginning that the fish isn't very fresh, so I've never really thought about trying it as sashimi. However, I happened to come across some that were very fresh, so I tried it with searing sashimi. Then, I was surprised by how delicious it was. The flavor was concentrated and the refined fat was just right, giving it the taste of "white meat toro." The Japanese name akamutsu seems to be the correct name for this fish, but it is also called by many other names, including oome, mettukin, mekin, kingyo, and danjyuro.
This fish is caught using bottom trawls, longlines, gill nets, etc., but most of the catch seems to be using bottom trawls. The continental shelf in the southwestern part of the Sea of ??Japan, stretching from around the Oki Islands to Tsushima, is a good fishing ground for blackthroat seaperch, with medium to large ones being caught in large numbers from August to October, and small ones from winter to spring. It is known as the "fatty tuna of white fish" because it is fatty regardless of the season. It is generally cooked either boiled or grilled, but as shown in the photo above, the surface of the skin is seared to create grilled frosted sashimi, which adds the flavor of the skin and makes for a truly delicious taste. Generally, fish are chosen for their good color and luster, but in the case of blackthroat seaperch, those caught by fishing or other means that have good scales and luster tend to be less fatty than their appearance suggests.As a fisherman says, ``Blackthroat seaperch caught in muddy areas are best caught by methods such as bottom trawling.'' Because their scales are bald and whitish, they often appear to be less fresh, but in fact, they look whitish because they have a lot of subcutaneous fat, and are not necessarily less fresh. This time, I judged the freshness of a fish not by its appearance based on the scales or glossy color of the fish's surface, nor by its texture based on the firmness of the fish, but by the ``color of the gills'' by prying open the gill cover. The color of the gills still retained a bright red color, so I decided it was suitable for eating as sashimi. The blackthroat seaperch belongs to the genus Actinopterygii, family Acropomatidae, suborder Percoidei, order Perciformes, and is characterized by its continuous red dorsal fin.On the other hand, the real Mutsu, also known as Mutsu or Kuromutsu, is characterized by its dorsal fin being clearly divided into two sections, the first and the second.It belongs to the Mutsu family and the Mutsu genus, with no other species, being the only genus and family in its own family.It is not in any way related to the blackthroat seaperch of the genus Doederleinia in the family Percoidei. The peak season for this fish is winter, but the spawning season for blackthroat seaperch is from August to September, and the most delicious time is from late May to July, when the Rather, it has a relatively soft texture, so it seems to be even more delicious to eat if you leave the skin on and add some extra touches, such as searing, to increase the texture, as shown in the photo. |
In this month's issue, I wrote an article about the blackthroat seaperch, including the meaning of redoing it, but I wonder how readers felt about it. Were there any hints for sales? I would be happy if the article in this month's issue was of some help to you...
An opinion and the communication are to iinfo@fish food times
Date of updating 1 Mar. 2025
