Kitchen · April 2026 · 5 min read
How we cure the black cod.
Seventy-two hours, one bowl of white miso, and a kitchen that has been doing this since 2001.
If you've been to Tsunami before, you've probably had the black cod. It's been on the menu since the day we opened in 2001, and aside from a small refinement to the marinade in 2008, the recipe hasn't changed.
The cure starts seventy-two hours before service. We take a portion of skin-on Alaskan black cod and brine it lightly in cold dashi to set the flesh. After that, it goes into a saikyo miso paste — a base of white miso, mirin, sake and a small amount of sugar — and stays in the fridge, weighted, for three days.
What that does, beyond seasoning the fish, is start to break down the proteins. By day three the flesh has the texture of soft butter and the miso has worked its way through to the centre. The cod is then portioned, seared on the robata under binchotan, and finished in the salamander to glaze.
Plated with a single shiso leaf and a pinch of sansho pepper, that's the dish. Three days of patience, two minutes of fire, one bite that gets the table talking.
We get asked for the recipe a lot. The honest answer: it's not the recipe — it's the time, the consistency of the miso, and the fish itself. Source three-day-old wild Alaskan black cod, weight it properly, and don't rush the cure. Everything else is technique you can learn.
also worth reading
