This recipe for ume shiso spaghetti shines with butter

This hearty Japanese spaghetti is tart with pickled plum paste, rich in butter and fragrant with lemony-minty herbal shiso. Japanese pickled plums (Ume) have a distinctive sour-fruity-salty flavor so intense it's puckering. The effective umami goes well with butter and gives the sauce its glistening creaminess. The recipe is inspired by a version once served at Masayuki Ishikawa's funky Sawtelle Kitchen, a tiny house of a French-Japanese restaurant on Sawtelle Boulevard. The handwritten menu always featured the fan-favorite ume shiso spaghetti. I've eaten it so many times that I think I've come pretty close. You can buy pickled plum paste at Japanese grocery stores. Or you can buy whole pickled plums, remove the pit and mash them into a paste. Since umeboshi is so salty, taste it to your liking.