page_title: Zanthoxylum piperitum
section_title: Japanese cuisine
hierarchical_section_title: Zanthoxylum piperitum / Uses / Culinary / Japanese cuisine
caption_attribution_description: English: Japanese pepper (Zanthoxylum piperitum) harvested in Okayama Prefecture and sold at supermarket in Osaka, Japan.
context_page_description: Zanthoxylum piperitum, also known as Japanese pepper, Japanese prickly-ash, or Korean pepper, is a deciduous aromatic spiny shrub or small tree of the citrus and rue family Rutaceae, native to Japan and Korea.
  It is called sanshō in Japan and chopi in Korea. Both the leaves and fruits are used as an aromatic and flavoring in these countries. It is closely related to the Chinese Szechuan peppers, which come from plants of the same genus.
context_section_description: The pulverized mature fruits ("peppercorns" or "berries") known as "Japanese pepper" or kona-zanshō (粉ざんしょう) are the standard spice for sprinkling on the kabayaki-unagi (broiled eel) dish. It is also one of the seven main ingredients of the blended spice called shichimi, which also contains red chili peppers. Finely ground Japanese pepper, kona-zanshō, is nowadays usually sold in sealed packets, and individual serving sizes are included inside heat-and-serve broiled eel packages.
  The ground Japanese pepper is also blended with ground chili pepper and other aromatics to form the shichimi or "seven flavor", which is used to flavor various dishes.
  Young leaves and shoots, pronounced ki-no-mé or ko-no-mé (木の芽, lit. 'tree bud') herald the spring season, and often garnish grilled fish and soups. They have a distinctive flavor which is not to the liking of everyone. It is a customary ritual to put a leaf between cupped hands, and clap the hands with a popping sound, this supposedly serving to bring out the aroma. The young leaves are crushed and blended with miso using suribachi (mortar) to make a paste, a pesto sauce of sorts, and then used to make various aemono (tossed salad). The stereotypical main ingredient for the resultant kinome-ae is the fresh harvest of bamboo shoots, but the sauce may be tossed (or delicately "folded") into sashimi, clams, squid or other vegetable such as tara-no-me (angelica-tree shoots).
  The immature green berries are called ao-zanshō (lit. 'green sansho'), and these may be blanched and salted, or simmered using soy sauce into dark-brown tsukudani, which is eaten as condiment. The berries are also available as shoyu-zuke, which is just steeped in soy sauce. The berries are also cooked with small fry fish and flavored with soy sauce (chirimen jako), a specialty item of Kyoto, since its Mount Kurama outskirts is a renowned growing area of the plant.
  There is also a dessert named kirisanshō, rice cake dessert flavored with ground Japanese pepper. It is a specialty in the north.
  In central and northeastern Japan, there is also non-sticky rice-cake type confection called goheimochi, which is basted with miso-based paste and grilled, sometimes uses the Japanese pepper as flavor additive to the miso. Also being marketed are sansho flavored arare (rice crackers), snack foods, and sweet sansho-mochi.
caption: Fresh green Japanese pepper in a supermarket in Japan
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