Shellfish species 12: Japanese Ivory Shell-Japanese Babylon Shell/Baigai

BAIGAI-1

Japanese Ivory Shell/Japanese Babylon Shell are known as Bai, Baigai, Isobai in Japanese.
They are just in season now as we see them over the counters from Spring to Summer.
They used to very common and found all over Japan, but unfortuantely too many have been caught or killed by pollution in recent years.
The biggest specimens are caught off Toyama fairly deep where they can attain 15cm length and weigh as much as 300g.

BAIGAI-2

The most popular way of eating them is to first boil them in water and soy sauce and serve them cold.

BAIGAI-SASHIMI

But the Japanese apprecaite them very much raw as sashimi and

BAIGAI-SUSHI

sushi!

There must be a good reason for the Japanese to call them “Kai no Oosama/King of Shelfish”!

Please check the new postings at:
sake, shochu and sushi

—————————————-
日本語のブログ
—————————————-

4 thoughts on “Shellfish species 12: Japanese Ivory Shell-Japanese Babylon Shell/Baigai”

  1. These look so interesting! It’s too bad I am not in Japan while they are in season. Maybe next year. The dish where they are boiled in water and soy sauce looks delicious!

    Like

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s