The Story of Sushi (20 page)

“There!” Zoran barked. “Six different salmon
nigiri
in a few seconds. You have to think quick because your customer is going to come in and want something different each time.”

That evening Kate returned to the classroom. Jay was teaching a night class for a group of civilians, and Kate was his intern. She gave the students pointers and chatted with them while they worked. After the class a woman came up to Kate. The lady said she liked Kate’s style, and handed her a twenty-dollar tip.

It had been a good day. Kate’s knife had been sharp in class. And so far the new fish lessons weren’t that bad—no fish heads, no fish guts, no fish blood. No problem.

K
ate strode into the classroom the next morning and placed another box of Krispy Kreme donuts on the sushi bar. She set something else out, too—an apple. It was for Zoran. She was surprised at how sad she was that he was leaving.

Zoran strode into the classroom and took roll.

“So, is this next fish called a snapper or a sea bream?” He chuckled. “It’s
so
confusing. There are hundreds of varieties of sea bream and snapper in the world. What’s it called in Japanese?”

“
Tai,
” someone said.

“Right! Where does the name come from? In Japanese, there is a word—” Zoran solicited help from Takumi on the spelling “—
omedetai.
” It means “congratulations.” “If you’re having a celebration in Japan, they serve you
tai.
A sumo wrestler, when he wins a championship, what does he get? A huge
tai
! That’s part of the winning—a giant
tai
sashimi.”

In old Tokyo, people considered sea bream a high-class fish, while tuna was a despicable, low-class fish.
Tai
were so high-class, in fact, that they were too expensive for most street vendors to use in sushi. Only the fanciest sushi shops sold
tai.

In the twentieth century, as sushi escaped its low-class roots, sea bream occupied a place of honor in sushi bars. Only in the past few decades has tuna risen through the ranks to challenge the supremacy of
tai.
Many Japanese still consider
tai
one of the best
sushi toppings. A Japanese saying, “
uo no tai,
” states simply, “the
tai
of fish.” People utter it when they want to indicate that something is the best of its kind. There’s also a proverb, “
kusattemo tai.
” It means, “even rotten, it’s still
tai.
”

Sushi menus in America often simply list the fish as “snapper,” a catch-all category that can include a variety of sea breams, snappers, sea bass, and ocean perch. True
tai
is a single species of sea bream called
Pagrus major.
It lives in the waters around Japan, Korea, and Russia.

Excavations of ancient shell and bone heaps indicate that Stone Age diners loved this fish. The oldest collection of poetry in Japan, the
Manyoshu,
dates from about 1,300 years ago and includes poems that celebrate the sea bream, putting the fish on a par with the beloved bonito, the source of flavor for dashi.

Sea bream are more closely related to tunas, bonito, and mackerels than salmon are; yet, sea bream are very different fish. Tuna, bonito, and mackerels look like streamlined silver bullets. Sea bream aren’t built for speed. They are tall, narrow fish with high foreheads and colorful skin and fins—rather like the absentminded character Dory in
Finding Nemo,
but red instead of blue. Instead of swimming quickly across expanses of open ocean, they putter around reefs and rocks along the bottom. Like salmon, they get their red color from the astaxathin pigment in the crustaceans they eat, but the color accumulates in their skin instead of their muscles.

The Japanese love
tai
so much that they have added
tai
as a suffix to the names of many fish that aren’t sea bream at all. Something similar has happened in the United States, with the local equivalent of
tai.
In 2004, researchers analyzed the DNA of “red snapper” at retailers in eight states. They discovered that three-quarters of the fish weren’t red snapper at all, but other fish entirely.

“When we do
tai,
” Zoran said, “one thing we have to be careful of is the top fin. The pointy little prongs. They contain poison.”

Kate’s mouth fell open.
Poison?

“If you’re unlucky enough to get one that breaks off in your
finger,” Zoran said, “you’re going to have to get it surgically removed.” It wasn’t clear if he meant the spine or the finger.

“Ready?” Zoran yelled. “It’s going to get messy!” He wrestled a Styrofoam box out of the fridge.

Kate peered inside. The box was full of foot-long pink fish wrapped in plastic. They were stubby and funny-looking. They still had everything—heads, mouths, big eyeballs, and tails. And poisonous spines.

“These are New Zealand farm-raised. These are red snapper. How can you tell?”

“They’re red?” someone said.

“Very good!” Zoran laughed.

Actually, the fact that a farm-raised snapper was red at all was a neat trick.

Sea bream and snappers are slow-growing fish and can live to ripe old ages, anywhere from twenty to sixty years. When sea bream are babies, eels eat them—one of many examples of one sushi topping eating another. When sea bream get older, they mostly eat shrimp and crabs.

When it comes to sex, snappers are the opposite of shrimp. They all start out as females. After a year or two, some of them perform a sex-change operation on themselves and become male. Because these fish take so long to mature, populations of sea bream and snapper grow slowly. A population of mackerel that is left alone can double in size in just three or four years. For sea bream, it can take fourteen years. Furthermore, the fish are predictable. Every year big groups of them return to the same spots to spawn.

All this means that fishermen can easily catch too many of these fish and wipe them out. In parts of the United States, populations of red snapper are in trouble, which is one of the reasons retailers substitute other species.

Long before the Norwegians started farming salmon, the Japanese started farming
tai
to supplement wild stocks. They bred Frankenfish
tai
that grew 40 percent faster. They even used human pregnancy hormones to induce the fish to spawn. By the mid-1990s,
Japanese aquaculture companies were farming six times as many
tai
in floating cages as fishermen caught in the wild.

The only trouble was, the farmed
tai
didn’t look like
tai.
In their floating cages at the surface, the fish got suntans and turned black.

So the farmers erected tents over the cages to keep off the sun. Then the fish became too white. The farmers learned to feed them krill a few months before harvest, so the fish would become red by the time they went to market. Feeding them paprika can achieve similar results. Sushi aficionados say farmed
tai
don’t taste as good as the wild ones, but no one seems to have complained of paprika-flavored fish.

In the kitchen, Zoran set a snapper on a cutting board in the sink under cold running water. He pointed to the poisonous fins along the back.

“Don’t rub your fingers the wrong way.”

He held a knobby steel instrument in his hand—a scaler. He leaned over the sink and scraped the scaler down the fish with quick, vigorous thrusts from tail to head. Scales popped into the air and flew in all directions. The students dodged the flying disks.

“Make sure you get the scales off its ass, too!” Zoran yelled. “You think this is bad, you should see a big
tai.
” He paused and formed a circle with his thumb and finger, the size of a silver dollar. “The scales are this big. If one of those hits you on the head, watch out!”

Because sea bream and snapper are slow-moving fish, they don’t need tiny scales to reduce drag. They’d rather have the extra protection of bigger scales.

Now Zoran scaled the head. “If you’re preparing a whole-fish presentation, don’t forget to scrape his chinny-chin-chin, too.” He scraped the scaler under the jaw, as though giving the fish a shave. Zoran peered into the fish’s wide-open eye. “Hallo!”

Zoran set down the scaler. “Now, you want me to take the head off here?” He smirked. “There’s going to be blood and guts. Yes? Okay.”

First, he snipped off the spines with scissors. “I once knew a sushi chef who got one of these spines in his finger, and it blew up to a huge size, from the poison.”

Zoran tapped the blade of his fillet knife on the fish, just behind the front fin. “You can’t cut right here; it’s hard as a rock.” He shifted the blade a quarter-inch toward the tail. “If I was preparing a whole fish presentation, I would have cut out the gills first. We’ll do gills next week.” He paused. “You want to see it now?”

Someone said yes. Zoran jabbed his knife into the gills and cut through cartilage. There were loud snapping sounds. He pulled out the veiny, blood-red fans of tissue and held them up.

Zoran’s face suddenly brightened. “Takumi-san, do you have a good recipe for
atama
?”

Takumi nodded. “Ah, yes!”

“Okay,” Zoran said, “everybody has to take their gills out.”

“What?!” Kate blurted.

“Takumi is going to make us something,” Zoran said.
Atama
was the Japanese word for head. Normally, a chef wouldn’t have to remove the gills because they’d be thrown out with the head, but now Takumi was going to use the heads.

Zoran reset his knife behind the fish’s front fin. He raised himself over the cutting board and thrust downward with a cut that crunched through bone. He pulled off the fish’s head, smearing globs of blood across the cutting board.

“Next step,” Zoran said, “cut from the ass down the belly. Clean out the guts. And the bloodline—very important.”

Zoran inserted the point of his knife into the fish’s anus and sliced an incision forward toward the chin just as he’d done with the mackerel. He stuck his fingers into the visceral cavity and yanked out a cluster of organs and guts, then held the fish over the trash can and used a bundle of skewers to scrape out more globs of purple blood. He stuffed a paper towel in the body cavity and wiped it clean.

“All right, your turn. Get your fish.”

Kate and Marcos went first, standing side by side at the kitchen sinks.

Kate picked up her scaler. She stood up very tall and tilted her head back, so her face was as far from the fish as possible. She peered down her nose to see what she was doing. She scraped the scaler down the side of the fish. Scales popped off. She kept going. When she’d finished most of the body, she turned to her classmates.

“Do I have to scrape his head, too?” Kate asked.

“Yeah,” someone said.

She turned back to the sink. This time she leaned into the work. She thrust out her chin, wrinkled her nose, and kept scaling. She rinsed the fish off with water. Then she realized she had only done one side. She sighed and flipped the fish over.

When she’d finished, Kate transfered her fish to the table and grasped her triangular fillet knife between thumb and fingers, again holding it like the bow of a violin. She poked the tip of the knife into the gill and winced, as if she’d poked herself.

Zoran strode over. “You okay?”

“No,” Kate said.

“Hold your knife properly,” Zoran said. “You’re going to hurt yourself.”

With Zoran’s help Kate removed the gills. Today was the first time she’d used her fillet knife this week. It was very sharp.

She gritted her teeth, chopped off the head, and scraped purple gunk from inside the head. Her bowl filled with goo. She cut open the belly and organs popped out—yellow, green, and white tubes like slimy sausages. She grasped some of them with her bare hands and tugged them loose. She scraped out the purple bloodline, then looked to Zoran.

“What do I do with the head?”

“Cut it!” he said, his voice much too chipper.

“In half?!”

“Yup.”

Kate tried but the head wobbled, and nearly slid out from under her.

“Don’t hurt yourself!” Zoran said. “Knife down, more power.”

She tried to adjust, but Zoran stopped her. He took the knife, held it vertical, and put his entire body weight on it, shoving it down through the mouth. The blade jerked toward the cutting board, splitting the fish’s skull. Finally, the two halves of the head
lay flat, still connected by a section of bone. Zoran swung the knife down with a heavy whack. Blood splattered. Kate shut her eyes.

In the kitchen, Takumi collected the fish heads. He believed that everything in the world had a spirit, and he wanted no usable part of an animal to go to waste. In the comic book
Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job,
the young female chef Kirara shares this philosophy. She treats the fish in her kitchen as small deities that possess emotions. At the end of a night working behind the sushi bar, Kirara sees leftover sushi, and sheds tears as she throws it away.

Takumi blanched the snapper heads, then sautéed them with salt, pepper, and a sprinkling of flour. He simmered them in a stockpot with leeks and dashi, and a splash of soy sauce and sake, while he scaled and cleaned his fish.

“Bring your fillets,” Zoran told the class, “I need you all in the kitchen.”

Snapper is best served with the skin on because it adds flavor and color. But the skin is too tough to serve raw. Herein lies a conundrum. A sushi chef needs a way to cook the skin but not the meat.

Zoran laid his fillet on a bamboo colander skin side up, and poured boiling water over it. Instantly the skin tightened and curled at the edges. He grabbed the fillet with bare fingers and dunked it into a bath of ice water.

“If you don’t heat the skin enough,” Zoran said, “it’s going to be too chewy. If you heat it too much, it’ll cook the fish.”

Kate stepped up. She laid her fillet on the bamboo. She did exactly what Zoran had done, but when she touched the steaming fillet, she yelped.

“Agh! I can’t lift it up. It’s
hot
!”

The fillet sat there, cooking. One of her classmates leapt in and grabbed it. He winced from the pain and tossed it in the ice bath for her. Each student took a turn. All of them flinched as they burned their fingers. Zoran called a fifteen-minute break.

Kate’s fingers were smarting. It had been a long morning. She
wandered over to the stove, where Takumi hovered over his pot of soup. He smiled and served her a bowl. A fish head stared up at her.

Kate had been raised on chicken casseroles. She hesitated, then sipped the broth. She took another sip. She picked the fish head out and nibbled at it.