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

by Trevor Corson

just to serve what he thinks are the freshest ingredients of the day but also to show off his skills.

“A Japanese person doesn’t feel he’s eaten dinner until he’s eaten rice,” Zoran said. “And miso soup should be at the end of the meal. When a Westerner sits down and orders miso soup to start, you know he doesn’t know anything about Japanese food.”

Many Americans believe it’s proper etiquette to rub their disposable chopsticks together before eating, to remove splinters. In Japan this is considered impolite.

When the chefs packed the sushi to go, they separated the nigiri with

decorative bamboo leaves. The leaves prevented the flavors from contaminating each other and added a mild antibacterial function. For their customers who were aristocrats, they even carved the family’s crest from a bamboo leaf and used it to decorate the sushi. The green pieces of decorative plastic that are still served with takeout sushi are a carryover from these early practices.

In Japan, sushi rolls are an afterthought. A sushi chef might squeeze together a simple roll at the end of the meal, just to make sure his customer leaves with a full stomach. But in America, sushi is all about rolls. And most of the sushi rolls in America have never been served in Japan. For starters, American rolls are inside out.

The California roll is considered

the key innovation that made sushi accessible to Americans. The roll was invented in L.A.’s Little Tokyo in the late 1960s,

In fact, the California roll wasn’t primarily invented for the American palate at all. At first, the sushi bar at Tokyo Kaikan was patronized by a mostly Japanese clientele. The chefs there simply had difficulty obtaining fresh fatty tuna belly—called toro in Japanese—

on a regular basis. But truckloads of avocados were readily available in California. An avocado is nearly a third fat, equivalent to well-marbled meat. Avocado melts in the mouth sort of like fatty tuna.

The point of the inside-out roll was to hide the seaweed.

ura-maki”—American-style inside-out rolls.

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. ...

he has cut down to the size of ...

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.

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.

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.

Japanese-style grilling was another cooking technique that a sushi chef needed in his omakase arsenal.

Along with humans and all other vertebrates, fish evolved from worms. Worms were the first creatures to have a circulatory system

with blood, a heart, and gills. They probably lived in the sea about 540 million years ago. Early fishlike creatures appeared around 500 million years ago, though at first they were more or less just giant worms. Some of these early fish are still around today. They’re called slime eels.

Fish as we know them today began to branch off from th...

400 million years ago and developed a more sophisticated ...

Four hundred million years ago, when worms

evolved toward fish, some of them added oil to their bodies while others developed simple gas-filled sacks, and thus became buoyant as swimmers.

On land it was a different story. As land animals evolved, they had to construct superstructures of tough connective tissue, fiber, and sinew to keep their muscle...

gravity. Birds had to work even harder to get airborne. As a result, the meat of mammals and birds is much tougher than the meat of fish. The connective tissue that holds all muscles together is a protein called collagen, a name that comes from the Greek word for “glue producing.” The collagen-filled ...

loses col...

A third or more of all the protein in the body of a land ...

The process of cooking meat—slow roasting, especially—transforms collagen into gelatin, making the m...

also

releases the juices inside, bringin...

In addition, cooking “browns” the meat, creating chemical reactions on the surface that produce ...

Fish don’t need to fight gravity, so their flesh consists of flakes of muscle held together with only a delicate matrix of collagen. Their muscles are naturally firm but also moist and quick to break apart. As a result, fish are easy and enjoyable to eat raw.

It is easy to ruin fish by cooking because their muscles are so delicate. The weak collagen collapses and the

flesh dries out at lower temperatures than the flesh of ter...

Sea creatures survive in their salty environment by loading their cells with free amine oxides and amino

acids, which counter the osmotic pressure of the ocean. Without them, the water in its cells would rush out of the fish’s body in a futile effort to dilute the salt in the sea, and the fish would collapse in on itself. These free amino acids are what give seafood much of its taste. They include glutamate, the key flavor component of umami, and a particularly sweet-tasting amino acid

called glycine. Saltwater fish contain anywhere from three to ten times more of these delicious free amino acids than beef. Another important element in the taste of fish is glutamate’s counterpart, IMP, the savory substance that Japanese scientists discovered in such abundance in aged bonito. IMP is created...

Like

free amino acids, tasty IMP is more abundant in fish...

When exposed to thorough cooking, however, the free amino acids and the IMP quickly combine with other molecules, dampening taste. As a result, most fish are more interesting to eat raw, or only brief...

When it comes t...

uncooked fish fall flat. In the human brain, smell is linked to memory. A platter of raw fish cannot trigger the feelings of comfort and happiness that people associate with the smell of their favorite cooked foods. Perhaps that is one reason sushi chefs pay close attention to visual presentation. Ma...

bonito and tuna. Like tuna, mackerel swim fast most of the time, so their muscles are loaded with ATP. Mackerel also contain more glutamate and glycine than other fish. Cooked briefly over high heat, the surface of a mackerel undergoes browning, emitting a mouthwatering range of aromatic smells, while i...

filling ...

Crustacean flesh also contains a high concentration of sugars.

you do have to wash the shrimp because they are full of shit. Takumi rubbed each of his shrimp in a bowl