Next Zoran sliced an avocado. He laid a couple of wedges of the green fruit in the valley across the center of the nori. He tossed on crabmeat and cucumber. He lifted the edge of the rice and nori pad, pushed it over the filling, tucked it into the far side of the valley, and rolled it just a quarter turn to form a loose log. The nori had disappeared. The outside of the roll was rice, scattered with sesame seeds.
Zoran dropped his wrap-covered mat over the log of rice and gave it a quick squeeze, his fingers and thumbs tapping it flat on the sides and top. Inside-out rolls aren’t so much rolls as squished rectangles.
Zoran dipped the tip of his long willow-leaf knife in his dish of water. He tilted the knife toward the ceiling and tapped the back of the handle on the cutting board. A drop of water rolled down the blade. A wet blade has the advantage of not sticking to the rice.
Zoran swept his knife horizontally across the cutting board. The blade passed under the roll and out the other side, severing the sticky rice from the wood. He swiped his blade down with another quick cut through the middle of the roll, spun half the roll around so it was side-to-side with the other half, and executed two more quick cuts through both halves at once. He turned the six slices on their sides, revealing the colorful cross sections.
“Your turn,” he said.
They tried. Mostly they piled on too much filling. Avocado and cucumber spurted out of the ends.
At the party at Paramount, Kate had made so many hand rolls for customers that she’d gotten pretty good at them. Now she managed to construct a California roll, and it held together.
Slicing it was another matter. She was still afraid of cutting herself. She handled her willow-leaf knife gingerly. Her slices came out slanted, and the pieces were all different lengths. Her California roll looked like a miniature obstacle course.
“Okay,” Zoran ordered, “now, kappa-maki.” It was time to master Japanese tradition—the basic cucumber roll.
The basic cucumber roll is a type of hoso-maki, or “thin roll.” For the most part, thin rolls are the only rolls eaten in traditional Japanese sushi. There are only a few types of thin rolls, and the fillings are always simple. The two main kinds are cucumber and tuna.
Thin rolls have the seaweed on the outside—usually half a sheet. But the earliest record of a rolled form of sushi is from a 1776 Japanese cookbook, and the recipe calls for a more exotic wrapping than seaweed. It says to lay the skin of a poisonous blowfish on a bamboo window blind, spread rice across it, and lay fish along the center. Then roll the window blind up tightly, squeeze it into the shape of a square, and press it with something heavy. Today’s bamboo mats for rolling sushi look like miniature window blinds because that’s precisely what they are.
The cucumber roll gets its Japanese name, kappa-maki, from a mythical water sprite called a kappa, believed to inhabit lakes and rivers. Kappa are known for gobbling up children and generally causing trouble by farting and looking up women’s kimonos. In old Japanese paintings, these ugly green water sprites look rather like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In fact, in one of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles films, the turtles travel back in time to medieval Japan and get mistaken for kappa. The only food kappa prefer over human children is cucumbers. Thus, the name of the cucumber roll.
The other common thin roll, the tuna roll, is called a tekkamaki. Most Japanese people think the name comes from the slang term for a gambling den. The gamblers wanted to eat sushi without getting their fingers sticky—so the story goes. But the name more likely comes from the original meaning of tekka, a red-hot shaft of iron. The red strip of tuna in the center looks like a red shaft, and the wasabi creates a burning sensation. And some would say that the raw, iron-rich tuna flesh tastes metallic.
Cucumbers are a lot cheaper than tuna, and Zoran liked to brag that he still practiced ten cucumber rolls a day, the way a concert pianist practices scales. He took pleasure in making his students do the same. Regardless of the scheduled lesson on any given day, without warning Zoran was liable to instruct the students to set aside their work and begin practicing cucumber rolls. He would stroll around the room and say, “I’ll tell you the secret of mastering these.” The students would all look up, expectant. Zoran would grin. “Practice.”
As the students practiced cucumber rolls, the room filled with the smell of sushi. Mostly it was the scent of the seashore, which comes from compounds called bromophenols. Bromophenols are not actually the smell of the sea. They are the smell of the algae that live in the sea—algae such as laver, used for nori.
Zoran paced around the room, his arms folded across his chest. Some of the students’ rolls looked perfect. Others didn’t. “Marcos,” Zoran said, “too much rice.”
Kate looked down at her rolls in dismay. Like the slices of her California roll, the slices of her thin rolls had come out all different shapes. But she had an additional problem. Her thin rolls were popping open. Zoran glanced at them, but said nothing.
The next morning Zoran began by demonstrating a popular piece of American sushi called a crunchy roll. But he was emphatic that this was not Japanese food.
“Anything that’s greasy or oily isn’t part of traditional sushi,” Zoran warned. “That’s all Western influence.”
The funny thing was, sometimes Japanese tourists would come into Hama Hermosa and order the American rolls. The California roll and a few other American rolls had been adopted at low-brow, or “American-style,” sushi shops in Japan, and people had taken to calling avocado “the toro of the fields,” because of its similarity to fatty tuna. But many other American rolls weren’t available in Japan. The tourists from Japan loved them.
Most American sushi rolls are built on a basic inside-out roll foundation, like a California roll. But as soon as Zoran flipped over his pad of nori and rice, things took a dramatic new turn.
Onto the nori, Zoran squirted a glob of mayonnaise laced with red chile. On that he laid two straight shrimp that had been deep-fried in heavy batter. Next was cucumber. The only thing that was Japanese was the bright orange stick of pickled burdock root for extra crunch; it was loaded with dye and MSG. Zoran squeezed the roll closed. He tossed it around in a tray of “crunchies”—bits of deep-fried batter—until it was covered. He sliced it, squirted on some sugary sauce, and held it up on a plate.
“The customer has to pay ten bucks for this!” He laughed. “Crazy! Would you pay for this?” Zoran shook his head in disbelief. “One shrimp costs, what, twenty cents? This is a big moneymaker. I guarantee you guys will have to make these.”
12
PUTTING ON THE SQUEEZE
“Stop what you’re doing!” Zoran yelled.
The students looked up, surprised, some of them still in the middle of practicing their American rolls.
“All food off your cutting board,” Zoran ordered. It was time to make nigiri.
The students gathered around Zoran. He hefted a plastic tub onto the table. Inside lay slabs of fish. He pulled one out and laid it on his cutting board.
“When we cut neta for sushi,” Zoran said, “we cut slices two fingers wide, four fingers long.”
The word neta comes from the word tane (pronounced ta-né), which literally means “seed.” In old Japan, laborers frequently reversed the syllables of common words as a form of slang. They reversed the syllables of tane and used the word neta to refer to things that were the seed or source for something. Neta can refer to the topics of newspaper articles, evidence against criminals, or material for jokes and comedy routines. Young people in Japan today use the word neta in conversation, and on their blogs, to refer to a person or to events that are a source of amusement. Sushi chefs use the word as slang to refer to toppings for nigiri and fillings for rolls. The glass case at the sushi bar is the neta case, and the trays inside are neta trays.
More specifically, for a sushi chef, neta refers to the particular pieces of fish that he has cut down to the size of a neta tray. It was in this sense that Zoran was now using the term
.
The neta tray is one of the fundamental size units of sushi. The average neta tray is about 9 inches long and 4 or 5 inches wide—or, as many sushi chefs prefer to measure it, about twelve finger widths long. Sushi chefs like to measure everything in fingers.
Aside from preparing rice, a true sushi chef’s most crucial skills involve converting each creature of the sea into a useful piece of neta, ready to be cut into small slices for nigiri. The process often begins early in the morning with a chef’s purchases at the fish markets and continues during the afternoon in the kitchen. By the time the customer shows up for dinner, the chef has already been hard at work for many hours. The chef saves the final slicing of small pieces for nigiri until the last minute, when the customer places an order. That way, the meat will spend only a short time exposed to the degrading effects of oxygen.
Zoran slapped a neta-size block of salmon onto his cutting board and expertly sliced off a small rectangle. He held his hand over the little slice of salmon, first one way, then the other. Just as he’d said, it was two fingers wide and four fingers long.
“When you cut, each slice should be one motion. No back and forth.” He set the heel of his blade against the block of salmon and pointed the tip upwards. He drew the handle back and up, letting the blade trace a single smooth arc down through the fish. “Don’t push hard. Let the knife do the work.”
He carved more slices and laid them in a neat row, overlapping, across the top of his cutting board.
“After the cut, lay the slice presentation-side down.” Generally, the prettier side of the fillet was the presentation side. “That way, when you pick it up, the presentation side will be in your palm, away from the rice. Okay, now you guys try. Everybody get a fillet.”
The students chose different types of fish and hunched over their cutting boards, drawing their blades down through the neta. Because of the various shapes of fish, blocks of neta are seldom exactly the right size. The chef must cut with his blade on an angle to create a slice that is the right length and width, as well as the appropriate thickness. Soon there was a row of nigiri-size slices across the top of each cutting board.
Kate had tried to imitate Zoran’s cut, but her willow-leaf blade scared her and it wouldn’t cooperate. Her slices came out in random shapes, and all of them were too thick.
Next she tried to remember the routine Zoran had taught them for squeezing nigiri.
Different lineages of sushi chefs employ different techniques for squeezing nigiri. The students at the California Sushi Academy learned a basic nine-step process.
First—if the sushi chef is right-handed—he reaches his right hand into his canister of rice and gathers together a cylinder of rice the size and shape of a wine cork. With his left hand, he plucks a piece of fish with his thumb and index finger and dangles it inside his cupped hand. He rotates his hand outward so that the slice of fish settles flat across the palm. Since he has already laid the slices of fish presentation-side down on his cutting board, the presentation side of the slice now lies against his fingers, and the underside is exposed. He cups his left hand into a U, with the slice of fish lying in the trough at the bottom. Then he presses the clump of rice lightly down into the U, on top of the fish.
Step two is simple. Keeping his left hand tightly cupped, he pinches the top and bottom of the wine cork of rice with his right thumb and index finger, squeezing the rice from an oblong shape into a triangle that points upward toward his face, sitting on the slice of fish.
Step three seems surprising. The chef holds his right index finger flat and presses down the point of the triangle, pushing it back into an oblong shape against the slice of fish. This appears to have accomplished nothing, but actually it serves a purpose. It forces the grains into alignment.
A sushi chef wants the grains lined up along the length of the finished rectangle. That way the grains will stick to each other without lots of extra squeezing. A tightly packed nigiri is bad. The chef’s goal is a piece of sushi just firm enough to stay in one piece while the customer handles it, but loose enough that it will immediately disintegrate in the mouth. When a perfect nigiri crumbles apart on the tongue, the grains of rice mingle instantly with the fish, combining tastes and textures. The sensation some diners feel is gratitude because the chef has calibrated the sushi so perfectly that they hardly have to chew.
Researchers have conducted MRI scans of nigiri made by master sushi chefs. The scans reveal that a master chef’s nigiri disintegrates easily on the tongue because it contains more empty space than a nigiri made by a novice. Scans of nigiri made by sushi robots showed a product tightly compressed, with almost no empty space on the interior at all.
Now, on to step four of the nigiri-making process. The chef opens up the U of the left hand and rolls the oblong cylinder of rice, along with its attached slice of fish, from the palm onto the base of the fingers. The nigiri has now turned right side up, with the fish on top.
Step five is to press the top of the nigiri lightly with the left thumb, holding the fish down onto the rice, while using the thumb and index finger of the right hand to flatten the long sides of the rice cylinder, shaping it into more of a rectangle.
At step six, the chef again cups his left hand into a U. With the index and middle fingers of his right hand held out flat, he presses along the length of the fish, squeezing the nigiri down into the trough of the U. This presses out any air between the fish and the rice. The warmth in the chef’s fingers also warms the fish slightly. Minutes ago the fish was refrigerated. By the time it’s served, it should approach the warmth of the rice, which is at body temperature. At the same time, the chef uses his left thumb to press down the upper end of the nigiri, using a motion similar to that of holding down the button on a cigarette lighter. This squares off the end of the rectangle.
At step seven the chef opens up the left hand again. With the right hand, he rotates the nigiri clockwise 180 degrees.
Step eight repeats step six, further shaping the nigiri into a rectangle and squaring off the remaining end.
Finally, step nine is to repeat step five, to put the finishing touches on the shape. The nigiri is complete.
A master sushi chef will adjust the height of his nigiri to account for the fact that he cuts firmer fish in thin slices and softer fish in thick slices. When he’s finished, the different types of nigiri should be a uniform height, despite different thicknesses of fish.
Different lineages of chefs create different shapes of nigiri. The most common shape is not, strictly speaking, a rectangle. The top of the nigiri is arched slightly like a dome so that the slice of fish drapes over it. Sushi chefs call this the comb style because the shape resembles a traditional Japanese hair comb. Other shapes include box, fan, boat, and rice-bale styles.
Kate’s clumps of rice fit in what could charitably be called ball style, and they were all different sizes. One of her slices of fish was so narrow that she laid it across the rice on a diagonal. Some of the other students’ nigiri looked nearly perfect. Again, Zoran glanced at Kate’s sushi and said nothing.
Kate knew that the sushi she’d made this week had been terrible. Unlike the young female chef Kirara, in the comic book Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job, Kate hadn’t been raised by a master sushi chef. She had some of Kirara’s spunk, but none of her skills. It was hard for Kate not to feel that she was once again losing her own personal battle with sushi. She turned her back on her block of fish. No more slicing. She hunted in the refrigerator until she found some shrimp tails already prepared by the restaurant chefs. She made the rest of her nigiri with those.
After class Marcos carried his nigiri into the kitchen. He peeled the slices of fish off his nigiri and tossed the fish in a sauté pan on the stove. It was premium sushi-grade fish, flown over fresh from Japan. It sizzled and turned brown and greasy.
“I’m getting kinda sick of eating raw meat,” he muttered.
13
FAST FOOD
Before Zoran took roll t
he next morning, he stepped out of the classroom to fill his plastic travel mug with coffee. Upon his return, he noticed one of the students rubbing her knife on a pumice stone at her cutting board. She was trying to get off a few spots of rust. Zoran almost dropped his mug.
“Never!” Zoran screamed. “Never! Never!”
The woman jumped, and nearly cut herself.
“Never, ever, do that over your cutting board,” Zoran shouted. “You’re going to get little bits of rust in your food!”
He shook his head and strode to the head of the table. He took a sip of coffee. “Today,” he announced, “you’re going to make sushi rolls for the vegetable deliveryman. Make it professional. You’re making it for a customer.” He scribbled a list of sushi rolls and nigiri on the whiteboard. “You have an order on the board.”
Zoran squinted and peered down the table. The Japanese student, Takumi, had already gotten to work.
“Stop! Stop!” Zoran cried. “Don’t make your sushi yet!” He pointed to the list of items on the whiteboard. “What order do you make these in?”
The students stared at the board. The list of sushi Zoran had written on the board began with Japanese-style thin rolls: two cucumber rolls (kappa-maki). Next were American-style inside-out rolls (ura-maki): one California roll, one spicy tuna roll. There was one other type of roll: a “big roll” (futo-maki)—this is a larger sushi roll that uses not a half sheet of nori but an entire sheet. Zoran had ended the list with four nigiri.
He repeated his question. “What order?”
The students stared at him, their faces blank.
“I’ll tell you,” Zoran said. “You want to make your ura-maki first.” He pointed to the two inside-out rolls—the California roll and the spicy tuna roll. “The nori is on the inside.” He shook his finger and laughed. “The customer won’t be able to tell if it gets soggy.”
The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice Page 9