A customer who chooses to use chopsticks instead of his fingers will also require a firmer pack of rice.
Takumi stared down at his rows of rice rectangles. “So it’s really about adjusting to the needs of the customer?”
Tetsu nodded. “That’s the sushi chef’s job. You’ve got to figure out what the customer’s needs are and adapt.”
Tetsu drifted away. Takumi reached for more rice and went on practicing.
After a while Tetsu returned. He’d changed out of his uniform. The aura of sushi master had vanished. He leaned against the counter looking like an oversized schoolboy. His stocky legs stuck out of a pair of shorts and he wore a baseball cap turned backwards.
Takumi dipped his fingers in the bowl of water and clapped. Tetsu stopped him.
“Too much water.” Tetsu said. He told Takumi never to dip both hands into the bowl of water. “Too much water, and your nigiri will fall apart.”
Tetsu demonstrated. He wetted just the index finger of his right hand. With that one wet finger, he painted a circle of water onto his left palm. Then he rubbed his hands together as if lathering them with soap, spreading a thin sheen of moisture across his skin. He cupped his right hand and knocked it twice against his left palm.
“I do it exactly like this, every time,” Tetsu said.
Now that his hands were primed, Tetsu reached into the rice canister, formed a rectangle, and picked up another imaginary piece of fish with his other hand. He pressed both hands together and carried them across the front of his body in an arc—squeeze, turn, squeeze, turn—and banged out another nigiri.
He repeated the water routine, dug in the canister for more rice, and swept his hands through the air. He banged out another, and another.
“It should never take you more than ten seconds to make a nigiri,” Tetsu admonished. “And when you’re busy, you’ve got to do it in five.” He blasted through the routine again. “So count to five while you’re making each one. As soon as you put your hand in the rice, start counting and move your body through that whole set of motions—in five seconds. The nigiri has to be finished by the end.”
Tetsu raced himself. “Five seconds!” His hands were flying now in a blur across his body. “Four seconds!” He deepened his stance. He dipped his finger in the water, rubbed, and clapped. The hands flew. “Three seconds!”
He left Takumi to race himself, and went on home.
Takumi tried to master Tetsu’s tricks, slowly at first—the water, the hollow rice rectangle, the sweeping arc. It’s just like making pasta, he thought.
He speeded up. He jabbed his hand in the rice and rushed through the motions, trying to complete his nigiri by the count of 5. He succeeded only in ripping it to shreds. He peered down at the disintegrated pile of loose white grains in his palm and laughed.
He tried again, and again, and the faster he went, the more the rice simply fell apart. He laughed again. He stopped and surveyed the array of white rectangles on the counter. There must have been sixty or seventy.
Suddenly Takumi grew sober. The rice was sacred. Seven deities in every grain. A single nigiri contained five or six hundred grains. Takumi stiffened, then bowed formally to the pantheon before him.
He apologized to the rice. He must redeem these deities, Takumi decided. He must master the art of sushi. He wiped his arm across the countertop. A quarter of a million little gods fell into the trash.
Weeks 9 and 10
44
EGGS AND OVARIES
The last few weeks of the semester passed in a pleasant blur. With Zoran’s absence, it felt as if a weight had been lifted. Tetsu took over the class. He didn’t speak a lot of English, but he got by.
One day, Tetsu told Marcos he was a good student. Marcos walked around in shock. Tetsu let Kate indulge her creativity. He taught the class how to make Japanese desserts, and he let Kate play with her cookie cutter, punching colorful heart shapes out of Japanese seaweed Jell-O.
Tetsu taught the students how to speak sushi-bar lingo. Sushi chefs use their own words for everything. Soy sauce is murasaki, which means “purple.” Wasabi is namida, which means “tears.” Nori is kusa, which means “grass.” Pickled ginger is gari, which supposedly is the sound pickled ginger makes in your mouth.
Tetsu warned the students to use this lingo only when behind the bar. “If you’re a customer at the sushi bar, you shouldn’t use these,” he explained. “Some customers think they know sushi and use these, but it sounds ridiculous. This is just for employees to use with each other.”
Tetsu taught them how to cook rice the old-fashioned way—in a pot on a stove—“in case your rice cooker broken.” He told them that when he was a boy in rural Japan, his grandmother had cooked rice in an iron bucket over a wood fire.
They practiced their basic sushi and sashimi skills. Under strict orders from Toshi, Tetsu used the last half hour of every class for nigiri-squeezing drills, including posture. Takumi’s posture quickly improved.
Toshi himself taught a few classes. He spent three days teaching the students how to taste different types of premium sake. Everybody got a little tipsy. On the day Marcos turned 18, Jay brought a chocolate cake with cherry filling to class and everyone sang “Happy Birthday.” They ate the cake with chopsticks.
Without Zoran around, discipline went out the window. But in a way, he no longer needed to be there in person. Kate and Marcos both heard his voice in their heads every time they did something dumb. Kate called it the “Ghost of Zoran Past.” Every few days Marcos would sidle up to Kate, adopt an Australian accent, and yell, “Kate, you’re terrible!” and Kate would throw her head back and laugh. As the semester wound to a close, they realized that Zoran had taught them almost everything they really needed to know before he left.
One morning Tetsu arrived at class with a Tupperware container. He peeled off the top and revealed a mass of plump orange spheres: salmon eggs.
Cheaper sushi restaurants purchase their salmon eggs salted and marinated, but better restaurants prepare them in-house. The standard marinade includes the usual suspects—soy sauce, mirin, sake, and dashi. Tetsu fingered the eggs. They were covered with a tacky residue.
“Need to clean them,” Tetsu said.
He ran warm water over the eggs in a strainer and rubbed them with his fingers. The water turned milky white. The smell of the ocean wafted up.
Salmon invest a lot in their roe, which is why salmon eggs are bigger than other caviar. A single salmon egg contains enough food to feed the embryo for an entire winter and on into early spring, as the embryo becomes a baby fish. Marcos plucked one of the orange orbs from the mass, held it up to his face between his thumb and finger, and inspected it like a jewel.
Tetsu lowered the strainer into a bowl of saltwater and picked away bits of white membrane.
“You need patience,” Tetsu said. He quit and handed the strainer to one of the students.
When the student had finished, Tetsu salted the eggs in a brine solution. A bit of salt plumps each egg and causes enzymes inside to digest proteins, generating more flavor-enhancing amino acids. Salt also causes enzymes to strengthen the egg’s shell, making the eggs firmer and therefore more fun to eat. After salting, Tetsu would leave the eggs to drain overnight. Tomorrow he’d marinate them for two or three hours.
Before the arrival of sushi, Americans mostly used salmon eggs as bait, to catch fish. The Japanese have been eating the salted ovaries of salmon and trout for more than a thousand years. But it was the Russians who pioneered the eating of loose salmon eggs as caviar in the 1830s. The Japanese word for salmon caviar used in sushi, ikura, comes from the Russian word for caviar, ikra. Today, in Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula just north of Japan, the black-market trade in illegal salmon eggs is worth $1 billion a year. Bears are also fond of salmon roe. They will suck out the eggs—20,000 of them in a full female—and leave the mother fish lying dead.
Salmon eggs are a recent addition to sushi. The respected Tokyo sushi chef Ji
ro Ono began serving them in the early 1980s, at the request of a customer. Now salmon eggs are so popular that Japanese food scientists have perfected techniques for manufacturing fake ones from vegetable oil.
Next, Tetsu brought out a small wooden tray loaded with pale yellow slabs that looked like cat tongues.
‘Uni,’ Tetsu said.
Sea urchins—called uni in Japanese—share 70 percent of their genetic code with humans. Nevertheless, there are significant differences. For example, humans and most other multicellular organisms develop “mouth first”—the first hole in the embryo becomes the animal’s mouth. By contrast, sea urchins develop “ass first.”
Until recently, Japanese people and Americans both despised sea urchins. Sea urchins commit a terrible crime—they eat kelp. In Japan, kelp is a sacred source of umami, necessary for making dashi. Japanese kelp harvesters destroyed sea urchins. In America, meanwhile, factories used kelp to manufacture agar for petri dishes. In southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, dive clubs and local authorities sponsored underwater urchin-killing parties. Scuba divers would swim around smashing urchins with hammers to save the kelp forests for the factories.
Kelp and urchins have been locked in battle with each other for eons. Vast armies of urchins swarm across the sea floor, advancing at speeds of up to 20 inches a day and chewing up all the kelp en route. In response, kelp have evolved a diabolical weapon to defend themselves against the urchin hordes. Kelp produce a protein that tricks at least some female sea urchins into believing that a male sea urchin has already fertilized their eggs. As a result, the female urchins stop making babies.
In Japan, sometime after the seventeenth century, people in a region called Hokuriku on the northern coast of Japan’s central island, came to appreciate the taste of sea urchins so much that they started harvesting urchins instead of destroying them. Since urchins eat kelp, they are loaded with the same delicious IMP that gives kelp its flavor.
Inside a sea urchin, the edible portions are the urchin’s gonads—either its ovaries or its testes, depending on gender. It’s difficult to tell which is which because the male and female sex organs look almost exactly the same. These gonads can occupy up to two-thirds of the urchin’s body. They are delicious, not only because they are loaded with tasty amino acids and IMP, but also because they are composed of 15 to 25 percent fat. The French have long cooked with urchin gonads, adding them to scrambled eggs, soufflés, and sauces.
In 1975, a young scuba diver in southern California named Dave Rudie heard that instead of smashing sea urchins with a hammer, he could make seven cents a pound selling them to a man from Japan. Rudie began collecting urchins from the bottom with a garden rake. Soon he was processing urchin gonads in his garage and selling them to sushi bars in San Diego. Now, his company, Catalina Offshore Products, is the premier American urchin supplier, selling high-grade California urchin to sushi bars around the country. His urchins are known at Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo as the best outside Japan.
Tetsu taught the students how to wrap a strip of nori around the edge of a rice nigiri to hold salmon eggs or sea urchin gonads on top. The Japanese refer to these nigiri whimsically as gunkan—which means “battleship”—because supposedly they look like little boats.
The following night, Toshi served customers at the front bar. Takumi worked next to him. By now Toshi knew that this might be one of the last nights he would ever stand behind a sushi bar.
Despite several busy evenings in recent weeks, Hama Hermosa had still been losing too much money. Toshi had decided to shut the restaurant for good. He wasn’t sure what would happen to the academy. American sushi, it seemed, had left Toshi behind.
A young lady sat down at the bar. She wore a shirt with a deep V-neck revealing an ample bosom. She leaned forward, her elbows on the bar. There were certainly things Toshi would miss about being a sushi chef. He turned to Takumi and spoke in Japanese.
“Working at the sushi bar really is the ideal angle for viewing breasts.”
Takumi bowed his head and laughed quietly into his chest. Toshi looked at his Japanese student for a moment.
“If you were in Japan,” Toshi said, “you sure as hell would not be standing at the bar making sushi already.”
Takumi had been studying sushi for less than three months. In Japan, a traditional apprenticeship would have taken him years. And he was already nearly 40 years old.
Takumi nodded. “I’d be in the back washing dishes.”
“Your life would be over before you had the chance to make sushi,” Toshi said.
New customers arrived, including a gorgeous brunette whose tight T-shirt barely contained her breasts. She sat in front of Toshi. He sighed and turned to Takumi.
“I can’t help it. When a cute girl sits down at the bar, I always want to make her something special. I’ve always given the cute girls the special cuts of fish.” He shook his head. “It’s sushi-chef discrimination.”
Toshi’s eyes wandered toward the T-shirt. The woman was talking with her friends and remained oblivious.
“Damn,” Toshi blurted in Japanese, “look at those breasts! They’re perfect!”
Takumi turned away, his body shaking with laughter. Toshi kept talking. “When I see tits like that, sometimes my dick gets hard and pushes up my cutting board.”
Takumi ducked below the counter and held his stomach. Toshi looked down at his work, but his eyes kept wandering back to the breasts. “God, I can’t stop looking at them.”
Next a blond woman wearing a cowboy hat sauntered in and sat at the bar. Her low-cut strap top barely contained the generous landscape of her chest.
Toshi turned to Takumi, eyes wide.
That weekend, Toshi catered another film set. He took Takumi along.
They had competition. Next to the sushi stall was a truck with a grill serving barbecue. Fragrant smoke billowed across the sushi stall.
At lunchtime the film crew mobbed the sushi stand. Grips jostled each other to get their serving of raw fish and rice.
Takumi was averaging seventeen seconds per nigiri. Still too slow. Next to him Toshi knocked out each nigiri in five seconds flat. Takumi deepened his concentration and picked up his pace. Ten minutes later he hit twelve seconds per piece.
After an hour, the crowd thinned and Toshi slowed down.
A grip strode past. “Thank you, guys, that was fantastic. I came back for seconds twice.” Two more grips stopped by and thanked them, too.
The barbecue truck had gotten only a handful of customers.
Toshi threw together a few final plates of sushi and carried them next door to the barbecue truck. He returned with a couple of Styrofoam clamshells. He and Takumi sat in the van with the doors open and the air-conditioner blasting. Toshi shoveled seared steak and potatoes into his mouth with a plastic fork.
“Man,” he said in Japanese, “American food is good.”
Weeks 11 and 12
45
LAST DANCE
The academy had scheduled a special final student sushi bar. Again, Kate invited her mother and brother. She planned to serve them omakase—chef’s choice.
That morning the students rushed around the kitchen making preparations. Kate sharpened her knives.
When Kate’s mother and brother arrived, she took her place behind the bar.
“We’d like omakase, please,” her mother said. Kate had coached them beforehand.
Kate nodded. She peered into the fish case.
“Well, let’s see, I could make you tacos,” Kate said, smirking. Her mother looked confused. Kate laughed. “Tako,” she explained, “is Japanese for ‘octopus’!”
Her mother frowned. Kate thought for a second. She pulled a tray of albacore tuna and sliced off five neat pieces. She squeezed a bunch of shredded radish onto a plate. She pressed a perilla leaf on top and laid the slices of fish in a slanted row. She straightened up and eyed the platter. She stuck a blue cocktail umbrella in the radish. She handed the plate across the f
ish case. Her mom smiled.
While they were eating the sashimi, Kate broiled slices of eel in the toaster. She rolled the eel into a pair of hand rolls with crab and cucumber, and squirted on eel sauce—her own concoction. She handed them across the fish case.
Kate built a spider roll. She loaded the standard deep-fried soft-shell crab on the rice, but altered the recipe and layered in cilantro and shredded radish. She chose a wide white plate, arranged the roll elegantly, and handed the plate to her mother and her brother.
Kate pulled a tray of flatfish and cut off two quick slices. She straightened up, lifted her elbows and hands away from her body, and squeezed together a pair of nigiri as if she were performing for a crowd, just as Toshi had demonstrated. She dripped lemon juice on the nigiri and handed them across the fish case. Her mother bit down, chewed, and nodded. “That’s good.”
“Now I’m going to invent a Kate roll!” Kate said.
She loaded spicy tuna, avocado, eel, cucumber, and shredded radish on a pad of rice and nori and tucked it in tight, just like Zoran had taught her.
On the last night of Hama Hermosa’s existence, Toshi strode into the dining room at 5:15 in his white jacket. He switched on the lights over the front sushi bar and surveyed the row of sea creatures in the fish cases.
There were beige ribbons of eel, tight purple curls of octopus, and orange flaps of shrimp. There were tan blocks of albacore, red bricks of tuna, pink strips of fatty tuna, and translucent sheets of flounder. There was a pale shaft of giant clam. There were orange trapezoids of salmon embedded with zigzag lines of fat, and wedges of yellowtail with maroon triangles of dark muscle. It was like an anatomy booth at a museum of natural history, except that visitors were encouraged to eat the exhibit.
The Story of Sushi Page 27