Spices in Japanese cooking

Two traditions, two intensities. Sichuan cooking uses it heavily with chicken, in mouthwatering chicken and in the shredded, sauced dishes built on numbing oil; Japanese practice dusts sansho over grilled yakitori far more lightly. Chicken is mild enough that the numbness registers clearly rather than competing with the meat.

Add alongside: Chilli flakes, Ginger, Sesame seed

The standard East Asian treatment for a mild fish: ginger simmered with it in Japanese nitsuke, steamed over it in Cantonese cooking. It suppresses the fishy note without adding a flavour strong enough to bury a delicate fillet, which is a narrow target most spices miss.

Add alongside: White pepper, Garlic, Sesame seed

A standard of Chinese and Japanese fish cookery. Ginger is used specifically to counter the smell of fish — an explicit purpose in the culinary literature rather than an incidental effect — and its citric sharpness cuts the oiliness of salmon at the same time.

How: Julienned with spring onion over steamed fish; In a soy and rice wine marinade

Add alongside: Onion, White pepper, Fennel seed

• Fresh ginger only. Ground ginger against salmon tastes of baking spice and is a well-known way to spoil a good fillet.

A crust of coarsely cracked pepper on a seared tuna steak is a standard preparation, and it works because tuna is dense and meaty enough to carry a treatment that would overwhelm a flaking white fish. The pepper toasts in the pan and the interior stays raw, which is the whole point of the dish.

How: Pressed as a crust onto a steak before searing; With salt and lemon on grilled tuna

Add alongside: Salt, Sesame seed, Lemon

• Use coarsely cracked rather than finely ground — fine pepper burns in the short hard sear tuna needs.

Tuna is oily and strongly flavoured, and chilli meets it rather than covering it. The pairing runs across Sicilian, Spanish and Japanese cooking, and it is as at home on a tinned-tuna pasta as on a grilled steak.

How: Bloomed in oil for a tuna pasta; Scattered on grilled or seared tuna

Add alongside: Garlic, Lemon, Parsley

The canonical use, and the mechanism is the opposite of what people assume. Wasabi is not covering the fish — raw tuna at sashimi grade has very little to cover — it is providing a brief sharp contrast against a dense, fatty, faintly metallic flesh, and then clearing completely so the next mouthful tastes of tuna again. Its volatility is the whole reason it works here where a persistent heat would not.

How: Grated to order and placed between fish and rice in nigiri; A small mound alongside sashimi, taken with the fish rather than stirred into soy

Add alongside: Salmon, Rice

• Stirred into soy sauce it loses most of its effect, because the volatile compounds disperse into the liquid instead of reaching the nose.

Established in Japanese cooking with beef tataki and wagyu, and adopted widely outside it. Rich beef fat coats the palate and wasabi cuts through it without adding the acidity that a mustard or a pickle would — useful precisely where the dish is already balanced and wants sharpness rather than sourness.

How: A dab alongside seared beef tataki; Whisked into cream or butter as a sauce for steak

Add alongside: Horseradish, Black pepper

• It cannot be cooked into a sauce. Heat destroys the pungency, so it goes in off the heat at the very end.

Ginger is sharp, immediate and slightly sweet, and it does two jobs here: it supplies a top note the tofu cannot, and it works against the faintly beany quality of the soy that some people notice and dislike.

How: Grated into a dressing for cold silken tofu; With spring onion and soy over fried tofu

Add alongside: Garlic, Chilli flakes, Sesame seed

Tofu is protein without much free glutamate, so it reads as flat in a way that meat does not. Supplying savouriness directly — through MSG, or through soy, fermented bean paste or stock doing the same job — is what makes a tofu dish taste finished rather than merely seasoned.

How: A pinch in a braise or a dressing; Via soy sauce or fermented bean paste, which supply the same thing

Add alongside: Sichuan pepper, Chilli flakes

A shiso leaf under or beside a piece of sashimi is doing a job rather than decorating a plate: it is assertive enough to reset the palate between pieces without leaving a flavour that competes with the fish. Very few herbs anywhere are strong and clean enough to manage both.

How: Whole leaf under or beside sashimi; Shredded over a rice bowl with raw fish

Add alongside: Wasabi, Sesame seed, Sansho

• Shred it at the last moment; cut shiso darkens and loses its top notes within minutes.

Sansho over grilled eel is the canonical Japanese pairing and oily fish generally is what it suits: the citrus cuts fat, and the tingle arrives as a texture over a rich mouthful. Salmon is the closest oily fish most kitchens outside Japan can reach for, and the relationship transfers.

How: Shaken over grilled oily fish at the table; With soy and mirin on a rice bowl

Add alongside: Shiso, Sesame seed, Chilli flakes

• At the table, not in the pan. The sanshools that give the tingle do not survive cooking.

Recorded honestly as a weak pairing rather than a strong one. Poppy seed in shichimi togarashi is there for texture — it is nearly flavourless whole and unroasted — and sanshō is one of the most distinctive aromatics in Japanese cooking. They co-occur in the same mixture without interacting, and in many versions hemp seed does the poppy seed’s job instead. Treating this as a flavour partnership would overstate what is happening.

How: Both in shichimi togarashi

Add alongside: Dried orange peel

• Poppy seed contributes texture rather than flavour here
• Several shichimi formulations substitute hemp seed and lose nothing

The one salt pairing that is a real question, because both supply basic tastes and the two interact rather than simply coexist. Glutamate reads as savoury only in the presence of sodium, and a mixture of the two tastes fuller at a lower total sodium than salt alone does — which is why Japanese furikake, Chinese seasoning salts and a great deal of commercial food use them together. The proportion is small: MSG is used at a fraction of the salt.

How: Together in furikake; In a seasoning salt

Add alongside: Shiso

• MSG on its own, without salt, does not read as savoury
• SpiceHQ holds no source competent for the culinary claim — the regulatory and clinical sources on glutamate and on sodium both state in their own scope that they do not cover culinary use, so this is recorded as convention rather than as food science

The Japanese treatment of saba, and it works on two levels: gingerol's sharpness cuts the oil, and ginger has a documented deodorising effect on the amines that make old fish smell. Grated fresh rather than dried, and added late.

How: Grated over simmered saba; In the simmering liquid with soy and mirin

• Dried ginger does not substitute here

Sanshō over grilled fish is standard Japanese practice, and the tingling numbness works on oily fish in the way acid does — it resets the palate between mouthfuls. The green citric aroma is the other half, and it is why sanshō rather than Sichuan pepper belongs here.

How: Ground over grilled eel or mackerel; With kinome leaves in spring

• Loses its tingle with age faster than its aroma; old stock is inert

Green shiso with raw fish is the canonical Japanese use, and the leaf is doing two jobs: its perillaldehyde is antimicrobial enough that the pairing has a practical history, and the mint-cumin-citrus aroma cuts oily fish cleanly. Served as a whole leaf under or beside the fish rather than chopped.

How: Whole leaves with sashimi; Wrapped around fish for tempura

Red shiso and ume is one of the fixed pairings of Japanese food: the leaves are salted and packed with the plums, where the fruit acid turns their anthocyanins bright red and the leaves in turn perfume the umeboshi. It is a pairing where each ingredient changes the other, which is rare.

How: Salted red shiso packed with umeboshi; As yukari, the dried purple furikake made from the leaves afterwards

• Red shiso rather than green; the two are used for entirely different purposes