Cooking Up Enjoyment

“Buri”: A Wintertime Culinary Delight

Food and Drink

Buri (yellowtail) is a fish found only in the seas surrounding Japan. While wild buri is a wintertime delicacy, cultivated varieties can now be consumed in the summer and fall as well thanks to advances in aquaculture. Buri also lies at the heart of a longstanding culinary tradition and ranks alongside maguro (tuna) and salmon as a popular food fish in Japan.

A Tasty, Healthy Food

Buri can be prepared many number of ways. It can be eaten raw as sashimi or sushi, grilled with salt or as teriyaki, or simmered in broth with daikon (Japanese white radish). While it is the fat content of kanburi that makes for a savory dish, one can also boil away excess fat by dipping it in boiling water à la shabu-shabu and eaten with citrus-based ponzu sauce. Served cool, the buri-shabu becomes a summertime treat.

Buri simmered in broth with daikon.

Younger buri—called inada and warasa—have lower fat content and a lighter taste. They go well with Italian and French dishes, served as carpaccio with thinly sliced raw beef or fish, olive oil, and herbs or sautéed in butter with fish and vegetables.

The fish contains high levels of DHA (docosahexaenoic acid), EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), and other important fatty acids that cannot be produced by the human body, as well as lipophilic vitamin E. Buri can thus help to prevent arteriosclerosis and high blood pressure by reducing the body’s neutral fat and LDL (low-density lipoprotein) cholesterol. It is rich in B vitamins, which aid in the metabolism of sugar and cholesterol and relieve fatigue; vitamin D, which enhances calcium absorption; and iron, helping to prevent anemia. Its red meat contains taurine, which improves liver functions.

Kanburi sashimi.

Advances in Aquaculture

The share of cultivated fish on the market has been rising in Japan and around the world; the trend is particularly pronounced for buri, of which around 60% are shipped from aqua-farms. Japan became the first to successfully raise hamachi commercially in 1928, and buri farming continues today—in spite of wartime suspension—in locations around western Japan. Japan has since continued to lead the world in aquaculture technology. The Seikai National Fisheries Research Institute of Nagasaki, for instance, succeeded in moving up the spawning period, normally during March–May, to September–November the previous year.

Making this possible was a method developed by Kurose Suisan of Kagoshima—one of Japan’s biggest yellowtail farming companies—to produce juveniles in hatcheries after extracting eggs from healthy, mature fish, eliminating the need to catch small wild fry. The company began shipping “young buri” from June 2009 that enabled the consumption of fresh yellowtail even during the summer months. And in 2016, Hashiguchi Suisan and Hosei Suisan of Nagasaki teamed up with feed maker Apro Japan to cultivate autumn buri that reach markets in September–November.

Autumn buri being unloaded at port. (Courtesy Hachiguchi Suisan)

A National Fish?

The biggest consumer market in Japan is Tokyo, a metropolis in eastern Japan with an overwhelming preference for salmon. Catch of autumn salmon in 2016 was a record low, so 230,000 tons were imported to cover the shortage. Production of cultivated buri has grown to 140,000 tons (compared with 100,500 tons caught in the wild), but this is still not enough to supplant salmon imports. Should demand for yellowtail grow, though, there is room to increase production. The future of this fish native to Japanese waters may lie in efforts to generate additional consumer demand.

The 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games present a golden opportunity to reach consumers around the world. Efforts are already underway to designate buri as Japan’s “national fish” and to actively promote this healthy and tasty seafood to visitors from abroad.

(Originally written in Japanese by Nagasawa Takaaki and published on February 7, 2018. Illustration by Izuka Tsuyoshi. Banner photo: Slices of winter yellowtail sashimi.)

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