Mentaiko Pasta

16 May Mentaiko Pasta

Posted at 17:44h in Archive, Food, Lifestyle by Fatima Omri 0 Comments

Good afternoon all! Hope you are having a relaxing and peaceful Sunday! I have been cooking a lot recently to relieve some stress. One of my way to relieve stress is eating (a lot), and I used to take out food often. Some of those foods I ordered were junk food for the convenience, however I realized that if I am eating a lot anyway, healthier food would be better. I also found cutting ingredients like vegetable is very soothing, and it’s helpful to get away from reality 😉 I feel also productive when I see the end products. Nowadays, I go to grocery store twice a week to buy bunch of foods and cook lunch with them every day. Cooking between work lets me rest my eyes for a bit. Looking at vegetables instead of screen of laptop makes me happy haha. When I do not have 30min for cooking, I cook some simple dishes like mentaiko pasta. It only takes about 10min, and it is such a creamy deliciousness! This is Japanese style pasta and very common dish over there. You may think this is very fishy but do not worry; it does not have the fishy smell. I imagine many of you are not familiar with mentaiko (spicy cod roe). It is popular Japanese food which we typically eat with white rice. You can definitely find it in Japanese grocery store and possibly in Asian super market as well. Let’s start cooking and hope you enjoy it!

INGREDIENTS (1 serving)

1: Mentaiko – Spicy cod roe (2 pieces)

2: Spaghetti (120g)

3: Room temperature butter (2 tablespoons)

4: Heavy whipping cream (1.5 tablespoons) *optional

5: Milk (1.5 tablespoons) *optional

6: Nori – Roasted seaweed sheet (3 sheets) *optional

7: Green shiso leaves – Perilla leaves (3 leaves) *optional

*You may substitute spicy cod roe with cod roe if you don’t like spicy food. It is not spicy as you think since we are mixing with milk and heavy whipping cream. You can also substitute heavy whipping cream and milk with 3 tablespoons of half & half or even with left over water in a pot after cooking pasta. Nori and green shiso leaves are for the topping in the end. It is not necessary, but it looks pretty with them. There are many versions to mentaiko pasta, and I have tried many different recipes. You may add 1 table spoon of soy sauce, 1 table spoon of dashi soup, half table spoon of garlic oil, or 1 table spoon of mayonnaise. You can try multiple ways and decide your go to ingredients 😉

STEP BY STEP – 10 min cooking

1: Pour hot water and some salt into a pot and boil it. After salted water is boiled, pour pasta into it.

2: While boiling the pasta, cut nori and green shiso leaves thin with cooking scissors.

3: Next, slice top layer of spicy cod roe and separate the inside from the roe sacks. Throw the roe sacks away and keep the inside. Put ¾ of spicy cod roe into the mixing bowl and leave ¼ of them for topping.

4: Add butter, heavy whipping cream, and milk into mixing bowl as well and mix them all together lightly. Make sure not to smash the cod roe.

5: Take out pasta out of the pot 1 minute before it is fully cooked (Al dente) and drain water from pasta. You do not need to drain water completely because it could help the source mix with spaghetti well.

6: Pour cooked spaghetti into mixing bowl and mix them together lightly.

7: Place the mentaiko pasta onto serving plate and add ¼ of spicy cod roe on top of the pasta. Finalize the dish by decorating with shredded nori and green shiso leaves.