I don't often venture east on my holidays but a few years ago I went to Japan where I got to experience all the culinary weird-and-wonderful-ness that they have to offer. My staple diet on that trip, like that of most Japanese people, was rice, noodles and soup. There were however two paticular things that stick out in my mind. One is staying at a ryokan in Kyoto where the proprietor (who was also the chef) insisted on cooking us a "Western" style breakfast every morning. His interpretation of a Western style breakfast would be, for example, a boiled egg with some chopped tomato and a side of sliced apple. Individually, all the elements would be quite typical "western" foods, but they would be things that you would never typically put together. Despite all the amazing, fresh, cheap sushi I ate, those breakfasts were probably the culinary highlight of the trip. The other is that everything seemed to be available in green tea flavour.
I'm a bit old fashioned when it comes to tea. I like mine a nice beige colour with milk and one sugar. "Builders Tea" as we tend to call it. Green tea has some strange medicinal flavour to it which I don't find particularly pleasant. I particularly remember their green tea kit kats (not too bad) and green tea ice cream (disgusting). Quite how something which can be used to flavour white chocolate and sweet ice cream can also be used to flavour salmon I'm not too sure, but it was something Jamie obviously thought would work and so it was something I was intrigued about, if not particularly looking forward to. For all my curiosity about the fish though, upon closer inspection it's probably the greens which are really the main event of this dish - a generous quantity of asparagus, tenderstem broccoli and sugar snap peas accompanied by a dressing featuring another classic Japanese ingredient, miso, along with a variety of other good old Asian flavours. With some coconut rice also joining the party I felt this would be a dish where, love it or hate it, I would get good value out of my 15 minutes.
I bought all the ingredients (I've now added green tea bags and miso paste to our already bulging cupboards - god knows when I'll ever use them) and got going. It's another dish where the cooking is fairly instinctive, although I guess it's much easier to say that in hindsight. You start by coating the salmon in the green tea and frying in some oil. Meanwhile you cook the rice in a 50/50 mixture of coconut milk and water, boil the greens, and liquidize the sauce. Before you know it, you have a dish which looks exciting but sadly doesn't quite match up in flavour. The salmon is nice but the green tea flavour doesn't really stand out too much. The crispy skins are a clever idea but don't really taste of anything. The rice, cooked in coconut milk, is a bit gloopy. The dressing though is the biggest let down - it is murky brown in colour, watery and tastes overwhelmingly of soy sauce. It wasn't horrible, but none of it quite worked as intended.
Lolz gave the dish 7/10. Difficulty rating 2/10.
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