Japan loves eating tuna and fish eggs, but can we love eating tuna eggs?

Japan loves tuna. Not only is tuna (or maguro, as it’s called in Japanese) one of the most common types of sushi and sashimi, tuna sandwiches, tuna pasta, and even pizza topped with tuna are all extremely popular.

Japan loves roe too, with ikura (salmon eggs) being a highly prized delicacy. Tarako (cod roe) is regularly eaten with rice, pasta, or on bread, as its spicy version, mentaiko. Even flying fish eggs, called tobiko, are part of Japanese cuisine.

And yet, we’d never seen tuna eggs on a restaurant menu in Japan, nor on the dinner table at our friends’ or families’ homes.

So imagine our surprise when we were strolling around the Yokosuka Port Market in the town of Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture, and after stepping into fish seller Nagai Suisan’s booth to browse their wares…

…we spotted not only various cuts of tuna…

…but also tuna eggs!

▼ まぐろ卵 = Tuna eggs

Since they were selling them in a fish market, they must be edible…right? Still, being compete newbies when it comes to this kind of roe, we wanted to double check how you’re supposed to eat them. So we checked with the staff, who informed us that while it’s common to eat other types of roe raw in Japan, salmon eggs should be stewed.

With our curiosity piqued, we decided to buy a pack, which cost us 1,130 yen (US$7.55) for 391 grams (13.8 ounces). Price-wise, that’s more expensive than what you’d pay for imported beef at a Japanese supermarket, but less expensive than domestically raised Japanese beef, so we guess you could call tuna eggs an affordable luxury.

Back home we opened up the pouch, and were very startled to see just how huge the egg sacs are!

They’re so big that, looking at them from above, we’d have guessed that they were just thick cuts of fish if we didn’t know otherwise. In profile, though, they look much more egg sac-y.

Since we were following Nagai Suisan’s recommendation to prepare our tuna eggs as nimono (the Japanese term for stewed/simmered dishes) we started by preparing a broth of soy sauce, mirin (sweet cooking sake), dashi (bonito stock), ginger, and water. With this being our first time cooking the unique star ingredients, we didn’t bother with exact measurements for the various seasonings, and just added them “to taste.”

Once the broth was simmering nicely, we added the tuna eggs to the pot. While they cooked, we used a spoon to periodically skim off any film from the top of the broth, and as we were doing this…

…we noticed that the egg sacs had transformed!

Maybe we should say that they “blossomed?” In any case, they looked very different coming out of the pot than they had going in.

Lifting a spoonful to our mouth to take a bite, we expected either a gritty texture, like tarako, or one of firmness giving way to a popping sensation, like ikura. Instead of either of those, though, the stewed tuna eggs had a consistency not unlike stewed white fish, a sort of meaty flakiness.

As for the flavor, tuna eggs taste very much like tuna, it turns out, without as sharply pronounced a feeling of fishiness as some other types of roe. We’re not sure we’d dump a bunch of tuna eggs over a bowl of white rice like is sometimes done with ikura and tarako, but our stewed sacs would make a very tasty side dish.

So while tuna eggs may be hard to find, they’re also pretty easy to love, and we’ll have to keep an eye out for them on our subsequent shopping trips. If this is an adventure your palate isn’t quite ready for, though, you can still find more orthodox treats in Yokosuka, like cinnamon rolls.

Shop information
Nagai Suisan (Port Market branch) / 店名　長井水産ポートマーケット店
Address: Kanagawa-ken, Yokosuka-shi, Shinko-cho Ichigo Yokosuka Port Market
神奈川県横須賀市新港町6いちごよこすかポートマーケット
Open 10 a.m.-6 p.m.

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