Kingfish Sashimi Salad with Pickled Radish

This salad is not for the faint-hearted home cook. Designed to impress, this Kingfish Sashimi Salad requires sophisticated plating, a gourmet palate and use of a unique ingredient. Inspired by Japanese flavours, your guests will appreciate you all the more!

Why I Love Kingfish Sashimi Salad with Pickled Radish

I really enjoy making salads that require some effort. Techniques and ingredients which may be a bit foreign to me or if I know it’s going to take a lot of time.

Inevitably when I do make a salad, that at a glance I know is not easy, the result has always been stupendous.

You do have to choose the right audience and/or occasion when you make these salads.

Some of the flavours may be too sophisticated for their palate and could get lost on them. Save these kinds of recipes for your real foodie friends.

I love kingfish sashimi, and it is by far my favourite fish when eating in this fashion.

The pickles mixed with the nose clearing wasabi, peppery red radish and creamy peas is a mouthful of pure joy. I was really happy with this recipe.

I also envisioned the plating to be done individually so that I could play with how we could showcase the pickled radish and kingfish and do it justice.

What is Sashimi Grade Fish?

No doubt when you have visited your fishmonger you may have seen the “sashimi-grade” or “sushi-grade” tuna, salmon and kingfish.

Sashimi-grade is not a regulated term that has strict guidelines. For many people, they believe it’s just a marketing ploy to up the prices of the very same fillet you’d get that’s not sashimi-grade.

The only useful result of naming a fish sashimi-grade is that it is safe to consume raw.

I am a sashimi or sushi-grade fish consumer. When I am preparing sashimi fish to be eaten at home, I understand this term to mean it is the freshest fish available, it is safe, and it has been handled in a way that meets all food safety standards.

I also like to purchase this grade of fish because it means that I don’t have to prepare it in any way and all I have to do is slice it. I don’t want to have to use tweezers to pin-bone the fish, nor do I want to worry about removing any excess fat or bloodlines.

I purchase my raw fish from a Japanese grocer. It is costly, but it is the best quality sashimi I can find with zero preparation and zero wastage.

When I’m not entertaining, I will sometimes get my sashimi-grade tuna or salmon from my local fishmonger for our mid-week dinners; like our poke bowls.

What is Organic Butterfly Pea Flower?

In the absence of purple radish at the markets, I decided that I would make my own. I also wanted a more consistent colour throughout the whole vegetable so “dyeing” it with organic butterfly pea flower was such a fun technique.

Organic butterfly pea flowers have been around for quite some time. It is a flowering plant grown in Southeast Asia.

It is perhaps most well known as a tea in all its indigo glory. The gorgeous infused colours have been used as a natural colouring of all sorts of foods, and in the most recent times, blue coloured bread is all the rage!

As the organic dried version can start to get costly, a powdered version can now be purchased. Much easier to control if you’re expecting consistency, albeit still on the expensive side. But the colours are stunning and so much fun!

The popularity of organic butterfly pea flower stems back centuries as it has been part of Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine.

Butterfly pea tea benefits include having a calming agent to assist with stress, is a memory enhancer and a real brain booster.

How to Make Kingfish Sashimi Salad with Pickled Radish

How To Make Purple Radish

For this exercise, we are going to cut the white radish 3 ways to give us different textures for the salad.

So, to begin, let’s peel all the white radish. Aim to buy the smaller ones as we don’t want too much leftover.

For the 1st white radish, using a mandoline, slice thinly to get nice, round pieces.

For the 2nd white radish, cut into thick slices about 10-15cm thick. Using a range of small cookie cutters, cut out cylinders of varying sizes. This will give the salad some height.

For the 3rd white radish, use a wide peeler and shave into wide strips.

In a small mixing bowl, add lukewarm water to the dried organic butterfly pea flowers. Let it sit for 45 minutes.

In a large mixing bowl, mix together white vinegar, sugar and salt. After 45 minutes, add the now dark blue water of flowers to the pickling mixture.

Add all the white radish into the pickling water with the butterfly pea flowers and let it sit in the fridge overnight.

You’ll find that despite the water being a deep indigo blue, the white radish will turn out purple. This is because of the reaction with the vinegar.

The next day, remove all the pickled white radish from the fridge. Give them all a rinse to get rid of the dried flowers sticking to the radish.

Pat dry and set aside.

How To Make The Salad

In a small saucepan, bring water to the boil. Blanch peas for 2 minutes. Remove and run under cold water to stop the cooking process. Pat dry and set aside.

Using a knife or mandoline, slice red radishes thinly.

Cut the kingfish fillets into 16-20 thin to medium slices.

How to Make Wasabi Mayonnaise

In a small mixing bowl, add 6 tbsp of Japanese Kewpie mayonnaise.

Using a small sieve, sieve 1 tsp of wasabi powder onto the mayonnaise so that no clumps will form.

Mix until well combined.

How To Assemble The Salad

This is an individually plated salad which you can serve as an entrée salad or side dish to your main course. The instructions below are for 1 plate. Repeat this 4 times:

On each plate, add 1 ½ tbsp of wasabi mayonnaise in the middle of the plate. Using the back of a regular spoon smear some upwards in an ‘S’ motion and some downwards in the same motion.

Put 4 slices of pickled radish of varying sizes on the sides of the mayonnaise.

Add 2-3 slices of red radish next to some of the pickled radish.

Place 4-5 slices of kingfish sashimi in a herringbone fashion.

Roll up 4 shaved slices of pickled radish and place anywhere near the kingfish sashimi.

Add 4-cylinder chunks of pickled radish anywhere around the salad.

Sprinkle some peas and micro herbs leaves around the part of the plate that is empty.

Season with some cracked pepper.

Serve.

Do you think your dinner guests will be rapt if you served them this salad as a starter?

Mine indeed were, and I would not hesitate to make it again. It brought so much joy watching them all finish off a salad in 3 minutes when it took me 24 hours to prepare! LOL!

That’s all!

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