Ochazuke (お茶漬け) is a Japanese dish where one pours hot green tea or dashi over a bowl of rice. The concept is similar to Chinese paofan (泡饭). The Japanese ochazuke is light tasting, easy to digest, boosts one’s appetite and is perfect for all seasons – It is comfort food for the soul and body. This 15-minute salmon ochazuke (鮭お茶漬け) is a short cut recipe using an instant ochazuke soup pack I bought from Daiso. The bulk of the recipe time is prepping and frying the salmon (about 10-12 minutes), followed by making a pot of green tea & assembling the rice bowl (about 3 minutes).
These are instant ochazuke soup packs selling at Daiso (SG). There are three flavours and my favourite is the purple packaging (the basic seaweed edition) as this version had 2 more sachets of the ochazuke mix compared to the green packaging (wasabi) and the red packaging (salmon). Each sachet is a single person serving and comes with green tea soup granules, seaweed and crispy rice crackers.
I personally like to prepare my salmon fillets by marinating them in sake for 5-10 minutes in the fridge – this will remove the inherent, natural fishy smell from the salmon. You can skip this step if you are not sensitive to the natural smell of fish. Next, I pat the salmon fillets dry with paper towels and fry them in butter, olive oil, salt and pepper. The cooked salmon were delicious on their own or you can also eat it with a bowl of rice or salad.
Next, prepare a freshly brewed pot of hot tea such as hojicha (roasted green tea). As the tea seeps, coarsely shred the cooked salmon to small chunks. Prepare a bowl of rice, topped with the contents of the instant ochazuke sachet and the shredded salmon. Pour hot tea over the rice, stir to dissolve the granules and enjoy immediately :)
This recipe use an ochazuke instant premix pack as a shortcut. You can also easily make the ochazuke mix yourself – recipe in the cooking note below.
Check out the ingredients and step-by-step photos on the previous page.
Cooking Note(s):