How to cook ARAJIRU (fish bone soup) 〜あら汁〜 | easy Japanese home cooking recipe

Welcome to Taicho's Kitchen. Today I'm going to show you how to make arajiru or fish bone soup. So this is something I make quite often when I buy a whole fish and then I have the fish bone leftover because a life is sacrificed for me and so I don't want to waste the leftovers because there are some good meat on the bones. And this is actually quite very easy and still very tasty so I hope you give it a try when you have leftover bones. Then let's get started. Here are the ingredients for fish bone soup. Here I have the leftover fish bone from making sashimi. We make this quite often when we make sashimi because we're always left with these fish bones. It's just a great way not to waste them. And for the broth we're also going to use a strip of kombu and scallion just as a condiment. And then salt and sake. You could make this without sake. It's not really a big problem. Then let's start cooking. The first thing I'm going to do is make the broth. So you actually want to do this on the night before so that the kombu gives out the umami much more. But I forgot to do that so I'm just going to do it right now. So in a pot I'm going to put in two cups of water and then give them a strip of kombu. This is about five gram or so. And then let it soak for at least half an hour to an hour or so. And then next I'm going to prepare the scallion for the condiments. Take the end off and then for this I'm going to cut in just kind of diagonally so that it looks a little neat. This is finished. So we're going to prepare the fish bones. In order to get rid of all the unwanted odor of the fish and also like the blood and whatnot we're going to lightly let the bones go through boiling water. So I'm just going to put all these parts in here very lightly. So we don't want to cook this here. We just want to get the unwanted odor on the surface. I'm just going to take out the parts now. Then we're going to turn the heat off and then wash this in running water. So what you want to do here is there are some scales left especially on the head. So that's why you want to get out as much as possible. So we have scale here and also here this is belly. There's some small scales left here often. And then also here the intestines. You want to take out that intestine. Here on the other side of the belly. On the top side of the fish like this here as well. You want to make sure there's no scale left. And also here on the stomach side but when there's also some kidney or inside organs you want to take as much as of those out as possible. And this is finished preparing the fish bones. Now we're going to make broth out of these. So this broth has been sitting in water for about an hour now. I'm going to turn the heat to high and then right before boiling I'm going to take out the kombu. So this is almost boiling. I'm going to take away the kombu. I'm going to put in the all the fish bones. So once this has come to boil I'm going to turn the heat to low. Then we're going to take away the scum here. And then here I'm going to put in a tablespoon of sake. If you don't have sake then you don't have to worry too much about that but this will kind of add a little more depth to the flavor and also kind of take away the fishy odor as well. And then in this I'm going to put in a fourth teaspoon of salt. So you can always add salt later. So in the beginning try to put less salt than more because you can never take away salt. So try not to mix too much because if you mix too much then the bones are going to break out and then it'll be too difficult to eat them. A little taste. Oh perfect. So I'm going to put the lid on and let this cook for about five to ten minutes until all the goodness from the bones and the meat will be taken out in the soup. So about 10 minutes has passed. This is looking great. As you can see there's a lot of fat. That's from the belly part of the fish and this oil is really tasty and also very healthy for you. So a lot of people think that fat is bad but that is really not true. Your body does need fat. Some fat is actually good for your body like the vegetable fat and the fish fat especially. So I'm just gonna take away some parts. So you don't want to mix this too much because you want to have a really clear soup. Let's have the head. So for some of the westerners this fish head may look gruesome so I apologize for that but for us Japanese this just looks so delicious. I'm gonna put some scallion as condiments. Then this is finished. Let's eat. Okay let's eat. Itadakimasu. Oh it smells so good. Oh look at this clear soup. This looks so divinely delicious. Itadakimasu. And I apologize beforehand for slurping. If you don't like the sound of slurping then please skip to the end. Oh this is so good. So good. From this head you can take out the cheek meat. Oh so delicious. And the forehead it's got also meat in there. So you want to try to get as much meat out as possible. So delicious. So if you find small bones like this in your mouth you can take them out with your chopsticks. You don't want to spit them out or you don't want to take them out with your fingers. That's a little bit rude but with your chopsticks you can. And then just put it on the side like this and then it's fine. Try not to swallow small bones. It can get stuck on your throat and that's not very comfortable. And here so when you eat snapper or when you eat seabream they always have a fish bone that kind of looks like this. This is called tai no tai which means snapper of snapper or seabream of seabream. This is located right outside of the gills. They just kind of look like a seabream itself and so it's called that. And it's always fun to find this fishy looking bone. I always enjoyed as a child trying to find this bone. A little fun trivia. Oh this was so delicious. So this is a great small dish to make when you get a hold of a whole fish and then you fillet them and you're left with this fish bone. And instead of throwing away you can make a really great soup like this. And instead of seasoning with salt you can also season it with either soy sauce or miso and then you have different variation of this. Those are also very delicious. Or also you can put in some different vegetables in this and then you also have another variation of this. I hope this video was informative for you. I hope it gave you some new ideas for your cooking. And if you like what you saw please hit that like button and I look forward to see you in the next video. Bye!