Steamed Salmon Casserole

Last night's dinner was steamed salmon casserole. Basically, you layer a number of ingredients into a soup bowl. Place it inside of a steamer and let it cook for 10 to 15 minutes.

The biggest difficulty I had was gathering all of the ingredients. There were a few ingredients I couldn't find. One of them was yuba, which is dried soybean milk skin, which I couldn't fine. Another one was chrysanthemum leaves -- I ended up substituting a little bit of parsley in its place. Tsuji recommends replacing it with spinach leaves.

I don't have a Japanese style steamer, and the bowls needed to be in a big steamer in order to make this work. I got out my large steamer, which is placed inside a 2 gallon stockpot. It was difficult to fit all of the bowls in there, but I stacked them in order to fit everything in the steamer.

The layers were one section of konbu, tofu, mushrooms, salmon, partially, and lemon slice and sprinkled with a little bit of sake. Although this was simple, it was incredibly delicious, moist and flavorful. The slight citric flavor of the whole dish was a subtle but tasty element. I think this is a dish that I will be repeating over and over again -- I just wish I could find some of these other ingredients.

One last thing, this was supposed to be served with ponzu sauce. I realized this a little too late and tried to improvise it at the last minute...which didn't work! I'll try again with the next dish that requires ponzu.