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.