Takowasa, and Why It Makes You Order Another Beer

When I was living in Japan, if takowasa was on the menu I ordered it. Not considered it. Ordered it. I have eaten enough of the stuff that somewhere out there is an octopus fisherman whose family I put through school.

It is on our menu, most Americans have never had it, and I would like to fix that.

What It Actually Is

Takowasa is raw octopus cut small and dressed with wasabi. That is the whole dish. It is one of the most standard things on an izakaya menu in Japan, in the same category as edamame: nobody thinks about ordering it, it is just there, and it arrives fast.

Speed is part of why it is everywhere. It is made ahead and it comes out of the fridge, so it hits the table about ninety seconds after you ask for it, which matters a lot for the first thing you eat.

The Part That Is Actual Work

The making of it is less casual than it looks, and one step does most of the heavy lifting.

Raw octopus is slippery. There is a coating on it, and if you leave that alone you get two problems: the texture goes slick instead of clean, and the seasoning slides off rather than going in. So the octopus gets rubbed hard with salt and then rinsed thoroughly under running water until that coating is gone. Skip it and no amount of good wasabi rescues the dish.

After that it is cut into bite-sized pieces, dressed, and left to sit. Time in the fridge is not idle: the seasoning needs hours to actually get into the octopus rather than sitting on the outside of it.

Wasabi, and the Bit About Stems

Here is the thing most people outside Japan do not know: proper takowasa is often made with wasabi stems, not the grated root everyone pictures.

The stems get chopped and pickled, and they bring something the paste cannot. The root gives you heat and not much else. The stems give you heat plus a fibrous, snappy bite of their own, so the wasabi is a texture in the dish as well as a flavour.

Home recipes in Japan substitute tube wasabi, which is fine and is what most people have in the fridge. But if you have only ever met wasabi as a green blob next to sushi, the stems are a genuinely different ingredient.

Why It Goes With Beer, Specifically

This is the actual reason to write about it.

Takowasa is crunchy. The Japanese word is korikori, and it describes exactly the springy, resistant snap raw octopus has, which is nothing like cooked octopus and nothing like any other seafood you have had.

So you get: crunch, then salt, then the wasabi going up through your nose and clearing out fast. Every one of those things makes you want a cold drink, and beer answers all three at once. The carbonation resets your mouth, the cold kills the wasabi burn, and the malt handles the salt.

Then you are back at the start with an empty mouth and a piece of octopus in front of you, and the whole loop runs again. It is not an accident that this is bar food. It is engineered, whether anybody meant it that way or not, to make you order another beer.

Before You Order It

It is raw. Genuinely raw, not seared or blanched, which is why it carries the asterisk on our menu alongside the handrolls and the crispy rice.

If that is fine with you, get it early, get a cold beer with it, and do not order it as a side to something else. It is the thing you eat while you are deciding what else to eat.