Ah, thanks. I didn’t find them fishy at all. Which is why I had trouble id’ing them as fish.
An awful lot of panic about vitamins escaping.
Maybe this thread ?
In this post @carolina1 shared your appreciation of seeing peas cook!
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Just saw a bunch of these in the street market. They could be herring or sardine fry.
They can be stir fried with veggies, peanuts or fried rice. Also often mixed with congee.
I just ate them out of the bag.
Someone else tells me they are surimi eel.
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The fish on the lower right of the illustration with 3 fish is identified as being “Japanese anchovies” (日本鯷) which are indeed in the sardine family.
There are eyes on the fish which would eliminate them from being surimi eels as the meaning of “surimi” is “fish paste”.
The fishiness may depend on how fresh they were, In the places I’ve lived, they are always quite fishy.
Here’s more about whitebait:
“Whitebait is the immature fry of a variety of different species, in these Japanese products it is primarily anchovy and a lesser amount of sardine.”
And yes, in Japanese “shirasu” is the general term for whitebait. If they are baby eels, they are called “shirasu unagi” (unagi=freshwater eel, anago=sea eel).
I know. I’m waiting for someone who is not me to correct him.
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Sorry, i sometimes (too often?) get carried away…one of the occupational hazards of having been a teacher for so many years.
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I’ve been a teacher for 21 years. I get it.
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I believe the post was in the last week. Maybe? Time has a different meaning with this covid mess.
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This was the most recent mention
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As it happens, surimi eel exists.
They’re eyeless, though.
Yes, I know they exist…but they’re man made.
There it is! My MIL always said, “The mind goes first!”
Thank you!
I think the photos show whitebait. It’s a commonly sold fresh fish here.
However, dried sprat is a very common type of food sold everywhere in Sri Lanka. It has several uses. You can deep fry them, or mix with deep fried eggplant and onions, or even thinly grind them and add as a flavour for steamed chickpeas. There’s many more ways to eat them, usually with a lot of chili pepper.
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Looks like shirasu, which is baby fish that is often cooked and eaten with rice. They have different sized immature fish and they each get different names (of course):
Was at a friend’s house in Japan for dinner and she made a pasta that she topped with a sauce and some of the crispy chirimen and it was sooo good.
Both Chinese and Korean traditions also used dried tiny fish for various home cooking meals. In Chinese cooking, my mom used to steam these tiny anchovies with a bit of oil and soy saue (they were dried and sometimes lightly salted) and it would be a topping on rice. They could also be stir fried into certain dishes (greens being a popular option).
Thanks! Looks like we have consensus.
Glad we seem to have decided on that.
In Tokushima they are commonly eaten raw on a bowl of hot rice with a piece of sudachi (a local citrus similar to a lime) and some wasabi. I won’t eat them that way at all because I personally (←important!) can’t eat the eyes of any food. If unavoidable, I can stomach them in small amounts boiled or dried. In their raw state, they are extremely seasonal.
In Shizuoka, they’re also eaten raw on hot rice, but without the sudachi and usually with either grated ginger and/or pickled ginger (the type eaten with sushi), some nori and shiso (perilla leaf). Some people also put a raw egg yolk on top.
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