Mentaiko Spaghetti is Classic Japanese-Italian Comfort Food

This is a recipe I developed for the New York Times. You can get the recipe 100% free with this gift link.

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When I was a kid growing up in Morningside Heights, breakfast at my Japanese grandmother’s apartment one floor below ours almost always meant rice and eggs — sometimes raw, beaten into the rice with soy sauce (tamago kake gohan), but often it was tarako: salted, cured pollock roe, lightly grilled or broiled until smoky, then crumbled over hot rice and sprinkled with nori. It was salty, briny, a little funky, and completely delicious.

That flavor’s stuck with me (you might say my grandmother was my roe model), and these days I keep tarako and its spicy sibling, mentaiko, in my freezer at all times. You can find them easily at Korean and Japanese grocery stores — H-Mart almost always has them — and they last for months. They’re fantastic not just on rice, but in all kinds of dishes where you want a punch of umami: potato salad, onigiri, cream cheese for bagels, even stirred into scrambled eggs. (You can find those recipes on NYTcooking.com as well, though they are behind a NYT paywall).

But my favorite use might be mentaiko spaghetti, a classic dish of Japanese wafu cuisine (Western-style dishes reimagined with Japanese ingredients). It’s as easy as mixing mentaiko with cream or butter (I like adding miso for extra depth), tossing it with spaghetti, and finishing it with nori or shiso. I sometimes add an egg yolk to help it emulsify, or go full carbonara-style with whole eggs, black pepper, and a ladle of pasta water. I also find that using crème fraîche in place of the standard heavy cream adds a nice tang that complements the fish eggs. Not necessary, but nice if you've got it.

It’s fast, comforting, and deeply satisfying. The kind of dish that reminds me how powerful food can be, not just for feeding people, but for carrying memory. My own kids are still undecided on tarako (“will eat, but will never ask for it” is the current consensus), but maybe someday a smoky bowl of rice will spark something familiar in them, too.

Let me know if you give it a try or have your own favorite way to use mentaiko or tarako.