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

by Trevor Corson

The name means “willow.” The tapered blade is the shape of a willow leaf. This is

Zoran told the class they would have to sharpen their knives by hand—every day. The high-carbon blade allows for a very sharp edge, but the edge is also more fragile,

and the metal rusts easily, so Japanese knives require daily care.

Out in the wild, it has family who are killers. One of its closest cousins, a vicious carcinogen,

doomed 100,000 turkeys and ducks in England in 1960, simply by sitting around on a pile of peanuts.

A handful of small shops in Japan are in charge of most of the good mold. Mold experts manage mold as though they are breeding racehorses. Some of the shops have been

selling the best strains for

centuries. They keep backup jars of mold in high-security vaults...

Mold has to eat. The spores are dormant, but when you give them something to munch on, they germinate and grow into white fuzz like the type you see on old bread.

pours a little mold into a funnel on one of the big machines—just enough to infect a batch of 6,600 pounds of rice.

grows at tremendous speed, sending out feelers like ivy until it has ensnared every grain of the 6,600 pounds of rice in a web. The mold eats so fast that the incubator, like a nuclear reactor, would overheat if it weren’t properly controlled. In two days, the fuzzy web has eaten so much rice that some 500 pounds of it has simply vanished.

soybeans, along with a dose of sea salt, bacteria, and yeast.

the tubs just sit around. For months. Molds don’t have stomachs, but they do manufacture digestive enzymes.

the rice and soybean plants have spent their lives soaking up sunlight and building it into giant molecules that are much too complicated. The digestive enzymes take those molecules

apart. The enzymes split the proteins into useful building blocks called amino acids. They split the carbohydrates down into little energy bars in the form of simple sugars.

After the tarp goes over the Jacuzzi tubs, the mold in the miso suffocates and dies before it has even had a chance

produces spores asexually,

The mold might need air, but the enzymes don’t. They keep ...

In addition, it is the most frequently

used building block in the proteins throughout our bodies.

Next, the bacteria

The same bacteria that make yogurt and cheese are the life of the party in miso.

Now, the miso possesses just about every attribute you could want in a food: savory amino flavors, sugary sweetness, acidic tartness, salty tang, and fragrant smells, along with nutritious proteins, sugars, fats, helpful digestive enzymes, and friendly bacteria.

It’s got something else as well. And that’s where the connection to sushi comes in. Around the edges of the tarp,

brown liquid has oozed out. It contains many elements of the miso, especial...

soy sauce originated as a by-product of making miso.

Before soy sauce, the Japanese, like the Chinese and Southeast Asians, had preferred fermented fish sauce. Vegetarianism became popular when Buddhist monks

arrived in Japan in the sixth century.

For a long time, soy sauce remained a luxury. Japanese commoners made do with miso. Then, about 500 years ago, Japanese food companies built the first soy-sauce

factories, and soy sauce became commonplace. About the same time, the makers of soy sauce added wheat to the mold fermentation process to make the sauce sweeter.

In the case of rice vinegar, the fermentation process produces acetic acid, which is what gives vinegar its tangy sourness. And rice vinegar is what sushi chefs add to cooked rice, along with sugar and a little salt, to make it tangy and sweet.

Kate and her classmates had been under the impression

that what made sushi delicious was the fresh ingredients. In fact, the fundamental flavors of sushi—soy sauce and rice vinegar—depend on infecting certain fo...

Dashi is highly flavorful, and it is a cornerstone of Japanese

cuisine. Dashi is the soup base to which miso is added to make miso soup.

These power pellets are called ATP—adenosine triphosphate.

savors nearly as much as glutamate.

Dashi’s role in sushi usually goes unnoticed, particularly in the United States. Most Americans think they are supposed to dunk all their

sushi in soy sauce. But full-strength soy sauce overpowers the delicate flavors of raw fish. A good sushi chef adds all the flavoring the sushi needs before he hands it to the customer. He mixes his own sauce and uses it behind the sushi bar. This sauce is called nikiri. Each chef has his own secret formula. Most are a variation on a standard recipe, and dashi is a key supporting actor.

To 100 parts soy sauce, the chef adds twenty parts dashi, ten parts sake, and ten parts mirin, a sweet rice liquor used in cooking. The mixture is heated and...

more complex soy sauce, with a broad array of flavor compounds appropriat...

chefs frequently painted a sheen of nikiri across the top of pieces of sushi with a basting brush. This was the traditional method of seasoning sushi. The chefs were forever handing sushi to customers and admonishing them, “No soy sauce!”

The deliciousness of dashi and soy sauce intrigued a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda, who in 1908 figured out that glutamate is what makes kelp broth so delicious. He realized that the stuff could be manufactured. The product was called monosodium glutamate, or MSG.

Much of what makes all fish delicious is IMP, created when the ATP in the fish’s muscles breaks down after the fish’s death.

IMP could be manufactured, too, and like MSG used as a flavor additive.

Western scientists believed that the human tongue could taste only four fund...

salty, sour, and bitter. The Japanese scientists argued that there was a fifth fundamental flavor, triggered by amino acids like glutamate and compounds like IMP, and epitomized by foods such as dashi and nikiri. They c...

the tongues of humans and other animals possess specific receptors for umami.

MSG

Big Mac