Yuzu Marinated Japanese Mushrooms Make a Great Sake Pairing

These Yuzu Marinated Japanese mushrooms make for a delightful side or a great tapa to pair with your favorite sake. The mushrooms are simple cleaned and roasted before being tossed in a bright citrusy marinade made with yuzu juice and yuzu kosho.

Yuzu is a Japanese citrus that has a flavor that's somewhere between mandarins and meyer lemons with a hint of grapefruit. When green, the zests are used to make a spicy condiment called yuzu kosho, which literally means "yuzu pepper". They turn yellow as they ripen, at which point they can be juiced. It's a little hard to find fresh yuzu in the US, but you can get both the juice and yuzu kosho bottled online, or at a Japanese grocery store.

Roasting the mushrooms, not only creates a boatload of umami through the Maillard Reaction, it also evaporates any excess liquid in the mushrooms, allowing them to soak up the marinade like a sponge. I used a combination of shiitake, maitake(hen of the woods) and shimejis(beech mushrooms), because it's what I had on hand, but eryngi (king trumpet) and enoki mushrooms would work as well.