Home-style
Ika no Kakeae
Ika no kakeae — squid and root vegetables tossed in a ground sesame and vinegar-miso dressing
Squid, daikon, and carrot are tossed in a vinegared miso dressing thick with ground sesame — a style of dish found across Japan, but called 'kakeae' in Saga, where fatty mackerel sometimes stands in for squid at autumn festivals.
- Origin: Saga
- About 910 km west of Tokyo
What it's made of
Squid is tossed with vegetables like daikon and carrot in a dressing built on toasted sesame and white miso; depending on the area and season, other seafood such as sardine, mackerel, horse mackerel, or crucian carp is said to be used instead, hand-filleted, lightly salted, and rinsed in vinegar first when an oily fish is chosen. It's eaten as an everyday side dish throughout the year.
How it's made
White sesame is roasted and ground well, then white miso, sugar, and vinegar are worked in one at a time. Blanched squid and salted, julienned daikon and carrot are cut into strips and tossed in the dressing, sometimes with yuzu pepper or ginger added. Daikon touched by early frost is said to turn especially sweet, its flavor spreading more the longer it's chewed. How well the sesame is ground is said to shape the final result.
Why it took this shape
While it's an everyday side dish, it's also said to be indispensable at gatherings such as festivals or rice-planting days. Meals are often simple day to day, so the extra variety on festival days is said to carry a note of hospitality for guests. Around the time of the autumn festival, mackerel at its fattiest is often the fish of choice.
Before you go
- How to shop at a supermarketHow to choose prepared foods, sashimi, and packaged sushi, when discount stickers tend to appear, region-only specialties, buying by weight, the checkout and bagging flow, and sampling etiquette at a local supermarket.
- Food for Obon and the harvest moon (tsukimi)A guide to the meat-free shojin ryori and somen served at Obon, and the tsukimi dango offered on the night of the harvest moon.
- At teishoku diners, shokudo, and machi-chukaA guide to the teishoku set-meal format, free rice refills, table placement, and paying at a shokudo-style diner.
Dishes in the same style
- Agonoko UmaniThe roe of egg-bearing flying fish, caught only in early summer, is simmered in stock and soy sauce as an Oki bar snack. Its large grains and dense, sticky texture are prized as a delicacy said to be scarcer even than the fish's flesh.
- Funa MisoCrucian carp is simmered slowly with soybeans for around five hours, then finished in a sauce of red miso and coarse sugar. A freshwater fish dish of the Kiso rivers' lower basin, made with fatty winter carp simmered until the bones soften through.
Ingredients and dishes from this land
Also from Saga
- Ara no SugataniA grouper weighing ten kilos or more is simmered whole in a giant pot over the better part of a day — the showpiece of the hospitality dishes women prepare for guests during the Karatsu-kunchi festival, said to have started as a postwar display of one-upmanship.
- FunankoguiCrucian carp, wrapped whole in kelp, simmers for hours with daikon and other roots until even the bones turn soft — a winter protein source from the lean season on the Ariake Sea, and in Kashima, an offering to the god of good fortune at New Year.
- Futsu MochiPounded mochi is worked through with boiled mugwort and wrapped around sweet bean paste — where much of Japan offers diamond-shaped rice cakes at the Doll Festival, parts of Saga offer this mugwort mochi instead, and it doubles as a snack marking spring's arrival.
- Go DofuSoy milk is set not with nigari but kudzu starch, giving this Arita specialty a softer, glossier bite than ordinary tofu — served with sesame-soy as a side, or with black sugar syrup and soybean flour as a dessert.
- Hoshigaki NamasuJulienned daikon and dried persimmon are tossed with vinegar, yuzu juice, and soy — from Saga's Matsubai district, where curtains of drying persimmons hanging under the eaves mark the fall, and this dish is said to appear alongside New Year's osechi.
- Imari GyuJapanese Black fattened within Imari's JA district in Saga — sharing the same Tajima roots as Saga Gyu, but kept as a separate brand after the JA Saga merger of 2007 left Imari's cooperative outside it.