BTW, salmon eggs (roe) are mostly fake at cheap sushi places, and always when they’re sold cheap. It’s like popping boba filled with fish oil, salt, sugar, and colorant.
Ever heard of kelp caviar?
It’s basically extraction of seaweed (which turns to gel when mixed with water) that’s flavored with fishy taste and colorant.
Did you try it, and what do you think? I tried the IKEA version, does not taste like the real fish eggs.
Also, Salmon Sushi is not an Japanese idea (Japanese thought uncooked Salmon was not good)
https://medium.com/torodex/salmon-sushi-is-not-a-japanese-invention-9189d9cd78b7
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Until the Norwegians sent some to Japan.
I never tried it. I was never into fish eggs. But I did see a documentary on how kelp caviar was made.
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A risk well worth it. 
Learned something. I figured it might be a canadian/US first nation thing via smoking culture. But i never had “raw salmon” til i came to taiwan. the smoked salmon here is not well cooked and thinly sliced, yuck. Good, well cooked smoked salmon or bust i say haha. And it better be an endangered species as well, not that pink or atlantic crap! The stench of extinction must come through in the meat, at least subtly.
You don’t cook smoked salmon, it’s salted, cured, it’s smoked.
And my guess is that (almost) all smoked salmon is not smoked in Taiwan, but smoked and sliced at place of origin.
Im probably messing up the words, sorry. Cooking might tehnically be wrong. But back in canada we would always eat it “cooked”. Big thick fillets cooked during the smoking process or perhaps steamed first to cook it through. Can eat it with your fingers peelingboff the dryish layers.
All the stuff i have had here are raw slices dipped in/sprayed with liquid smoke 
I know what you mean. The taste and texture is very different. Again you would pay a lot for the better quality smoked salmon if it’s available here at all.
Had you never been to a sushi place or had lox?
While it makes sense to me that you could smoke salmon while cooking it like you do with pulled pork, ribs, or brisket, when people say “smoked salmon” (in Europe and the US, anyway, as in Taiwan), it’s not cooked. It’s brined/cured. Often served on a bagel with cream cheese, or as charcuterie, or on eggs Benedict, among other things. Cooking it would ruin the flavor and texture.
Smoking explained,
“Cold-smoked salmon is smoked below roughly 90 degrees fahrenheit ( |32.2 °C|), while hot-smoked salmon is smoked above approximately 120 degrees ( |48.9 °C|). The temperature difference results in cold-smoked salmon and a fresher and less smoky flavor, while the hot-smoked version is much smokier.”
Neither is actually cooked, it’s preserved/brined, than smoked.
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I consider smoking to be a cooking process.
I did too. But i can see why the word cook might also be defined by temperature.
In pictre form:
I personally never had this until living in t aiwan.
On west coast canada i always had something more or less like this which uses low heat, smoke and cured. Its a firm texture sofeels more “cooked”, but i see now cured is probably the correct term.
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You can hardly say that lemon marinated fish is cooked although it’s perfectly edible. Or pickled herring.
Ya, cured makes more sense. It is prepared in a way that changes cell stucture to become firm and “cooked like~ish”, kills pathogens and can be stored without refrigeration. Not cooked, but very much not raw 
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Went to a sushi restaurant for lunch yesterday. There was a surcharge for all the salmon sushi dishes.
Interesting. I wonder if this is the same for the cheap quality sushi chains, eg. sushi express? Was there last week and everyone was ordering salmon all night. To be fair their 30nt for 2 tiny peices is already pretty inflated, maybe their margins are good enough to absorb current wholesale costs?
Looking a Alibaba, which raises costs due to the middlemen situation and thus actual price is likely 20 percent lower, salmon is still crazy cheap.
If taiwan imports are actually that much more expensive its almost certainly due to racketeering and/or government import issues.
Most mega sushi chain stores have their own importing routes for their seafood, and the cost can be somewhat controllable even when certain items jump up in price. I managed one of the major conveyer belt sushi stores, so I know many tricks to keep the cost down.
Lately, most of the seafood/raw fish on top of the rice are processed at their central factory. (cleaning, slicing, portioning…) Once the stores receive them, all they have to do is lay it on top of rice and…voila. A sushi machine also portions the rice. We had the machine as well in our store. It takes absolutely no skills to make sushi at the sushi express or even Kura or Sushiro.
What makes Kura and Sushiro different is the quality of seafood, staff training, their special menu items(ramen and all the good stuff), and their rice. Most of their seafood is directly imported from Japan from their own proprietary factory/kitchen and you can’t get them anywhere else.
Frozen salmons(which I think sushi express is using) are considerably cheaper than fresh, but the quality goes way down because of logistical problems, not holding them at the right temperature (going back to the super freezer), and not properly thawing the fish.
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