Katsuo no tataki

The finest food in Japan. And one of the most unusual.

It's unusual in one small way and one big, mysterious way.

(Linguistic note: tataki comes from the verb tataku, meaning spank.)

There are a variety of Japanese dishes that are called something-or-other tataki, but this one is usually just called tataki. Katsuo is the kind of fish it's made from, bonito, the small member of the tuna family that swarms around the southern coast of Shikoku and is caught in the millions, dried, and shaved paper-thin. This is the katsuobushi, "dried shaved bonito" used as the basis for about half the soups and sauces in Japanese cooking.

If, instead of drying the katsuo fillets, you want to make tataki, here's what you do:

Well, not you, personally, but here's what should happen.

Make a little fire of rice straw, char the outside of the fillets in the flames while whapping them with damp rice straw (to keep them from going up in smoke) and serve with katsuo dipping sauce. The dipping sauce is usually about half soy sauce and half a mixture of viengar (rice vinegar, of course) and sudachi juice. Sudachi is a small, round, intensely green citrus fruit grown extensively on Shikoku and not much anywhere else. And don't forget the garlic!

Garlic is pretty rare in Japanese cooking. In fact, here in Tokushima Prefecture, if you buy your tataki in a supermarket as I usually do, it will come with sliced onion and/or grated ginger plus a little packet of dipping sauce. But in Kochi Prefecture, on the southern side of Shikoku, where katsuo is king and tataki is a little bit of heaven, sliced garlic is de rigeur. Why? I don't know. But I'm glad it is.