Soy-candied cockles

  • Side
  • 10-12
  • 30 minutes
Not yet rated

As Tim Anderson notes below, these soy-candied cockles (or zarugai no tsukudani) are almost like a jam. They are intensely salty, a little sweet, and very easy to make. Since they are so salty, you only need to eat a small amount with rice at a time, but they last for up to a month in a sterilised jar in the fridge.

Extracted from JapanEasy Bowls & Bento by Tim Anderson (Hardie Grant, £25), Photography ©Laura Edwards

First published in 2022

Tim Anderson says, “​​Tsukudani is here in the pickle section, but is it a pickle? It isn’t soured by vinegar or fermentation, but it is preserved, and it occupies a similar sort of space as pickles in Japanese meals: as a strongly-flavoured side, or as something to enliven rice. But tsukudani (named for Tsukuda, the area of Tokyo in which its production began) is more like a jam – a salty, salty jam. Basically, this method of preservation involves boiling various ingredients, typically seaweeds and seafood, in a mixture of sugar, mirin, sake and soy sauce until everything reduces down to a syrupy, blackish mass of concentrated deliciousness. I made this cockle tsukudani for the first time a few years ago and served it to an actual cockle farmer in Essex. His assessment: ‘They taste like cockle liquorice.’ This was not intended as a compliment. But I don’t care – these are sweet, glistening jewels of intense, meaty shellfish flavour and I won’t hear a bad word about them. Just a little spoonful on a bowl of hot rice; I am in liquoricey cockle heaven!”

Ingredients

Metric

Imperial

Method

1

Combine all of the ingredients in a saucepan along with enough water to cover by about 2.5cm

2

Bring to the boil and then keep boiling, stirring occasionally, until the liquid reduces all the way down to virtually nothing, with the consistency of a very thick syrup. At the end of this process, you should stir it more frequently to prevent burning

3

When the liquid is thick and jammy, remove from the pan and leave to cool before packing into a sterilised jar and keeping in the refrigerator for up to one month. Serve at any temperature

First published in 2022

Tim Anderson is a chef, writer, restaurateur, and MasterChef champion.

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