Ikura (Salmon Caviar)

How to easily separate and cure salmon roe in a dashi brine to make ikura (Japanese salmon caviar).

Homemade Ikura Recipe

With spawning season in full swing, the salmon are packed to the gills with roe. If you’re able to find a skein of salmon roe at your local seafood shop (or you happen to know someone that’s going salmon fishing in Alaska), 5 minutes and a handful of ingredients is all it takes to turn that ugly sac of roe into a decadent bowl of ikura (salmon caviar)

Unlike the limp salty goop that that comes out of jars, homemade ikura caviar is truly sublime. The plump silken pearls of caviar glow like precious gemstones and are loaded with the savory taste of umami. Stick a spoonful in your mouth and each orb bursts with a satisfying pop, sending their rich, briny flavor flooding over your tongue in a wave of culinary bliss.

Serve it on blini’s as a canapé, use it for making sushi, or just spoon it over a bowl of hot rice to make ikura don. I also like serving this red caviar along with salmon sashimi on a bowl of vinegared sushi rice or as a filling for temaki sushi rolls.

I’ve put together a little video to show you how to separate the delicate salmon roe from the skein and this technique should work with almost any salmon or trout roe. Just be sure to select a skein of roe with large mature pearls. Immature roe have weaker sacs which will break as you try and separate them from the skein.

Ikura (Salmon Caviar)

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Yield 6 servings

Equipment

Units

Ingredients

1 ½ cups dashi
2 tablespoons soy sauce
1 tablespoon sake
1 tablespoon granulated sugar
1 tablespoon salt
2 large skeins fresh salmon roe

Instructions

Make the brine by adding the dashi, soy sauce, sake, sugar and salt to a bowl and stirring until the salt and sugar are completely dissolved.
Watch the video for instructions on separating the pearls of caviar from the skein.
Rinse the caviar with cold water and then put it in a container with enough brine to cover it.
The ikura will be ready to eat in 1 day.

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Nutrition

Calories 144kcalCarbohydrates 4gProtein 20gFat 6gSaturated Fat 1gPolyunsaturated Fat 2gMonounsaturated Fat 1gCholesterol 312mgSodium 1789mgPotassium 250mgFiber 1gSugar 2gVitamin A 252IUVitamin C 13mgCalcium 39mgIron 1mg

Course Appetizer, Basics

Cuisine Japanese

Diet Dairy-Free, Low-Carb, Pescatarian

QUESTIONS or COMMENTS?

What do you think?64 Cancel reply

Comments

Marc Matsumoto says

11/02/16 at 12:44

Hi Elizabeth, ikura definitely needs to be refrigerated and this should be eaten within a few days as the brine is relatively low in salt. If you make a more concentrated brine the ikura will keep a bit longer (maybe a week or so), but it’s be to either eat this right away or freeze it.

Reply
Terri says

11/17/16 at 19:18

Do you know of any online sources for ordering a skein of salmon roe?

Reply
Marc Matsumoto says

11/21/16 at 01:06

Hi Terri, sorry I don’t know of any places online, you may have a tough time finding it online because it’s easily perishable before it is cured, so it needs to be used almost as soon as it comes out of the salmon.

Reply
Kathleen says

07/16/19 at 15:58

How long can you keep Ikura. I’m fishing in Alaska and want to make this recipe and share with my friends back home.

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  07/17/19 at 09:03
  
  Hi Kathleen, because there’s a relatively low salt content (compared to other methods of curing), it will only last about 5 days max, and towards the tail end of that the texture starts to go off a bit. I’d recommend draining and freezing the ikura after letting it soak in the brine for about 12 hours. It won’t have quite the same texture as unfrozen, but it will be better than letting it sit in the fridge for a few days before delivering it to your friends.
  
  Reply
Cheryl says

08/15/19 at 18:05

I have salmon roe frozen immediately after cleaning the fish. How do I work with that?

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  08/16/19 at 13:56
  
  Hi Cheryl, my experience with previously frozen roe is that the individual egg sacs tend to break much more easily so I lose a lot while trying to separate them from the skein. That being said, if the other option is to toss them, it might be worth doing anyway. In the future you may want to separate the eggs from the skein when they’re fresh, and then you can freeze the roe after it’s been cured.
  
  Reply
Ada says

09/04/19 at 01:18

Hi, can you send the video link again? Thanks.

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  09/04/19 at 12:16
  
  Hi Ada, sorry about that, the video embed seems to have disappeared in one of our moves. I’ve added it back in or you can check it out here: https://youtu.be/YM8mMB_JI8Q
  
  Reply
Allen says

09/11/19 at 04:14

Hi Marc,
I live in Alaska and I have access to a lot of salmon eggs but I need help finding a proper screen strainer like you have in your video that fits in a bowl. I ended up using some chicken wire and it didn’t work very well.
Where should I look online and what’s the proper name for it?
Thanks,
Allen

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  09/11/19 at 09:27
  
  Hi Allen, it doesn’t need to fit in a bowl, but it needs to be stiff and the holes should be no larger than 1/3-inch. What I used is a cheap disposable BBQ grill that’s used in Japan (https://www.amazon.com/Stainless-Squares-Barbecue-Nonstick-Grilling/dp/B07GGLJ3YY?th=1&psc=1&smid=A387MXZEP21FUM&linkCode=ll1&tag=norecipes-20&linkId=633da3afc5100097c91c2607d353f1df&language=en_US&ref_=as_li_ss_tl), but anything with similarly sized holes should work.
  
  Reply
- Allen says
  
  07/14/20 at 05:56
  
  Hi Allen, I use a tennis racket that i picked up at the thrift store. It works very well, I have also just used a large metal spoon to seperate the eggs from the skein with very good luck. From Allen.
  
  Reply
Maggie says

10/15/19 at 23:21

You’re talking dirty to me on this. Thank you for the GREAT video! How do you recommend storing the ikura. Are you okay w/ freezing individual half pint canning jars? I’ve got about 10 pounds of to process from a local fisherman.

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  10/15/19 at 23:50
  
  Thanks Maggie! Wow that’s a lot of Ikura! This has a relatively low level of sodium so it won’t keep in the fridge for more than 4-5 days. If you want to store it longer term, I’d recommend draining the brine after a day or two and then packing it into sealed containers and freezing it. You can then defrost it in the fridge.
  
  Reply
Elizabeth says

11/14/19 at 01:09

Hello Marc,

I used your recipe to cure Salmon roe and the result does not look right and I’m wondering if you can help me figure out what may have gone wrong. The eggs did not soak up the brine and remain very small. The roe is from Sockeye salmon and had been frozen since the end of July.

Any suggestions will be appreciated.

Best,
Elizabeth

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  11/14/19 at 09:54
  
  Hi Elizabeth, I’m sorry to hear it didn’t turn out as expected. A couple of possibilities here. The first is that sockeye salmon has smaller roe than king salmon so the roe could have been small to begin with. The second possibility is that the roe was not fully matured. In Japan, roe that is not fully matured is usually salted and cured without removing it from its skein and only the fully matured roe is sold for turning into ikura. I’m not sure where you bought yours from, but if the store didn’t make this distinction it’s possible that it had not fully developed before being harvested. The last possibility is the fact that it was frozen. Unless it was flash frozen and held in a deep freezer, freezing food impacts it on a cellular level. As the water in the food freezes it forms ice crystals which rupture cell walls so when it’s defrosted, liquids leach out of the cells (this is called drip loss). Also, home freezers are set to cycle the temperature up and down to prevent ice from building up on the walls. This means the food is repeatedly partially defrosted and refrozen again, which can worsen the damage to the cells (freezer burn). That’s why I usually recommend freezing Ikura after it has been cured, but even then it will not have the same texture as when it was fresh. I hope that helps.
  
  Reply
  - Elizabeth says
    
    11/15/19 at 06:20
    
    Thanks, Marc. I let it cure for another day and they got a little bigger. They also turned out to be delicious. The roe is from Sockeye which I got from a friend who went fishing in Alaska last summer.
    
    Reply
    - Marc Matsumoto says
      
      11/16/19 at 01:38
      
      I’m glad to hear it!
      
      Reply
Ivy Baker says

12/06/19 at 14:21

I liked that you explained that you will want to include dashi and soy sauce. It is cool to know that it can really help enhance the flavor. I wonder if you can do this with other types of fish eggs.

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  12/09/19 at 12:51
  
  Hi Ivy, in Japan we eat all sorts of fish roe (cod, herring, salmon, trout, mullet, etc) , and they’re all prepared a little differently, but dashi can definitely enhance the flavor.
  
  Reply
Yvonne says

11/21/20 at 02:30

Hi Marc,
Thank you for sharing the video of how to deskin the ikura. I bought two frozen ones. After I rinsed the ikura in cold water, many white fatty goblets appeared and I couldn’t separate them from the fish eggs! Would you know why this happened and how I can prevent it?

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  11/21/20 at 08:26
  
  Hi Yvonne, the white goblets, are most likely the skin of popped roe. This happens when Ikura is frozen before being separated from the skein as ice crystals that form during freezing will piece the skin of each piece of roe. When you defrost it the ice melts away leaving big holes in the roe from which the inside of the roe leaks out. Next time I would recommend looking for fresh roe that has never been frozen. If you are worried about parasites, you can freeze it once after separating it from the skein and soaking it in the brine for a day. Then you can drain off the brine, put it in a sealed container and freeze it.
  
  Reply
ly wright says

12/10/20 at 11:56

can you make ikura with uni???

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  12/10/20 at 15:50
  
  Hi ly, I’m guessing you’re asking if you can brine uni like Ikura? If so, I don’t see why not. Uni is often sold in brine in Japan to keep it from falling apart so this should be no different. That being said, you couldn’t really call it Ikura since it wouldn’t be salmon roe.
  
  Reply
Jen says

09/24/21 at 10:13

Hi,
I just tried your method to separate the roe from the egg sac but they all disintegrated 🙁 I didn’t use much pressure at all and now I have this liquidy stuff I don’t know what to do with. Is it still edible? Any tips on how to prepare it or is it basically toast at this point?

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  09/24/21 at 10:37
  
  Hi Jen, I’m sorry to hear it didn’t go well for you, that has happened to me once so I know it’s pretty frustrating.It usually has to do with the freshness of the roe (i.e. the longer it’s been since it was removed from the fish the more likely they are to pop). If the roe sac was frozen once this could also cause them to burst. Unfortunately there’s no way to rescue the roe once they’ve burst. Next time, if you have a roe sac that doesn’t look like it’s going to be cooperative, you can try salting it without separating the individual roe. This is called Sujiko in Japanese, and it can be sliced like cheese and eaten, but it is extremely salty (it needs to be heavily salted to kill parasites that live in the membranes between the eggs.
  
  Reply
Lawrence says

11/22/21 at 15:35

Hi we followed your recipe it turned up very well,thanks.but I have a couple.questions hope you can advise

1. After the 1 day curing do we drain the brine or keep and drain only those we wanted to serve?

2. How long can it last in the fridge?

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  11/25/21 at 22:43
  
  Hi Lawrence, sorry for the slow response. Yes, you’ll want to drain the brine after a day. If you let it soak too long, the skin of the eggs starts to get tough. As for shelf life this brine does not contain a ton of salt, so you’ll want to eat or freeze this within 5 days.
  
  Reply
Steve S says

07/25/22 at 03:59

Can you buy the dashi somewhere??

Reply
- Marc Matsumoto says
  
  07/25/22 at 21:55
  
  Hi Steve, “dashi” is just the Japanese word for soup stock. In this context it refers to a specific type of stock that’s made with konbu and katsuobushi. You can learn more about it and how to make it here: https://norecipes.com/how-to-make-dashi/
  
  Reply

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