Taste test: maguro nakaochi

Tuna sashimi is our favorite, but now that we’ve discovered what maguro nakaochi is, slices of fish suddenly seem rather ordinary. Maguro nakaochi? That’s tuna that you scrape off the ribs yourself. It’s best eaten paper-thin or rolled into your sushi.

At the Japanese restaurant MIFUNE in New York, you can now scrape tuna off the bone yourself and then make your own sushi with it. Scrape it off the bone? Yourself? Yes, exactly! The restaurant’s chef first cuts all the usable pieces from the enormous bluefin tuna and uses them himself. What remains is a carcass with scraps of fish still attached. That carcass isn’t thrown away—you can simply order it. You then get a huge plank with tuna ribs and bowls of nori, rice, egg, seaweed, ginger and wasabi. You can roll and build your own sushi with it. The video shows you how:

Japanese meal
A win-win situation: nothing is wasted, you get the ultimate sushi experience and the restaurant earns a little extra from what would otherwise be thrown away. But it isn’t entirely new: nakaochi is served more often in Japan. Sometimes on top of rice, sometimes in sushi (there’s even such a thing as nakaochi-maki), and sometimes as a dish in its own right. It’s then a two-part dish: during the first round, you scrape the meat off; after that round, the ribs are fried and served with ponzu sauce.

No, the fact that the scraps and leftovers of the tuna are what you put in your mouth doesn’t mean you can’t eat them, according to Japanese chefs. Quite the opposite, in fact. It’s apparently the meat around the bones that tastes especially delicious. We’d certainly like to try it!