Scene-stealing supporting actor
We visit Just Champion Enterprise Company, located in Pingtung’s Nanzhou Township, where the production lines are working overtime to deal with the opening of the sakura shrimp season, racing against time to preserve their product’s freshness.
“The most important thing with sakura shrimp that will be consumed raw is to control the freshness,” says Yang Yun-yu, general manager at Just Champion, which exports over 90% of its sakura shrimp products to Japan. What matters most at auction is to select lots that include few shrimp of other species and are sufficiently fresh. After arriving at the processing plant, the shrimp are inspected and small fish and shrimp of other species are picked out by hand. Then they are washed three times in water of the same salinity as seawater, and flash frozen. The result is “sashimi grade” sakura shrimp, which can be directly dipped in soy sauce or wasabi and eaten raw.
Yeh Chiung-yu, a manager at Just Champion, says that with sashimi-grade sakura shrimp one can taste the sweetness of the meat. Also, like other fresh shrimp, it can be used to make gunkan-maki (a type of Japanese sushi).
Meanwhile, “prepared food grade” sakura shrimp that has been boiled in salt water is also exported to Japan and is sold through restaurants and supermarkets. Restaurants use it to make sakura shrimp and vegetable pancakes, tamagoyaki (Japanese omelet), or donburimeshi (served in bowls of rice), as well as add it to udon noodles or sukiyaki (Japanese hotpot). Since sakura means “cherry blossom” in Japanese, it is only natural that dishes made with sakura shrimp are the most apt foods to appear on menus when the cherry blossom season arrives in March.
In Taiwan, sakura shrimp are mostly used dried as an ingredient in various dishes. It takes four kilograms of fresh shrimp to make one kilo of dried shrimp, but dried shrimp has an even richer aroma and can be used in many ways: You can toss a handful into fried rice, mix it into steamed or scrambled eggs, put it into radish cake, or serve it with youfan (fried glutinous rice) at banquets, while Western-style restaurants use it to garnish pasta or shaved ice, or to make a snack mix with almonds.
Although this shrimp plays only a supporting or decorative role in cuisine and is small in size with little meat, dried sakura shrimp costs about NT$3,000 per kilo. The main reason for the high price is the scarcity of this shrimp: It is only caught in large numbers in the seas off Taiwan and in Suruga Bay in Japan’s Shizuoka Prefecture.
The fisher folk of Daxi Fishing Harbor first remove bycatch such as fish and other shrimp species before sending the sakura shrimp to the processing plant.
A sakura shrimp trawler offloads its catch at Daxi Fishing Harbor in Yilan’s Toucheng Township.