Cheese Kamaboko: Fish Cake Snack with Cheese Bits
Kamaboko is a traditional Japanese food with at least 900 years of history.
It is a steamed or baked fish cake made with whitefish meat (such as cod, shark, lizardfish, or wrasse), sugar, salt, mirin, egg white, and starch.
Traditionally formed into an arched shape, Kamaboko fish cake comes on a small rectangular wooden plate.
Today, Kamaboko comes in various varieties, and here in Japan, it is available at any supermarket and most convenience stores.
The food goes well with alcoholic beverages, and we love to eat it as an Otsumami (おつまみ) along with Sake or beer.
Cheese Kamaboko (チーズかまぼこ)
Among others, flavored Kamaboko is popular with drinkers.
Those fish cakes have a stick shape without using a wooden plate, and the representative is Cheese Kamaboko, a cheese-bits-embedded variety.
Natori’s & Maruzen Chiikama
This time, I got a packaged Cheese Kamaboko from Natori (なとり), a Japanese food company well known for the Cheese Tara snack.
Maruzen (丸善) is also a food maker well recognized for its Cheese Kamaboko fish cake, whose product has the nickname Chiikama (チーかま).
Features
The package from Natori contains four sticks of Cheese Kamaboko fish cake, individually wrapped in a plastic film.
As mentioned above, this one has half-dried cheese bits embedded throughout the cake.
Taste
Cheese Kamaboko generally has a firm, smooth texture, lightly seasoned. The snack is not fishy at all and is easy to eat.
The Natori Cheese Kamaboko uses rich-tasting processed cheese and matches perfectly with beer!
Ingredients
Lastly, for your information, here are the specific ingredients used in the Japanese fish cake snack.
| Fish meat (Cod, Lizardfish), Processed cheese, Salt, Sugar, Fermented seasoning, Egg white, Modified starch, Seasoning (Amino acid), Sodium phosphate, Color (Carotenoid), Acidifier |
(Reference Page: Wikipedia 蒲鉾 )
