“You see,” Zoran said calmly, “you don’t cut all the way through the head because you want the guts to stay attached.”
He tossed the head and viscera in the trash. Kate heard them land at the bottom of the can with a thump.
Zoran carried the body of the fish to the sink. He ran cold water into the belly cavity and scrubbed vigorously with his fingers. Next he produced a thin bundle of bamboo shish-kebab skewers held together with a rubber band and used it to scrape the fish’s spine inside the cavity. Globs of coagulated purple blood slid down the drain.
Kate took a deep breath.
Along with humans and all other vertebrates, fish evolved from worms. Worms were the first creatures to have a circulatory system with blood, a heart, and gills. They probably lived in the sea about 540 million years ago. Early fishlike creatures appeared around 500 million years ago, though at first they were more or less just giant worms. Some of these early fish are still around today. They’re called slime eels. Some people eat them.
Fish as we know them today began to branch off from the big worms around 400 million years ago and developed a more sophisticated circulatory system. Fish have a simple, two-chambered heart that pumps blood in a loop. From the heart, blood rushes first to the gills, then on to the rest of the body along a central artery that runs down the spine.
Zoran had just scraped out that central artery. Chefs call this the bloodline, and if not removed, it can ruin a dinner of fish by contaminating it with the overpowering taste and smell of blood.
Zoran gave the mackerel a final rinse and stuffed it with paper towels. “This, we’ll grill,” he said. “Okay, get yourselves a fish.”
Kate let the others go first. When it was her turn, she lifted a fish from the box and held it aloft at arm’s length. At her cutting board, she sized up the fish. It looked plump and felt slippery. She was afraid it would slide around when she tried to cut it. Slicing sushi rolls frightened her enough, and they stayed in one place.
In the comic book Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job, the young female chef Kirara borrows a worker’s knife at the fish market and guts and cleans a fish with such speed and skill that a crowd gathers. As a woman, she can’t be squeamish or hesitant around blood and guts, or the male sushi chefs won’t take her seriously.
Kate faced a similar challenge. She grasped the handle of her willow-leaf knife lightly between her thumb and fingers, at the very back end of the handle, as if holding the bow of a violin. Touching her knives as little as possible made her feel safer. She pressed the knife against the fish and sawed. The blade sank straight through the fish and cut its head clean off. She stared at the decapitated animal. Blood leaked out onto her cutting board.
She looked around the room and saw that her classmates were forging ahead. She stared back at the decapitated fish in front of her. She slit a gash down its belly. She leaned to the side and peered in. Parts of organs protruded through the crack. She poked the tip of her blade at the guts, as if her knife were a magic wand that could make them disappear.
She dropped the head into the nearest trash can. She picked up her fish and held it over the can. She stuck her knife inside the belly and wiggled it. Organs tumbled out into the trash bag with wet slaps. After a while things stopped falling out. Kate couldn’t take it anymore. She laid the fish back on her cutting board. She didn’t wash it or scrape out the bloodline. Zoran didn’t notice.
“Okay, bring your saba, please!” Zoran yelled, heading for the kitchen.
It was time to grill. But Zoran and his Japanese colleagues at Hama Hermosa did not use a grill. It was better just to poke a few skewers into a fish and hold it over flames, or better yet, over glowing charcoal. Japanese chefs didn’t use ovens, either. Baking isn’t part of Japanese cuisine. Even modern homes in Japan, outfitted with all manner of appliances, seldom have ovens unless the house is completely Westernized.
Zoran stabbed three steel skewers into his mackerel to form the shape of an oriental fan and grasped the base of the skewers with one hand.
“You want a lot of salt on the tail and fins,” he said, sprinkling white crystals on the fish, “so they don’t burn.” He cranked up the biggest burner in the kitchen. Blue and orange flames leapt into the air.
Zoran held the mackerel over the flames and yellow sparks popped around it as the oil in the fish combusted. The aroma of sizzling flesh filled the kitchen. It smelled fantastic.
When humans started burning animal flesh on sticks, one benefit of the practice was safety—heat kills bad bacteria. But there were two other reasons. One has to do with gravity. The other has to do with our noses.
Four hundred million years ago, when worms evolved toward fish, some of them added oil to their bodies while others developed simple gas-filled sacks, and thus became buoyant as swimmers.
On land it was a different story. As land animals evolved, they had to construct superstructures of tough connective tissue, fiber, and sinew to keep their muscles up and running against the constant drag of gravity. Birds had to work even harder to get airborne.
As a result, the meat of mammals and birds is much tougher than the meat of fish. The connective tissue that holds all muscles together is a protein called collagen, a name that comes from the Greek word for “glue producing.” The collagen-filled sinews of horses is boiled to make glue. Human skin wrinkles with age because it loses collagen; pumping collagen back into tissues is part of cosmetic surgery. A third or more of all the protein in the body of a land animal is collagen.
The process of cooking meat—slow roasting, especially—transforms collagen into gelatin, making the meat tender and easier to eat. By breaking apart the collagen walls and the membranes of the muscle, cooking also releases the juices inside, bringing out flavor.
In addition, cooking “browns” the meat, creating chemical reactions on the surface that produce hundreds of aromatic smells. When we think of “flavor,” much of what we sense is actually smell. Try cooking your favorite dinner and eating it with your nose pinched the entire time. Much of the experience vanishes.
Fish don’t need to fight gravity, so their flesh consists of flakes of muscle held together with only a delicate matrix of collagen. Their muscles are naturally firm but also moist and quick to break apart. As a result, fish are easy and enjoyable to eat raw.
It is easy to ruin fish by cooking because their muscles are so delicate. The weak collagen collapses and the flesh dries out at lower temperatures than the flesh of terrestrial creatures. What’s more, although cooking creates appealing aromas in fish, just as it does in meat, these smells come at the sacrifice of taste. The reason has to do with where the taste of fish comes from in the first place.
Sea creatures survive in their salty environment by loading their cells with free amine oxides and amino acids, which counter the osmotic pressure of the ocean. Without them, the water in its cells would rush out of the fish’s body in a futile effort to dilute the salt in the sea, and the fish would collapse in on itself. These free amino acids are what give seafood much of its taste. They include glutamate, the key flavor component of umami, and a particularly sweet-tasting amino acid called glycine. Saltwater fish contain anywhere from three to ten times more of these delicious free amino acids than beef. Another important element in the taste of fish is glutamate’s counterpart, IMP, the savory substance that Japanese scientists discovered in such abundance in aged bonito. IMP is created when the high-energy power pellets called ATP break down after the fish’s death. Like free amino acids, tasty IMP is more abundant in fish than in animals.
When exposed to thorough cooking, however, the free amino acids and the IMP quickly combine with other molecules, dampening taste. As a result, most fish are more interesting to eat raw, or only briefly cooked—at least when it comes to texture and taste.
When it comes to aroma, uncooked fish fall flat. In the human brain, smell is linked to memory. A platter of raw fish cannot trigger the feelings of comfort and happiness that people asso
ciate with the smell of their favorite cooked foods. Perhaps that is one reason sushi chefs pay close attention to visual presentation.
Mackerel, however, is a good candidate for cooking. Mackerel are little cousins of bonito and tuna. Like tuna, mackerel swim fast most of the time, so their muscles are loaded with ATP. Mackerel also contain more glutamate and glycine than other fish. Cooked briefly over high heat, the surface of a mackerel undergoes browning, emitting a mouthwatering range of aromatic smells, while inside the flesh, sufficient IMP and amino acids remain to generate mouth-filling taste.
“Cooking time should be about five minutes,” Zoran said, flipping his mackerel to sear the other side.
Marcos stabbed three skewers into his fish and leaned against the kitchen table, waiting for his chance at a burner.
“I’m going to kill you guys,” he said. He drummed his hands against the edge of the table. “I was the best marshmallow griller in my Boy Scout troop.”
Several students stood at the burners and cooked their fish.
“I could do this back at the hostel,” Marcos said, still waiting. “I bet it would impress the ladies.”
Marcos had met a few girls since arriving in Hermosa Beach. But when he’d told them that he was studying to be a sushi chef, so far the response had been lukewarm. ‘A sushi chef? That’s pretty random.’
‘Not many men can cook, you know,’ Marcos would say.
Now he imagined himself in the kitchen of the hostel where he was living, surrounded by admiring young women, all waiting for him to grill them a fish. He hopped about, testing different stances with his skewered fish. He decided that the coolest posture for fish grilling would be to hold the skewers behind his back, like a pool player executing a behind-the-back shot. In his head, the girls went wild. He laid his fish back on the table and raised his hands, palms down, like a rock star trying to suppress applause.
“One at a time, ladies, one at a time.”
Kate paid him no attention.
“Cutting that fish was disgusting,” she was telling one of the other women in the class. The other woman hadn’t been bothered by it, but she offered Kate a sympathetic smile. Kate went on. “I mean, he just gave us a fish.”
In a few minutes, Marcos and Kate advanced to the row of burners. Zoran strode into the kitchen and sniffed the air.
“Kate, you didn’t clean your fish properly!”
From the flames, Kate’s mackerel stank of burnt blood, intestines, and bacteria.
Marcos was still preoccupied. “To really impress the ladies with sushi, I think I need to become a freestyle sushi chef,” he said. He pretended to toss his mackerel up and slice it in midair, with sound effects. He sighed and stared at his fish. “It’s looking all juicy.” He pulled it from the flames and held it up to his face. The skin was a crisp golden brown. “That’s some marshmallow skill, right there.”
Afterwards, the students ate their fish, but Kate had no desire to eat her stinky mackerel. She knew she’d failed to prepare it to specification. But as she packed up her gear after class, she felt a peculiar sense of accomplishment. She had done something that she could never have imagined herself doing before. She had cut the head off a fish.
18
EAT THE PIE
That evening at Hama Hermosa, a few people trickled in for dinner, including some friends of Toshi’s at the back bar. Fie helped Toshi serve his friends omakase.
Fie had rolled a traditional Japanese worker’s bandana into a cord, then pulled back her shiny flaxen hair and wrapped the cord around her head and tied it. On a Japanese sushi chef, this lent a degree of machismo. On Fie, it was an unprecedented fashion statement. Standing behind the sushi bar, in her tight black T-shirt and Japanese headband, Fie radiated a whole new category of authority: she was a Westerner, she was a woman, she was beautiful, and she was a sushi chef. Toshi, a head shorter than Fie, reached up and adjusted her headband, then stood back and nodded.
Before long a pair of big Caucasian men in their fifties strode in. One was wearing a yellow baseball cap. At first they didn’t notice Fie, who stood working at the far end of the bar. They bellowed out boisterous greetings to Toshi.
“You look great, Toshi!”
“It’s good to see you!”
They ate whatever Toshi served them. Partway through their dinner, working awkwardly with chopsticks, one of them asked, “Hey, Toshi, what’s this sauce?”
Toshi glared at the men. His eyes narrowed. Finally he grunted, his voice low and threatening. “Secret…sauce.”
Then his face relaxed and opened into a huge, crinkly-eyed smile. He laughed uproariously. So did the men. But Toshi didn’t answer their question. Instead, he called Fie over and introduced her.
The men gazed at Fie, goggle-eyed. They forgot all about the sauce. They immediately purchased a giant bottle of premium sake to share with the chefs.
Everyone raised a glass. “Kanpai!”
The men knocked back their sake and poured more.
“So,” the man with the yellow baseball cap said, leaning toward Fie, “how did you end up behind a sushi bar?”
Toshi sagged against the back wall of the bar and surveyed the restaurant. For twenty years, his old restaurant in Venice Beach had filled up every night with admirers. He’d been a superstar. Now his restaurant was empty. He’d been hoping business would pick up again this summer, but so far it hadn’t. Worse, the aftereffects of his stroke were still sapping his charisma. He felt exhausted after serving just a few courses of sushi.
The men raised their glasses again. “Kanpai!” Then they added, “To Fie!”
The man in the yellow cap rested his elbows on the bar and beamed at her, as she served them nigiri. He chewed slowly. “That’s good,” he said, his eyes glazing over. “It’s not Toshi. That’s Fie. I can taste the difference.”
They downed more sake and heaped more praise on Fie. Toshi watched from the sidelines.
“I might as well retire,” he muttered.
Fie flushed red. She pulled back from the bar. The two men apologized.
“Hey,” the man in the yellow cap said to Toshi, raising his voice, “you know how guys are with beautiful women.”
But Fie wasn’t just a pretty face. She put care into the food. Her sushi was good. Toshi nudged her back into position. She topped four nigiri with something red and marbled. She armed herself with Toshi’s blowtorch and seared the surface of each slice with a burst of blue flame. Toshi sagged lower against the wall and watched.
Fie applied a dab of creamy sesame dressing with wasabi to the top of each nigiri, then plated all four on a dark brown ceramic platter. She was about to hand it across the fish case when Toshi hissed at her. “Fie!”
Startled, Fie turned. Toshi was scowling. He pulled her nigiri off the brown platter and replated them on a pair of bright white plates. Now the browned flesh stood out against the white background, and each pair of nigiri looked special. Fie nodded. She added pinches of chopped green onion and served the plates. The man in the yellow cap chewed, a smile spreading ear to ear. “Fie! That’s incredible!”
Fie allowed herself a shy smile. “It’s Kobe-style beef.”
“Beef? I thought it was tuna! Oh, that’s good.”
“You’re getting all my favorite things,” Fie said.
For their last dish, Fie served them toro nigiri. When they had finished, both men leaned back in their chairs. The man with the yellow cap rubbed his belly.
“That was incredible. Very, very, very nice.” Slowly, he nodded. “That was worthy of Toshi.”
Toshi pushed himself off the shelf. “I’m not feeling so great,” he said. “I need to head home and rest.”
The men became subdued for a moment.
“Toshi,” the yellow cap guy said, smiling again and raising his voice, “soon you’ll be back to normal!”
Toshi nodded. He hoped he was right. He slipped out through the swinging door into the kitchen. Before the door had even closed the me
n had turned back to Fie.
“Okay, so what nights are you here?”
Fie told them her schedule. The men sat for a few minutes, downing the rest of their sake. The man in the yellow cap gazed at Fie.
“God love the human race for people like you,” he said. “You’re spanning the globe.” He thought hard for a moment, then issued his final declaration of the evening.
“Life is a great big—” he paused “—pie. And you should eat it.”
19
BIG TEST
On Monday morning, Zoran set up a sign on the sidewalk in front of Hama Hermosa: “Student Sushi Bar, 2 Nigiri $1, Rolls $3–$5.”
Hama Hermosa wasn’t normally open for lunch, but every Monday from now on, Zoran would open the restaurant’s doors at lunchtime, and the students would serve sit-down customers off the street, using the real sushi bar in the back room. Toshi insisted that students at the academy get as much experience serving customers as possible. He believed it was the best way for them to learn. Kate was excited. She hoped that serving customers again would help lift her spirits. She’d invited her mother to come.
In preparation, the students spent the morning cooking rice and loading the fish cases at the back bar with neta. Around noon, customers started trickling in.
Kate was nervous at first, but as soon as she started chatting with her customers she felt the same rush of enjoyment she’d felt at Paramount Pictures. She served a man who’d brought along his two sons, both about Kate’s age. Then Kate’s mother arrived. The man and his sons ordered a few items from the menu and asked Kate about the school. She explained a few things about sushi. Kate’s mother listened, intrigued. The men asked Kate to make them something special—something that wasn’t on the menu.
She made them an inside-out roll with grilled eel, avocado, cucumber, and tempura-fried shrimp. She tucked the roll in tight, the way Zoran had showed her, and squeezed it closed. She tossed the roll in tempura crunchies. She sliced and plated it, and squeezed stripes of sweet eel sauce back and forth across the plate. She chuckled to herself. With those stripes, she should call it a zebra roll. The slices of roll held together long enough for the men to gobble them up. Kate chatted with the men some more.
The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice Page 12