Mentaiko is pollock roe cured with chili — the pink, finely grained sacs that turn up on Japanese breakfast tables, inside rice balls, and, more recently, tossed through spaghetti. This sheet keeps it very plain: three whole sacs lying on an oval plate with a sprig of green leaves tucked in beside them. There is almost no internal detail to negotiate, which makes it one of the easier pages on this site to finish and a good choice for an unsteady hand or a short session. Prepared with care homes and reminiscence work in mind. The PDF is two pages — a colour version first, then the plain line art. Download and print — no registration.
🗣 Conversation Starters — for care activities and family time
Do you like mentaiko? How hot do you like it?
Have you had mentaiko pasta, or the mentaiko baguette?
Have you ever been to Fukuoka? Did you bring some home with you?
What is your favourite thing to eat with plain rice?
What is mentaiko?
It is the roe sac of Alaska pollock, salted and then cured in a marinade built on chili. The word itself records where the dish came from: pollock is myeongtae in Korean, which entered Japanese as mentai, and ko means roe. A chili-cured pollock roe already existed in Korea; the Japanese form is usually credited to Kawahara Toshio, who had grown up in Busan and who began selling his own version at his shop Fukuya, in the Hakata district of Fukuoka, in 1949. The detail people in Fukuoka always add is that he never patented it and showed the method to anyone who asked — which is a large part of why the whole city, rather than a single company, became the home of mentaiko.
Mentaiko, karashi mentaiko, tarako — what is the difference?
Tarako is the same pollock roe salted but not spiced — paler, mild, and the version most often given to children. Karashi mentaiko is the chili-cured one, and in everyday Japanese mentaiko almost always means that. Heat varies by maker and is sold as mild, medium and hot, and a good one tastes of the marinade — kombu, sake, sometimes yuzu — quite as much as of the chili. The sacs on this page are whole and unopened; cut one across and the inside is a dense mass of extremely fine eggs, which is why the colour sample shows the surface as a fine grain rather than as flat pink.
How is it eaten — and how should this page be coloured?
On plain white rice, packed inside an onigiri, stirred through spaghetti with butter and shredded nori (a Tokyo restaurant called Kabe no Ana is usually credited with that pasta in the 1960s), or spread with mayonnaise on a split baguette and baked — the mentai furansu that Fukuoka bakeries are known for. One thing worth knowing: the fish is not caught off Fukuoka. Pollock comes from the cold northern Pacific — Hokkaido and the Tohoku coast, and in large volume imported from Alaska — so Fukuoka’s claim is the curing, not the fishing. For the page itself, resist making the roe one flat pink. Lay a warm coral or salmon across each sac, push a deeper red-brown along the lower edge and into the seam where one sac overlaps another, and leave a pale streak running along the top of each: that curve of light is the only thing stopping them from reading as three sausages. The leaves are the single strong green on the sheet, so save them for last, and keep the plate quiet — a pale wood tone or a soft grey lets the roe carry the picture.
