The Story of Sushi (10 page)

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.”

“S
top 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.

B
efore Zoran took roll the 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.”

Crisp nori is a hallmark of a good sushi roll—at least, in Japan. Traditional sushi rolls—the ones with nori wrapped around a thin filling of rice and cucumber or tuna—should be eaten right away, while the nori is still dry and crackly. If a customer is sitting at a table in a restaurant, there’s no point in ordering a traditional sushi roll. By the time the waiter delivers it, the nori on the outside will be damp from touching the rice. Traditional thin rolls are supposed to be eaten at the sushi bar, within seconds of leaving the chef’s hands. But with inside-out rolls, the nori is on the inside, where it goes instantly soggy anyway.

Zoran jotted the number 1 next to the spicy tuna and California rolls on his list. Next he pointed to the “big roll,” or
futo-maki.

“The second thing you want to make is your
futo-maki.
They don’t have to be super crispy.” The diameter of a big roll is nearly twice that of standard inside-out rolls, so it must be sliced thin enough for the customer to eat each piece in one mouthful. The filling dominates, so the crispness of the nori is less crucial. Zoran wrote a number 2 next to the
futo-maki.

“Now, your
kappa-maki
should be the most crispy, so you want to make those last.” Zoran scribbled a number 3 next to the cucumber rolls, and a number 4 next to the
nigiri. Nigiri
were quick to make, and saving them for last ensured that the fish toppings would be as fresh as possible.

“You must choose your own plates to display your sushi,” he added. “Remember, in Japanese presentation, use no more than seventy percent of the plate.” He glanced at the clock. “Commence! You have twenty minutes.”

Kate stared at the block of fish on her cutting board. Twenty minutes! This was crazy.

“If you make it in the wrong order,” Zoran yelled, “you’re doing the dishes!”

Right out of the gate, Kate screwed up. She panicked and started cutting her block of fish first simply because the fish was sitting right in front of her. It was a bad move, because now her slices of fish would sit exposed to the air while she made the rest of her sushi.

Zoran, having started a race, appeared set on winning it. Kate glanced at him and her mouth fell open. He was making three rolls
at the same time.
His hands flew around the cutting board in a blur, tossing ingredients onto different pads of rice and nori as though he were dealing a hand of cards. In under five minutes he’d completed all five of the rolls in his list. After that he started making extra rolls. It wasn’t clear how fifty sushi rolls and forty
nigiri
were going to be eaten by one vegetable deliveryman.

The entire history of sushi has been a quest for speed. More than a thousand years ago, when people made sushi they had to wait for a year before they could eat it. In the 1600s, they shortened the fermentation time to a month. After the invention of vinegar, they pressed sushi under stones for just a couple of days. With the invention of hand-squeezed sushi in the 1800s, it could be eaten immediately. Sushi had evolved into a meal of instant gratification.

But chefs in America have taken the speed of sushi to a new level. In 2000, a Japanese essayist named Toyoo Tamamura visited sushi restaurants around L.A., including Hama Hermosa, which at the time was called California Beach Sushi. He was startled to see that sushi restaurants in the United States were larger and had more tables than the small sushi bars he was used to in Japan.

When he sat down to eat, he was also startled to see people ordering as many as six
nigiri
all topped with the same kind of fish. To an American, it makes perfect sense to choose only his favorite items on the menu, as he would in any other restaurant. In Japan, Tamamura was accustomed to asking the chef for a series of small surprises, one or two
nigiri
at a time, each topped with a different item.

But Tamamura was most surprised by the volume of rolls that
Americans ordered. Rolls are far more labor-intensive than
nigiri.
The chefs worked as if they were under siege, squeezing out roll after roll for table orders at a furious pace, their hands never at rest. Tamamura wrote that “there are even tough guys who make three or four rolls at once.” He decided that sushi chefs back in Japan had it easy.

Zoran’s cutting board was now piled with rolls. One by one the students completed their sushi plates. One of the women in the class had plated her slices of roll in blocks that formed an asymmetric sunburst around her four
nigiri.
It was precisely the sort of display Zoran was looking for. He nodded his approval.

But he steamed around the table declaring the other presentations dismal failures. He rearranged the sushi on most of the plates.

Kate had struggled through the exercise. Her
nigiri
looked terrible, and her roll slices were still popping open.

Zoran arrived at Kate’s station. For once, he didn’t ignore her, nor did he criticize her in front of the whole class.

“Here, I’m going to show you something,” Zoran said, his voice quiet. His hands whirred and assembled the foundation of an inside-out roll. He stacked an impossibly high pile of cucumber and avocado on the nori. “Watch this.”

Zoran arched his hands and lifted the edge of the rice and nori pad. His thumbs and fingers gathered the pad up and hauled it over the filling like a pair of industrious spiders.

“You want to curl the near edge up, over, and down, and
tuck
it in.” With the tips of his fingers he pressed the curled edge of the pad down into the cavity of filling, then held the position and looked at Kate. “You’ve got to really
tuck
it in,
tuck
it tight.” He squeezed. “Like this.”

Kate watched. Something in her head clicked. She nodded.

Perhaps it was just as well that the vegetable deliveryman hadn’t arrived. Zoran told the students to pack up their sushi and take it home.

“Thank you, everybody, for a good day today,” he said. He turned to go. “I think we learned something.”