So I had a lot of circular slices of jalapeno and cilantro leaves leftover from the arroz con frutas de mer meal from the other night and I didn’t want to let them go to waste. What to do? Well, what came to mind was doing Nobu’s Toro/Hamachi With Jalapeno and Yuzu Soy (the recipe can be found in Nobu: The Cookbook (p. 130)). It’s actually a really easy but tasty dish to do.
Because the original dish used a ‘fatty/buttery’ fish, I thought I’d substitute salmon as the sashimi component of the dish. So I went and got a small block of sushi/sashimi grade salmon and sliced it up carefully and put onto a plate. I then grated two garlic cloves and dabbed each salmon slice with a little of the grated garlic. Pasted onto each grated garlic dab was a nice leaf of cilantro. Finally, a thin circular slice of jalapeno went atop each piece of cilantro leaf. Into the dish, I carefully poured a 2:1 mix of yuzu juice and soy sauce (in this case I used 2 tablespoons of yuzu juice and 1 tablespoon of soy).
All the flavors reminded me of the kanpachi with jalapeno that I had in some of my omakase courses at Matsuhisa, LA. So I’m pretty sure I got the dish right!
Update (23 Sep 2014)
OK. I just found a major clarification regarding this dish. I happened across the following video yesterday from Nobu Chef Oyvind Naesheim (see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SpoLkD841ZU ). At time index 4:16 through 4:35 Chef Naesheim indicates that they use serranos, not jalapenos for this dish!