Kaburazushi

Thick-cut salted turnip rounds sandwich fatty yellowtail that has been salt-cured and rested on its own. A sweet malt made from rice koji and cooked rice coats everything, with carrot, yuzu peel, and red chili for color. Cut open, white turnip and pink-red yellowtail sit in layers, and the tang gives way to malted sweetness underneath — a taste between sashimi and a rice-bran pickle.

The yellowtail is salted for about a month to draw out moisture and any fishy edge, while the turnip is salted roughly a week and pressed dry. A malt is built overnight from koji, rice, and hot water, then the drained turnip sandwiches the fish and is layered into a barrel, buried in more koji. Left to ferment seven to ten days, lactic fermentation and the earlier salting let the raw fish keep — a technique descended from narezushi.

One account holds that yellowtail, once priced so high it was sold by the whole fish, got sandwiched in turnip to stretch it further for ordinary households. Kanazawa sits in a basin between two rivers, its winters settling into the damp cold typical of the Sea of Japan coast — conditions under which koji fermentation proceeds slowly enough to hold spoilage back. It's also said to have spread as a year-end gift merchants carried to regular customers, in an age before refrigeration made that cold season itself a kind of natural larder.