The Story of Sushi (17 page)

Z
oran strode grimly to the whiteboard. He hated teaching creative rolls. He grabbed the Magic Marker.

“Types of American special rolls?” Zoran asked.

The students called out names—dragon roll, rainbow roll, caterpillar roll (covered with thin slices of avocado), Philadelphia roll (smoked salmon and cream cheese), and others. Zoran jotted them on the board.

“Companies mass-produce picture menus of all these kinds of rolls,” he sneered, “and then different restaurants give them different names.”

Most American special rolls are based on a basic inside-out roll, usually with a topping. They rely on gooey, fatty ingredients and sauces, and the shock value of unlikely ingredients.

Zoran tossed the marker back into its tray and slapped a long list of American rolls on the table. He’d printed it from the Internet. There was a candy roll, a dynamite roll, a pesto roll, a ragin’ Cajun roll (tempura alligator), and a holiday roll (cranberry salsa and turkey). A restaurant near San Francisco served a Prozac roll, though it didn’t actually contain Prozac. Marcos had heard of a roll called “the screaming orgasm.” He wasn’t sure what went in it.

Zoran demonstrated a quick caterpillar roll. The students tried their hand at it. Takumi made one and arranged it across the plate in an
S
-curve as if it were crawling. He poked two slivers of cucum
ber in its head for antennae. He stood back and stared at it. He muttered to himself in Japanese. “If you look at it too long, it gives you the heebie-jeebies.”

“Okay,” Zoran announced, “you have the rest of class to work on a creative roll.”

The students started testing their own ideas in preparation for the upcoming test. Zoran set about making the only special roll he considered worth eating—a Japanese-style
futo-maki,
or “big roll.”

The Japanese-style big roll has the nori on the outside, of course, like the thin rolls, but takes a full, 7-by-8-inch sheet of nori instead of half a sheet, and several ingredients are included as filling rather than just one. Zoran filled his big roll with crab meat, boiled whitefish, sweet egg omelet, cooked spinach marinated in soy sauce, simmered shiitake mushrooms, and simmered gourd shavings. He squeezed it closed. He looked up and surveyed the students’ progress.

“Come on, guys! It’s taken you thirty minutes to make three rolls!” Zoran yelled. “Gotta work on your speed. The customers are going to go home.”

Zoran pointed proudly to his Japanese-style big roll.

“This is the best roll.” He gestured at the American rolls the students had been making. “All that other stuff is
crap!
”

Most of the students were experimenting with a version of a standard inside-out roll. Most of the rolls involved large quantities of cream cheese and messy sauces. Kate’s involved fruit.

Takumi, meanwhile, had devised an entirely new roll structure. He built two small rolls and packed them side-by-side inside a larger, rectangular one with more rice, with the nori on the outside, Japanese style. He squeezed it closed with his bamboo mat, then cut off a slice. He examined the cross section. It was a geometrically perfect rectangle, containing two perfectly centered squares. He nodded to himself, and said, “domino roll.”

Takumi started on a second creative roll. He built a standard thin cucumber roll and sliced it. He stood the pieces on a plate, in a circle, cross sections facing up. It looked ordinary, but inside one piece Takumi had replaced the cucumber almost entirely with wasabi paste—enough horseradish to make a grown man weep.

Takumi spun the plate. The pieces of roll circled like bullets
in the chamber of a revolver. The plate came to a stop. Takumi giggled. “Russian roulette roll.”

A writer was visiting the classroom to learn about the academy. Takumi held out the plate to him. The visitor selected a piece and bit down.

Most commercial wasabi served in sushi bars isn’t wasabi at all. It’s a mix of horseradish powder, mustard powder, mustard extract, citric acid, yellow dye no. 5, and blue dye no. 1. Real wasabi is a rare and finicky plant. It’s hard to grow, nearly impossible to keep fresh, tricky to prepare, and absurdly expensive. It’s also much more delicious than its contrived counterpart.

Wasabi and horseradish are cousins. Along with mustard and regular radishes, they belong to the cabbage family. Being a cabbage has its drawbacks. Members of the cabbage family do not possess legs and can’t run away from predators. Instead, cabbages have evolved a high-tech defense system that would turn heads at the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. Inside their cells they store an innocent-looking, sugar-laced compound called glucosinolate. In separate compartments nearby, the plants store an enzyme called myrosinase.

When an insect or slug, for instance, bites into a member of the cabbage family, it’s in for a rude shock. By breaking into the plant’s cells, the predator cracks open the compartments, and the compound and the enzyme mix. The enzymes rip the sugars off the glucosinolate, converting it to an intense irritant called isothiocyanate, known to most people as mustard oil. Mustard oil is a highly volatile substance that converts rapidly to a gas and irritates mucous membranes in mammals. It’s often used in cat and dog repellent. Mustard oil is so toxic that it damages the plant as much as it hurts the predator, which is why cabbages must store it with the sugars attached.

True wasabi is native only to Japan and Sakhalin Island, a Russian outpost off Japan’s northern coast. It creates a derivative form of mustard oil called methylsulfinyl isothiocyanate. In humans, sulfinyl in small amounts can trigger a beneficial immune response,
activating enzymes that detoxify noxious chemicals in our bodies. The Japanese collected wild wasabi as a medicinal plant as early as the tenth century. Wealthy nobles probably began eating small amounts of wasabi with raw fish as a flavorful spice and a hedge against food poisoning. Real wasabi tastes sweeter, more subtle, and less spicy than the horseradish that passes for wasabi today.

To activate true wasabi, the chef grinds the tuberlike rhizome of the plant on a piece of shark skin. The fine, toothlike scales of shark skin are the most effective tool for breaking the compartments that separate the compound and the enzyme. Grinding the plant about ten minutes prior to serving it allows the enzymes to produce the isothiocyanate. Any longer and the heat and flavor rapidly dissipate. Mixing wasabi (or horseradish) into soy sauce, as most Americans do, dampens the flavor and aroma even more quickly.

Contrary to what many sushi chefs and customers believe, wasabi can’t kill bacteria on raw fish. But it does create conditions in the stomach that inhibit populations of bacteria from growing, and thus it may have some utility against food poisoning.

Wasabi plants grow only in shaded gravel streambeds with constant cold running water, making them difficult to cultivate. But in the city of Edo after 1600, sashimi became popular and demand for wasabi increased, so farmers began to grow it. Yet average citizens seldom ate wasabi. The leaves of the wasabi plant resembled a leaf depicted in the shogun’s family crest. For average citizens to eat wasabi was thus considered an insult to the aristocracy. Most people ate regular mustard with their sashimi, not unlike the fake wasabi sushi chefs serve now.

Today, a modern Japanese wasabi farm could be mistaken for a black-topped country road curving through a gully. The farms consist of streams that farmers have widened to accommodate rows of plants. The farmers cover the streams with black curtains to provide shade so that from above, the streams resemble strips of asphalt. The highest-quality wasabi comes from a mountainous region southwest of Tokyo called Amagi. Wasabi experts refer to all other wasabi simply as
bachi
—“from someplace else.”

For many years people assumed that wasabi wouldn’t grow outside Japan. In the 1990s, a California real-estate developer named
Roy Carver learned that true wasabi could fetch $100 a pound. He’d tried growing exotic mushrooms, Jerusalem artichokes, and black truffles, and now he decided to apply modern greenhouse technology to cultivating wasabi. He chose coastal Oregon, where the climate was similar to Amagi. He visited growers in Japan, but when he started asking technical questions they clammed up. He convinced a Japanese friend to conduct espionage. Carver managed to smuggle several cultivars of wasabi back to the United States, along with Japanese wasabi-growing manuals.

No one had ever succeeded in growing wasabi in greenhouses. Carver hired a Vietnam vet and former pastor as farm manager. He hired a botanist with a PhD as science advisor. They trucked in 9,000 cubic yards of river rock to a sandy plot on the Oregon coast. At enormous cost, they installed twenty-three greenhouses with a state-of-the-art irrigation system. A computer controlled the temperature and nutrient flow to mimic a Japanese mountain stream.

The farm had its first commercial harvest in 1997. Word spread, and Carver’s acts of espionage returned to haunt him. One day a black Lincoln sped into the farm. Asian men poked cameras from the windows, photographed everything not under cover, and raced away in a spray of gravel. Carver hired a security guard. On several occasions low-flying planes circled the farm. One Sunday morning at 6:00, a man jumped the 8-foot perimeter fence, snapped photos, and took notes until the guard chased him out.

Whenever Carver gave real wasabi to Americans to taste, the reaction was astonishment and delight. They had no idea that most wasabi was fake, and when they discovered how delicious the real thing tasted, they wouldn’t go back.

The problem was that most Japanese sushi chefs in the United States weren’t receptive. They told Carver and his sales team that Americans wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between real wasabi and horseradish powder. Americans didn’t appreciate subtlety, the chefs said, they just liked their sushi spicy hot.

Along with high electrical bills for the irrigation system and high labor costs, lack of demand from chefs destroyed Carver’s dream. In 2001, he ripped out the greenhouses and started importing cheaper, frozen wasabi from China. It’s still true wasabi, but the
quality isn’t quite as high. He sells it in tubes as Pacific Farms 100% Real Wasabi Paste. Many of his customers are American chefs.

The farm manager has continued to run the import and packaging operation. One day a couple of years ago, the manager received a phone call. A man was calling on his cellphone from a toilet stall. His friends had bet him $200 that he couldn’t eat a fist-size ball of Pacific Farms Wasabi Paste. Now he was refusing their offers to rush him to the emergency room. The manager tried not to laugh, and told him to wait it out.

As luck would have it, the visiting writer at the California Sushi Academy had selected the piece of Takumi’s Russian roulette roll that was full of fake wasabi. It was a much smaller amount than a fist-size ball, but the effect of the isothiocyanate in the horseradish was immediate and overwhelming. His eyes squinched closed and he gasped, while Takumi stood by and smiled.

Marcos had loaded his first attempt at a creative roll with far too many ingredients and couldn’t get it closed. He’d slimmed it down. The result was nothing special, but it was simple and well-formed.

Zoran sauntered by and examined it. He nodded. “Looks good. Very good. Something’s sinking in.”

Marcos was stunned. Suddenly his head swarmed with grandiose images. What he really needed to do was come up with a creative roll that was far more ambitious—something wild, something that would blow everyone away.

The other students finished their creative rolls. Kate had quietly tested several ideas. She’d decided on a plan.

O
n the drive to school the next morning, Kate was in a good mood. She liked her plan for her creative roll. She was looking forward to the test.

She was also proud to have actually filleted and skinned a whole fish this week. She hadn’t done a superb job, but the mackerel had been difficult for everyone. For the first time all semester, Kate felt like one of the guys. She pulled her Mustang into a Krispy Kreme shop and bought a box of donuts. When she got to school she set them on the back sushi bar, a present for her classmates.

Zoran had a present for the class, too—a pop quiz. The students sat at the bar, hunched over their papers. Zoran patrolled the room, his arms folded across his chest. Suddenly his voice broke the silence.

“Who’s trying to get brownie points by bringing in donuts?”

Kate raised her hand. “Me!”

“Well,” Zoran snorted, as though donuts were the most disgusting thing in the world, “
I
won’t eat them.”

Kate frowned.

After the quiz, Zoran explained about the next day’s test. “Toshi will give you the roll test. Then you will have ten minutes to create your special roll and plate it.” He glared around the room. “
Ten
minutes.”

He let them practice their creative rolls. Takumi rebuilt his
domino roll, and he refined it by adding curry powder to the rice. Marcos swigged black coffee and put his idea into action. His new creative roll was sure to impress everyone. It was composed of chicken wrapped in sheets of potato, then deep-fried. He ran around the kitchen, bursting with creativity.

Jay’s friend Jeff, the restaurant consultant, stopped by to make an announcement.

“I’ve got a sushi restaurant that’s looking for a student to work part-time in L.A.,” he told them. “It’s a win-win situation. You’ll learn and you’ll get paid. Fifteen dollars an hour. I also got a call from a nightclub.”

At the word
nightclub
Zoran laughed. “
Ny
tai-mori!
” he shouted. It was the Japanese word for sushi served on a naked woman.

Jeff continued. “I’m coming to you guys first. Anyone interested?”

Kate was seized with excitement. She could imagine herself having a lot of fun making sushi at a nightclub. Several of the students raised their hands, but Kate didn’t. On the roll test the previous week, in spite of her speed, her score had been the lowest in the class. If she spoke with Jeff directly, maybe he wouldn’t find out about her test score.

“Okay,” Jeff said, and turned to go. The students were to contact him through Zoran or Jay, so he could get the school’s assessment at the same time. Nevertheless, Kate took a deep breath and sidled up to Jeff as he was leaving.

“Anything in San Diego?” she asked, eyebrows raised.

“California is tough,” Jeff sighed. “There are opportunities in Des Moines, Kansas City, Utah. The opportunities are out there, especially in the Midwest. It’s harder if you want to stay around here.”

Kate pursed her lips. Then she screwed up her courage and asked him to keep her in mind for the nightclub job. He said he would.

The students finished their creative-roll practice. Marcos was way behind. His elaborate new roll had taken forty-five minutes. He took a bite and chewed. “Tastes like chicken,” he muttered.