The Story of Sushi: An Unlikely Saga of Raw Fish and Rice

by Trevor Corson

  Zoran grabbed a neta tray and set it atop the meat, the end of the tray flush with the head edge. He reminded the class that a neta tray was three palm widths long. He removed the tray and measured off three four-finger widths, then lowered the blade of his knife onto the fillet. He pressed the knife into the flesh and sawed gently straight down. At the end, he exerted extra pressure and cut through the skin. He lifted the huge hunk of meat onto a metal tray.

  Zoran handed the knife to Marcos. “Your turn.”

  Marcos measured off three more palm widths. He took a breath and cut straight down. Everyone watched.

  “Good,” Zoran said.

  Zoran retrieved his knife and made the third and last cut. By now he’d entered the tapering tail section, so the hunk was squatter and smaller. After that, only a little triangle of meat remained, just a few inches long. Zoran explained that toward the tail, the meat contains more fiber and fetches a lower price. He stowed the hunks of meat on the metal tray.

  Zoran hefted the first hunk back onto his cutting board. The cross section was the shape of a rugged mountain peak. Across the wide base of the mountain, flat against the cutting board at the bottom, the flesh against the skin was pale pink and full of fat, especially on the end near the belly. Rising toward the summit the meat turned darker red, and lines of muscle fiber traced U-shaped curves through the cross section like geologic layers.

  On one side, the peak was so purple that it was nearly black. This was the core of the tuna’s oxygen-burning, heat-generating machinery, where huge quantities of myoglobin proteins had concentrated.

  “Bloodline,” Zoran said. “If you leave the skin and bloodline on, the next day it will stink.”

  He carved the dark edge of flesh off and chucked it in the trash. Then he turned his knife flat and sliced off the rest of the summit.

  Zoran held up this piece of dark red meat. It had been the innermost edge of the tuna’s muscle, snug against the spine.

  “Very soft meat,” Zoran said. “Usually not good for sushi. Okay for tekka-maki”—thin tuna rolls.

  Zoran examined the flattened mountaintop. He peered at a circular irregularity in the surface of the meat.

  “Tuna get a kind of ringworm,” Zoran said, pointing. “You don’t want to serve that. Right around the ringworm the meat gets watery.”

  Parasitic worms don’t make it into tuna as often as they do into smaller fish because tuna tend to swim in deep water, far from shore. But sushi chefs have to stay on guard. Zoran cut out the worm and tossed it in the trash.

  The next step was to slice the hunk of meat into smaller blocks for the neta case. This presented fresh challenges. A sushi chef wants some blocks to consist entirely of fatty flesh, or toro, for which he can charge more. He wants other blocks to consist entirely of plain old red meat, or akami, which sell for less.

  Moreover, when the chef cuts his little slices off at the sushi bar, he wants the little slices to come out in a nifty rhomboid shape with lots of pretty fiber lines running across it from side to side, rather than a few long lines running end to end.

  To achieve these goals required reverse thinking. Sushi chefs had settled on some informal rules. As usual, they involved measuring things with fingers.

  Zoran measured down the side of the truncated mountain in three-finger increments. The slabs of neta he was aiming to cut stood vertically inside the cliff face. Three fingers would be a little shorter than, say, salmon neta, but later, when he cut slices from the neta for nigiri, he would cut on a diagonal so they would measure the standard four fingers. Diagonal slices of tuna were more attractive than simple rectangles.

  Satisfied, he inserted his blade sideways into the mountainside, three finger widths from the top, and cut horizontally across the mountain. He removed this block, leaving a flat expanse where the mountaintop had been. He repeated the procedure. The next block he cut off closer to the base; it was wider.

  A final block remained, roughly three fingers high. The belly edge was pale and riddled with fat—toro material. The rest was pink with some fat—good chutoro.

  The horizontal blocks were still too big for a neta tray. Zoran sliced straight down into the last block, measuring off the width of one thumb each time. This was a little shy of the two-finger width of a nigiri slice, but the chef would slice the neta at an angle from vertical. The slices would come off wide enough, and again, they would look more attractive.

  Zoran cut the new neta free from the skin. They were the right length, thanks to the initial cuts. Some were all toro, some were all chutoro. The upper-level blocks would be akami. The grain of the muscle fiber ran across each neta from side to side.

  Zoran pointed at the leftover skin. Bits of flesh remained on the fibrous surface.

  “That’s where your spicy tuna comes from,” he said. Later, someone would scrape the meat off with a spoon.

  Two big hunks of tuna remained. Each was a formidable mountain of flesh. Zoran placed one on the cutting board of the student next to Kate. The other he placed in front of Kate.

  “Okay,” Zoran said, “now it’s your turn.” He paused, his face serious. “Please ask me if you need help.” Bigeye was not the best tuna, but today’s fillet was still worth $200. “This is the time where I need you to not be shy, and call me if you need help.”

  Kate stood in front of her mountain of meat. Nothing so big had ever sat on her cutting board. She looked at the huge hunk of tuna, then she looked at Zoran, and then she looked back at the huge hunk of tuna.

  In the comic book Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job, the young female chef Kirara never works with large hunks of expensive tuna. She deliberately avoids them. She is trying to restore the traditional sushi of old Tokyo to its former glory, and she prefers to work with the more modest fish and shellfish that were popular before the rise of tuna. Kirara’s arch-rival in the sushi-making competitions—the muscle-bound male chef Sakamaki—shows off by cutting the largest and most expensive blocks of tuna he can find.

  Kate lifted her knife and whittled at the bloodline down one side of the meat. She peeled off a piece of the purple goo. The bloodline was deep and irregular, and she’d only removed the outside edge. Zoran stepped in and carved out the rest. Then he left her alone.

  Kate cocked her head to the side and sliced horizontally into the summit, removing the peak of soft meat. That was the easy part. She measured three fingers down. She took a breath.

  Kate sliced into the mountain from the side again. She cut carefully, moving her knife in a straight horizontal line. The block of meat came off. She laid it to the side. She handed the rest of the mountain to the next student.

  Zoran examined what remained of the block.

  “Oh,” came Zoran’s voice, “that’s not straight.” He shook his head. “Oh noooo.”

  Kate had cut in a horizontal line, but had not held her knife flat. The tip had been lower than the handle. The top of the decapitated tuna mountain was not level.

  “Oh dear,” Zoran said, shaking his head some more, “it’s going to be hard to fix this.”

  Kate shrank down inside her chef’s jacket.

  “Sorry,” she said, her voice tiny.

  While the students practiced with the hunks of tuna, Zoran marinated the soft top cuts of inner flesh in soy sauce, just as nineteenth-century street vendors had done. When all the students had taken a turn at cutting, he told them to spend the rest of class practicing their sushi and sashimi for tomorrow’s test.

  Zoran stood silently at his cutting board. He squeezed together simple, perfect tuna sushi—nigiri, and thin rolls wrapped in nori—using the marinated meat. He arranged his red, white, and black sushi on a black lacquer tray. The display was simple, a tribute to the Japanese art of food.

  The students’ trays filled with nigiri and sashimi. Except for one. Kate’s tray was empty. She wasn’t practicing for the test. She was in the kitchen, cooking sweet egg omelet.

  Zoran peered into the kitchen.

  “You been
in here with your eggs the whole time?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” Kate murmured.

  Zoran looked at the floor, turned, and walked away.

  41

  SUSHI KUNG FU

  On the day of the test, Kate steered her Mustang into the lot behind Hama Hermosa at 8:00 a.m. She’d already had a tough morning. She hadn’t gotten to sleep until 1:00 a.m. She’d rolled back out of bed at 4:20 a.m., bought gas, hit Starbucks, and arrived at the Laundromat a little after 5:00. When she yanked her chef’s jacket from the dryer, she saw that a big brown smudge still marred the front.

  In the parking lot at Hama Hermosa, she saw Jeff, the restaurant consultant, sitting in his car and talking on his cellphone. He noticed her and waved. He pointed at his cellphone and asked Kate to come back in a few minutes. She nodded and carried her gear inside.

  Finally, Kate thought. She was going to find out once and for all about the nightclub job. In the ladies’ room, she stared into the mirror at the smudge on her jacket and at the dark circles under her eyes.

  When she returned to the parking lot, Jeff shook his head. The way he put it was that the nightclub simply hadn’t gotten back to him.

  ‘But you’re a hot commodity!’ Jeff said. He sped away.

  Kate stood in the parking lot, gazing after him.

  In the classroom, the students laid their equipment out for inspection. Zoran strode in and checked knives, tapping the blades on his thumbnail.

  “Fingernails and hands, please!” he yelled. The students held out their hands and Zoran circled the table. Several of the students had bleached and ironed their jackets. Zoran glanced at the brown smudge on Kate’s jacket and guffawed. Kate pressed her lips into a flat line.

  Toshi rushed in and clapped his hands. “Let’s go!”

  The students stepped into position. Toshi strode to the head of the table with his clipboard of scoring sheets in hand. He looked down the table. With the restaurant in danger of closing, the school was in danger of closing, too. Right now, this class of students was all Toshi had left. He issued a single instruction.

  “Katsura-muki.”

  Column-peel. In unison, the students reached for a chunk of giant radish. Toshi lowered his glasses onto his nose. He rounded the corner of the table and watched Kate. A few weeks ago, this would have unnerved her. But now, she just kept peeling. Toshi scribbled on the clipboard, then moved down the table.

  One by one, the students folded their sheets of radish onto their cutting boards and began slicing them into slivers. Silence gave way to tapping as their knives hit the wood. Each student slowly accumulated a mound of white shreds.

  Toshi returned to Kate’s station and watched.

  “Not like this,” he said softly. She stopped working. He imitated her posture. He faced the table straight on, slouching, with his hips square to the cutting board. He shook his head.

  Toshi took a step back with his right foot. Now he stood at a 45-degree angle to the cutting board.

  “Like this.”

  He spread his legs, planted his feet, dropped his stance, and flexed all his muscles. He sucked in a deep breath, and belted out a cry like a warrior. “Huuuggghh!”

  The other students looked up, startled. Toshi grabbed Kate’s knife and chopped so fast that the knife sounded like a machine gun.

  “The power enters your arm from the stance,” Toshi yelled, “and goes into the knife!” He stopped cutting. “You gotta have good posture.” He looked around the room. “The stance.”

  Kate nodded slowly.

  Marcos might as well have just viewed a martial-arts film. Eyes wide, he turned back to his cutting board. He lowered himself into an athletic pose and began slicing, trying to match Toshi’s speed. Toshi wandered over to watch him. Suddenly a burst of crimson flooded across Marcos’s white sheets of radish. He dropped his knife and grabbed his hand. Toshi peered at the blood and then looked Marcos in the eye. “Is your finger gone?”

  Marcos smiled through the pain. “No.” He rummaged in his bag for a Band-Aid.

  Toshi turned to the rest of the class. “Stop!” he bellowed. “One step back!”

  The students moved away from the table. Toshi fingered each student’s shreds of radish, then he inspected the floor for dropped food. He scribbled on his clipboard.

  “Okay,” Toshi said. “Sashimi. Three-point presentation. Tuna.”

  Zoran opened the fridge and pulled out the blocks of bigeye he’d cut yesterday. The assignment was simple. Nine slices of tuna, arranged in three groups on a plate, plus garnish.

  “You have five minutes,” Toshi said. “Go.”

  Zoran clicked the stopwatch. Everyone squished three mounds of shredded radish onto their plates and propped a perilla leaf against each mound. Soon everyone was cutting fish, drawing the blades down through the blocks of flesh to create neat dominos of dark red meat. Kate fell behind.

  In quick succession the students finished and stepped away from the table. Zoran glanced at the stopwatch, then at Kate’s plate, then back at the stopwatch. The digits on the readout raced past the five-minute mark. The instant Kate plated her final slice of fish, Zoran clicked the stopwatch. “Time.”

  Toshi made his rounds, grading each student’s plate and making suggestions. He reached Kate’s station last.

  “Your slices could be higher,” he said. “But it’s good!”

  Kate cocked her head and studied her plate.

  “Okay, everybody, nice cutting!” Toshi said. “What’s next? Sushi! I want to see your sushi!”

  They rushed to grab trays of salmon, snapper, and shrimp.

  “Come on, come on!” Toshi yelled. “Let’s go! Everybody ready?” They weren’t. He bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Come on!”

  The students finally stood ready.

  “I need to see six pieces—nice.” Toshi paused. “Go!”

  But he stopped them after only two nigiri.

  “Just practice,” Toshi muttered. “I’m not going to test.” He leaned on Zoran’s cutting board. “How many days have you been doing nigiri?”

  “Every day,” someone said.

  Toshi frowned. “Shame on you guys. You guys make good rolls. But nigiri? No good. Just practice.”

  It took Kate a moment to realize that it wasn’t just her. Toshi was criticizing the whole class.

  Toshi strolled around the room, watching the students squeeze sushi. They stood with their elbows tight against their sides, their backs slouched, the wads of rice held up to their faces. Each nigiri took them nearly a minute to complete.

  Toshi shook his head. Then, suddenly he smiled.

  “When you make sushi, it’s magic!” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Show the magic!”

  Toshi stuck his hand in Marcos’s rice canister. Intrigued, the students put down their sushi and watched. Concealing the rice with his fingers, Toshi held his hands away from his body. It was as if, when he opened his hands, a white dove might flutter out. With a flourish he executed several quick squeezes and turns, like a magician shuffling cards. It took less than ten seconds. He opened his palm to reveal a perfect nigiri.

  “Not like this,” Toshi said. He held his palm flat and turned and squeezed the clump of rice in plain view, his movements plodding and deliberate. He jabbed his hand into the rice again. He opened his palm and pointed.

  “It’s already sushi!”

  He had already formed a nigiri, with one hand.

  “Look at my hand here.”

  The students gathered around. He showed them how to form the rice into a nigiri by pressing it in the crook between the base and middle knuckles of his fingers. Then he continued the final formation of the nigiri with both hands. His fingers moved so fast that it did look like magic.

  There is an old Japanese haiku, “With the movements of witchcraft and sorcery, squeezing sushi rice.” A nineteenth-century Japanese observer wrote that the hand movements of the sushi chef were like those of a ninja.

  In the comic book Sush
i Chef Kirara’s Job, when the young female sushi chef Kirara competes against her muscle-bound male colleagues, each chef squeezes out nigiri with his own martial-arts style, such as Flying Swallow, Stone Pagoda, and Dragon in the Clouds.

  In fact, real sushi chefs in Japan employ different styles of nigiri-making technique, called waza, depending on the chef’s lineage. The real styles have less whimsical names than those in the comic book—True Hand Flip, Little Hand Flip, Sideways Hand Flip, Upright Flip, and Thumb Nigiri.

  In the comic book, Kirara’s teacher instructs her to tap into a higher power when she squeezes nigiri.

  “The squeezing process can be done with just one hand,” he says. “But when you connect each grain of rice, you have to use both your hands. When both hands meet, you look as if you are praying toward the gods, don’t you? You must form nigiri with technique, not physical power. If you can do it, the spirit of sushi will arrive in your hands.”

  “The spirit of sushi?” Kirara asks.

  “In your connected hands, a spirit arrives, and sushi is born.”

  Meanwhile, in preparation for the sushi competition, Kirara’s arch-rival Sakamaki prepares by meditating under a freezing waterfall, like a samurai before battle. He arrives at the sushi bar dressed in a ninja’s chain mail.

  In comparison, Toshi wasn’t asking his students for much.

  “I want you to make ten pieces,” Toshi said. Again he sidled up to Kate, watched, and then stopped her.

  Once more Toshi settled into his fighting stance. Like a ninja reaching for a throwing star, he reached into her canister for a ball of rice.

  “Huuuggghh!” Toshi’s hands flew across his body, his fingers a blur of cryptic movements. With his shaven head, he could have been a Buddhist warrior-monk performing magical mudra. There is a Zen temple north of Tokyo that contains a stone statue of a Buddhist sushi sage, his hands pressed together, squeezing nigiri, just as Toshi was doing now. Toshi opened his hands and out popped a perfect nigiri. He flexed all his muscles, and grunted again.