People in Japan, including myself, eat raw eggs and chicken meat every year and the hospitals in Japan are not flooded with incidences of salmonella poisoning.

So what is toriwasa big deal anyway….it is not egg. In the eyes of westerners this is quite possibly the most feared dish in all of Japanese cuisine. Toriwasa is sliced raw chicken served sashimi style. In Kagoshima, where the dish is popular, a mirin sweetened soy sauce is usually served along with the chicken sashimi and occasionally with ground ginger. Commonly made from sasami the same thing as a white meat “chicken tenderloin” in the United States.In the photo above, you can see slices of ginger, a green herb (mitsuba) and small amount of ground wasabi on the side not pictured.

This dish is one of my favorite dishes and once you get past the western stigma of salmonella, you are on the road to good food tastes. Just in case, you still say “no way”, there are on average a few thousand reported cases of salmonella poisoning in Japan. Considering that almost all of Japan’s 127 million residents consume raw or “undercooked” chicken products on a frequent basis, that’s a relatively small number.