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

by Trevor Corson

to soften too much befor...

Japan’s native religion, Shinto, starts with the belief that everything—trees, foxes, fish, samurai swords—possesses its own spirit. Takumi abided by this belief. For example, he lavished care on his sushi knives because a skilled craftsman had poured his heart and soul into their creation, and so they had acquired spirits of their own.

According to Japanese folk tradition, each grain of rice contains not just one spirit but seven.

All rice, whether it houses deities or not, belongs to a single species of plant, with the sole exception of

one other species eaten only in West Africa. The primary species has more than 100,000 varieties, but these fall into two categories, Indica and Japonica. Japonica rices are shorter and stickier, and include sushi rice.

Sushi rice is sticky because it’s hopelessly disorganized. Most plants store solar energy inside seeds and grains, as little energy bars of sugar—glucose. They pack these energy bars inside the seed ...

orderly, and results in nice, straight strands of starch, each strand containing 1,000 pieces of sugar. The second way is to fling the energy bars into tangled, irregular, prickly heaps of starch, each containing anywhere from 5,000 to 20,000 pieces of sugar. Sushi rice contains more of this second, disorganized type of sta...

Average sushi restaur...

medium-grain version of Japonica. Each grain is oblong, two or three times longer than it is wide. Because of its shape, medium-grain rice does not form itself into sushi quite so willingly. But it is less expensive. The California Sushi Academy stocked medium-grain rice for the students in the classroom. High-end sushi restaurants pay extra for short-...

short-grain rice from American farmers who grew it just 400 miles away, in the Sacramento Val...

Takumi draped a Teflon net inside the bowl of a large commercial rice cooker. The Teflon mesh was to prevent the rice from sticking to the bowl. Then he ...

Sushi apprentices in Japan spend a

couple of years on rice alone because preparing it is so tricky. Traditional chefs consider the rice more important than the fish. The goal is grains that are firm, plump, and sticky.

Good growing seasons

can be bad for sushi chefs because high-starch grains can break open during cooking, resulting in mush.

The most favored sushi rice in Japan is a variety called Koshihikari. The starch in the core of the grain is more condensed than in other varieties, and the walls of its storage cells are thicker. Both factors contribute to a firmer and denser texture, qualities that sushi connoisseurs cons...

flavor and a moister sensation i...

In Japan alone, farmers have cultivated at least 2,000 varieties of rice. Like winemakers and coffee sellers, serious sushi chefs often blend different varieties, and different ...

Regardless of the type of rice,

sushi chefs generally prefer rice that has aged for a few months after harvest because it’s drier. To sushi purists, perhaps the most important factor is not the type of sushi rice but how it was dried. Most Japanese rice today is force-dried with hot air before milling. The purists complain that this causes the surface of the grains to become pasty. When vinegar is added to force-dried rice after cooking, the pasty surface of the grains can form a membrane, blocking

absorption of the vinegar. The very best rice is left to dry n...

Traditionally, sushi chefs cook their sushi rice with a splash of sake and a strip of kelp to add flavor.

Instead, Takumi reached for a maroon

can of white powder manufactured by the Otsuka Chemical Industry Corporation. This substance, known by its trade name Miora, came into commercial use as a rice additive in Japan after World War II. When labeled for sale in the United States, a sticker on the can declares in English that the ingredients are simply “potato starch and glucose.” But the Japanese ...

Amylase breaks starch down into glucose. Protease breaks protein down into amino acids. Cooking with Miora creates rice with unnaturally high levels of glucose and amino acids, which makes the rice sweeter and gives it more of the tasty flavor ...

Sushi chefs cook their rice with less water than if they were cooking rice for regular use. Too much moisture softens the

grains, makes them too sticky, and prevents them from absorbing the vinegar mixture the chef adds after cooking. But too little water also prevents the rice from absorbing the vinegar because the starches in the core of the grain will reharden before the vinegar gets a chance to penetrate.

If he added the vinegar too soon after cooking, the rice wouldn’t soak it up. But if he let the rice sit too long, it would start to harden and wouldn’t absorb the vinegar, either. At the right moment, he returned and poured Hama Hermosa’s recipe of sushi vinegar over the cooling

rice. In a tiny office off the kitchen, the recipe was taped to the wall: seven parts rice vinegar, five parts sugar, one part salt.

In the 1600s, in the area around Kyoto, the recipe for “quick sushi” came to include not just vinegar in the rice but sugar as well. It tasted good, and along with the vinegar, the sugar helped prevent the rice from spoiling for a few days. Sugar molecules love water. When water is in

short supply, they suck it right out of the bodies of bacteria and the bacteria die. That’s why fruit jellied with lots of sugar is called “preserves.”

One of the most venerated Tokyo sushi chefs today, Jir Ono, ads almost no sugar to his sushi rice. The

sugar, he says, makes people feel full too quickly, before they’ve had a chance to sample a sufficient variety of fish. Too much sugar can also overwhelm the delicate flavors of some of the best fish for sushi.

The most closely guarded secret

is usually the ratio of vinegar to salt in the sushi rice.

In the United States, sushi has Kyoto-style sweetness. Sushi chefs have noticed that when they add more sugar they get extra compliments. In a sense, the fundamental taste of sushi is no different from the fundamental taste of America’s other favorite Asian food. Chinese restaurants serve sweet-and-sour pork;

sushi restaurants essentially serve sweet-and-sour rice.

By 1910, more than 40,000 Japanese migrant laborers were toiling on American farms, along with another 10,000 on railroads and several thousand more in canneries.

By 1940, Japanese immigrant farmers were growing 95 percent of California’s snap beans and celery, nearly 70 percent of its tomatoes,

and around 40 percent of its onions and green peas. They owned many of the produce stalls in L.A.’s city market. But discrimination against the Japanese made it difficult for them to enter other businesses. One option was importing Japanese foodstuffs and selling them to other Japanese in the United States. People called this the “homesickness trade.” In L.A., a group of these importers formed an organization called the Mutual Trading

Com...

Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor interrupted the homesickness trade. The U.S. government locked up Japanese Americans in internment camps. A group of Catholic nuns in downtown L.A. protected the Mutual Trad...

The first sushi

bar outside Little Tokyo opened in 1970, in L.A.’s Century City near Beverly Hills. Its target wasn’t ordinary Americans. It was Hollywood stars.

In 1977, the U.S. Senate issued a report called Dietary Goals for the United States, that blamed fatty, high-cholesterol foods for the increasing incidence of disease. The report recommended greater consumption of fish

and grains. Around the same time, health experts also began to promote the benefits of omega-3 fatty acids, abundant in fish. Many Americans discovered sushi as a healthful alternative.

Like most wasabi served in restaurants, there wasn’t a shred of wasabi in

it. Real wasabi is a rare plant that is notoriously difficult to grow and tastes quite different. This was a mix of horseradish and mustard powder. She added water and stirred. The powder jelled into a green blob,

The hand-squeezed pieces of sushi were called nigiri, from the Japanese verb nigiru, “to grasp” or “squeeze.”

The word omakase means “I leave it up to you.” It’s what the sophisticated customer says to the chef when settling down at the sushi bar. Sushi connoisseurs seldom order off a menu. Traditionally, sushi bars in Japan didn’t even have menus. Omakase is an invitation to the chef—not