Ikura recipe (salmon caviar)

I caught some lake trout last weekend, and used half of the eggs from them to make Ikura caviar using the recipe in KPD's initial post in this thread and some Kayanoya original dashi stock powder from Kayanoya Onlineshop USA.  I used the other half of the eggs to prepare a version of caviar which uses the some of the same ingredients as Ikura caviar, but without the dashi, and with a larger amount of salt.  I'm writing to describe and compare the results of these recipes.

In the past I have made caviar from a variety of kinds of fish roe by soaking the eggs in a saturated salt solution (one part salt to four parts water) for 25-30 minutes. This is very tasty, and once you separate the eggs from their skeins, you can make the caviar quite quickly.  You can adjust the saltiness of the caviar by how long you leave the eggs in the brine, and by how long you rinse the eggs after you take them out of the brine.

The Ikura (Japanese caviar) recipe referred to in KPD's initial post is as follows:

1.5 cups dashi, a Japanese stock made with fish and kombu (kelp)
1 tablespoon salt
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon granulated sugar

I used half of the lake trout eggs to make Ikura using this recipe, which contains much less salt than the saturated salt brine which I've been using.  The recipe calls for soaking the eggs in the brine for a day. The Kayanoya dashi is easy to make.  The powder comes in a bag which is like a large tea bag. You simmer the bag in water for three minutes, and then remove the bag from the water.  I put the Dashi in my refrigerator to cool down while I removed the lake trout eggs from their skeins.  The Ikura is not very salty, and has a nice complex flavor from the dashi and other ingredients in the recipe. A minor disadvantage of this recipe is that the eggs don't stick together, so they have a tendency to slide off the edge of whatever you serve the Ikura on.  The saltier recipes described in this post stick together in a nice blob, which makes them easier to serve.

I used the other half of the lake trout eggs to make a variation on the Ikura recipe which used a saturated salt brine, to which I added the other ingredients from the Ikura recipe.  The ingredients were as follows:

1.5 cups water
1/3 cup salt (to produce a saturated brine)
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon granulated sugar

I soaked the eggs in this brine for 25 minutes, and then rinsed off the eggs in a strainer.  The caviar produced by this recipe is more interesting than caviar produced using just a saturated salt brine, but doesn't have quite as complex a flavor as the Ikura caviar produced using the dashi recipe shown above. But if you don't have dashi, my recipe permits you to obtain much of the flavor of Ikura without dashi.  And an advantage of this recipe is that you only need to soak the eggs in the brine for 25-30 minutes, rather than overnight.

Anyone see any issue with trying this with river salmon?

My dad just caught a fresh one the other day, tempted.

Anyone see any issue with trying this with river salmon?

My dad just caught a fresh one the other day, tempted.

No problem! I make caviar out of eggs from northern pike, lake trout, kokanee, lake whitefish, and perch.  It's all good. But you should get the roe on ice as soon as you catch the fish, you should make it into caviar ASAP, and you should get it eaten within about a week and a half.