Katsuobushi
dried, fermented, and smoked skipjack tuna
Katsuobushi (Japanese: 鰹節) is simmered, smoked and fermented skipjack tuna (Katsuwonus pelamis, sometimes referred to as bonito). It is also known as bonito flakes or broadly as okaka (おかか).
Shaved katsuobushi and dried kelp—kombu—are the main ingredients of dashi, a broth that forms the basis of many soups (such as miso) and sauces (such as soba no tsukejiru) in Japanese cuisine.
Katsuobushi's distinct umami taste comes from its high inosinic acid content. Traditionally made katsuobushi, known as karebushi, is deliberately fermented with Aspergillus glaucus fungus in order to reduce moisture. Katsuobushi has also been shown to impart kokumi (a term translated as "heartiness").
Traditional production process
The fish is beheaded, gutted, and filleted, with the fatty belly, which does not lend well to being preserved, trimmed off. The fillets are then arranged in a basket and simmered just below boiling for an hour to an hour and a half, depending on their size.
The rib bones are then removed and the fillets smoked for up to a month using oak, pasania, or castanopsis wood. They are smoked for five to six hours in one session, left to rest one day for the condensation to rise to the surface, then fired and smoked again the next day.
“Katsuobushi” enters the record as dried, fermented, and smoked skipjack tuna. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Katsuobushi, dried and fermented can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 20, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q113739. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katsuobushi” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.