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

by Trevor Corson

One of the ingredients of its “special sauce” was hydrolyzed vegetable protein.

te-maki, or “hand rolls.”

Nigiri are the little rectangles of rice topped with slices of fish and other toppings that sushi chefs squeeze together with their fingers.

Hand rolls are an...

sushi roll that don’t require a bamboo mat to make. The chef places half a sheet of nori—the crisp, dark-green Japanese seaweed paper—on his palm, presses on a blob of sushi rice and a ...

in Japan, sushi chefs might put a touch of wasabi inside a nigiri, using a larger dab of wasabi with fatty fish, and a smaller one with lean. But they never served extra wasabi on the side.

They

would serve a pinch on the side with sashimi—plain raw fish, without rice. But diners certainly weren’t supposed to mix the wasabi into their ...

Another thing Jay noticed was people gobbling up the pickled ginger as an appetizer. But the point of the ginger was to cleanse the palate betw...

to eat sushi.

The modern term “sushi” refers not to fish, but to rice—rice seasoned with rice vinegar,

sugar, and salt. Any food made with this seasoned rice can be called sushi, whether it involves fish or not.

In the old days, the larger sushi shops in Japan employed full-time

time specialist chefs whose only job was to prepare the rice.

Sushi began inland. Historians think it was first invented along the Mekong River, in what is now landlocked southern China, Laos, and northern Thailand.

During monsoon season, the rivers would flood into the rice paddies, and fish would swim into the rice fields. Soon the farmers were raising fish in the paddies along with the rice.

The inland folk packed the whole fish, including its guts, in a large amount of salt. Guts contain digestive enzymes. These enzymes, along with other enzymes in the fish’s flesh, broke the

proteins of the fish down into amino acids. The salt prevented harmful bacteria from growing. The result was fermented fish paste. This was how Asian fish sauce got its start.

The inland rice farmers along the Mekong River discovered a second way to keep their fish edible for

long periods. This method kept the fish in one piece and left it much less stinky. First, they gutted and cleaned the fish. Then, they packed it in cooked rice and sealed it inside a jar. They cooked the rice first because they wanted it to decay. Inside the jar, mold quickly digested the carbohydrates in the rice, breaking it down into sugars, just as in the making of miso. Then

yeasts ate the sugars, creating alcohol. The alcohol protected the remaining sugars from the bacteria in the air inside the jar. With the notable exception of botulism, many nasty bacteria—the ones that spoil food—need oxygen. Many benign bacteria don’t; they probably first evolved inside piles o...

sugars. They gave off lactic acid and acetic acid as waste. By now the ri...

But acids do prevent food from spoiling. When a bacterium runs afoul of an acid like lactic acid or acetic acid, the acid shoots hydrogen ions into the bacterium. The ions disable the cell’s

machinery and wreak other havoc, and the bacterium dies. Inside the jar, the fish was surrounded by acids in which very few bacteria could survive, and there was no oxygen for them, anyway. The fish didn’t stay perfectly fresh, of course. Digestive enzymes broke down most of the proteins. But the fish would keep, and stay in one piece, for as long as a year.

This original form of sushi spread to China, and then to Japan.

No one is certain where the Japanese word sushi comes from. One of the Chinese words for preserved fish was probably pronouced something like chee. In Japanese, that sound could have become shee, supplying the second syllable of the word sushi. The first syllable might

have come from the Japanese word for “sour,” suppai, making su-shi to be “sour preserved fish.”

While sushi was adopted in Japan, it disappeared in China. Possibly this was because Genghis Khan and the Mongols conquered China, and they preferred red meat to fish. But the original form of sushi is still eaten today in Thailand, as well as on the island of Taiwan off the southern Chinese coast.

It is also still eaten in Japan. The Japanese make the original form of sushi from freshwater fish—in particular, a species of carp related to goldfish. The fish are called funa. Funa-zushi

The original form of sushi had been a side dish. Now it became a self-contained meal of fish and tart rice. This form of sushi was a luxury, not a necessity. Sushi makers

began to entertain their aristocratic customers with new ingredients, including ocean fish.

Until recently, rice producers coated rice with white talc

powder to protect it during shipment. But talc is inedible and may even cause cancer, so cooks had to wash the rice thoroughly before use. Most rice is now talc free. In the United States, the FDA encourages producers to powder white rice with vitamins instead, and some states require it.

No rice starts out white. The rice plant is a kind of grass, and each grain of rice is actually a tiny fruit—which is to say, the plant version of an egg. The hull is the egg’s shell, made mostly of the same hard silica found in rocks. Under the hull is the

brown inner husk, or bran, and under that a super-thin layer of oils, enzymes, and

vitamins. Inside is the egg’s ...

In the modern world, rice is run through high-tech milling machines after harvest. First, steel rollers encased in rubber are used to break off the hull. At this point, all rice is brown. Next, to ...

inner husk, or bran, along with the oils and enzymes. After polishing, there’s a dent in the end of each grain. That’s where the embryo used to live. The milling process leaves behind a bit of starch as a fine powder on the rice. This leftover starch c...

rinse it off. A few brands of rice go throug...

step, a process trademarked Kapika. A special Japanese machine rubs the grains together so they polish each other clean. Kapika rice keeps longer and doesn’t require as much rinsing. The problem with all this processing is that removing the inner husk, or bran layer, also removes the vi...

An alter...

would be to encourage people just to e...

Most health-conscious people assume that brown rice was the form of rice that humans originally consumed, but that’s not the case. Throughout most of rice-growing history, people pounded rice grains in a wooden mortar with a mallet to break open the ...

with a heavy pounding head at one end. A person stood on the other end, leveraging the mallet up and down with his body weight. In practice, the effort required to break open the hull of the rice grains also broke off most of the inner husk, so eating brown rice wasn’t even an option until the invention ...

rice has been eaten for most of history. Fortunately, traditional pounding techniques left a bit of the bran on. Average “white” rice was actually “slightly ...

That said, rich people in Japan and other countries preferred the taste of bright white rice, and so they paid extra to have their rice polished. Sadly f...

besides rice bran to supply vitamin B1. People who ate polished rice condemned themselves to emotional disturbances, impaired sensory perception, weight loss, heart failure, and even death...

But aside from the lack of vitamins and certain minerals, white rice can provide all the basic protein and starch that a human needs to survive, and it beats out wheat handily.

rinses later the milling starch had washed away and the water ran clear. At this stage, some sushi chefs soak their rice in cold water for

as long as 30 to 60 minutes. The chefs at Hama Hermosa preferred to run cold water from the tap over the rice for just ten minutes or so. This achieved both a quick soak and a thorough rinse. Then the chefs would pour the rice into a colander to drain. Each grain of rice continued to absorb the moisture on its surface, like a tiny sponge. Takumi’s hands had turned red from the frigid rinse water. Anything but cold water would cause the rice