MISODOFU

Another fruitful visit to restaurant Inada. Chef Saburo Inada had just returned from Japan, bringing back with him a brownish-greyish paste which he served to me in a scoopful, accompanied by slices of bottarga. I savored microscopic bites, trying very had to guess what it may be. That's a sort of exchange of courtesy among food people, namely the challenge of delicious yet unknown foods. After a few minutes of thinking, all I could tell was that I was trying something which had fermented and which resembled a cheese that tasted like miso. Actually it is miso fermented tofu from the South of Japan. The flavor is quite complex, salty but also reminiscent of chestnuts and of mirin. I had tried something similar in a yakitori joint in Tokyo and tried to get to know more about the product over there, without success of course.

A notable dish was the crab meat wrapped up in scallop sashimi (wonderfully translucent sheaths of fish), sitting on a base of dashi jelly and with grated yuzu sprinkled over it... 
This time I could not find anything about it on the net but have not given up yet.
At the moment my first for fermented foods is quenched by a slim but very dense booklet, Tsukemono, by Ikuko Hisamatsu. It describes a big variety of pickling methods (Japanese and Korean) using miso, salt, rice bran, sake dregs...A veritable goldmine of information.