Last Friday, a food magazine wanted to do a topic on aged food, and they were interested in talking about abalone. So according to the editor from that magazine, she went around asking people about dried abalone and she got referred to us. Apparently people told her that we are the restaurant whom really knows about abalone. So Minori and I ended up having lunch with the girl and talking about abalone.

Actually, dried abalone is a very interesting food. I am not saying this because of the price, although shacho had told us stories that dried abalone price would have beaten any stock market 100 times over the last 20 years. Its interesting because of how it came by, how its dried, how it evolves after the process and how it tastes.
Fresh abalone is already a very expensive ingredient because of its super time consuming growth. It takes years to actually reach a respectable size for consumption and during those years, these is risk of bad weather and natural lost. Therefore, to allow it to reach the desirable size as a dried abalone is even much longer process.
In addition to this, the drying process is also very labour and time consuming, and require expertise. Our restaurant then buy the dried abalone, store it and age it like red wine, before serving them to our customers.

Fresh abalone is pale in colour, subtle but sweet in taste, has a clean bite texture and a faint sea smell. Contrasting to it, good quality dry abalone has a deep brown golden colour, smooth and sticky in texture, unique savoury fragrance and deep complex taste to it. We consider the best abalone to be very smmoth and sticky almost like mochi. Its a total miraculous transformation and one has to experiece it before they can understand. The best ones to try has got to be Japanese dry abalone which we insist on using exclusively.


I even heard from Shacho and Law san that in the old days, the abalone can be up to 250 grams and they have to slice it thinly to serve the customers. And the amazing part they told was that while slicing it, it will stick to the knife so much that they have to keep oiling the knife to keep going. Now this will only happen in our memory.