The Story of Sushi (12 page)

A
little before 5:00 a.m. the fax machine spit out the day’s price lists from the area fish markets. Zoran snatched it up and glanced down the rows of data—bluefin tuna from Spain, Croatia, and Australia; bigeye from Hawaii and Fiji; yellowfin from Florida and Vietnam; and nearly a hundred other items.

He burst out the back door clutching two bags of trash, which he tossed in the dumpster on his way to the old van. He fired up the engine, breaking the silence in the dark alley. Soon he was cruising down a deserted boulevard. Twenty minutes later the sky was brightening. Zoran removed one hand from the steering wheel and placed a call on his cellphone.

“
Ohaiy
gozaimasu!
” he yelled into the phone.

He pulled up to an apartment complex to pick up Tetsuya Tsumoto, the head chef at Hama Hermosa. Tetsu padded outside, moving like a sleepy bear. He was a stocky man with puffy eyes and droopy cheeks. He was wearing a jacket even though the morning was already warm. Tetsu had come to the United States as a language student thirteen years ago and worked for Toshi as a busboy. Toshi had turned him into a first-rate sushi chef.

Zoran gunned the van and headed for the Santa Monica freeway. Tetsu’s chin dropped to his chest and he fell asleep. The sun rose over the mountains, ushering in the beginning of a hot July day.

They left the freeway and entered the seedy garment district downtown, glass skyscrapers looming overhead. They drove down an avenue a few blocks south of Skid Row. Shafts of sunlight slanted through cracks between buildings. Homeless men lay in sleeping bags or stood in clutches on the corners. Zoran turned into a warehouse lot crammed with cars and trucks. He double-parked and hopped out. Tetsu rolled out of the passenger seat and trundled after him.

The two men walked through streams of cold air falling from the open backs of refrigerated trucks. As they walked through a loading door into the warehouse, they felt the chill of the huge refrigerated space. The smell of the ocean assailed their nostrils. Their shoes squished over a film of frigid water on the concrete floor. Under a high ceiling, long tables were covered with plastic bins and Styrofoam boxes full of ice. Zoran nodded to Tetsu and the two men split up.

Shouts in Spanish and Japanese filled the room. Everywhere men were in motion—most of them rugged-looking Hispanics with mustaches. They were dressed in work boots, heavy jackets, overalls, and hardhats. One man, wrapped in an insulated winter work suit and wearing a wool cap, drove a forklift around the room as if he were behind the wheel of a sports car. He came and went with frost-covered boxes on wooden palettes.

Zoran eyed the bins. There were sardines, squid, and barracuda from the waters of California. There were butterfish, tile-fish, skate, and live Maine lobster from the East Coast. There were amberjack, grouper, and trevally from Australia and New Zealand. From Japan there were Pacific saury, blue snapper, red gurnard, largehead hairtail, chicken grunt, and many other fish that didn’t even have English names.

There were night smelt, ling cod, Dover sole, and
loup de mer.
There were king crabs, conches, mussels, and sea urchins. And, of course, there were salmon, yellowtail, and tuna—cuts of big tuna, graded and priced. The belly meat from bluefin that had been fattened in pens in Malta was going for $63.50 a pound.

This was L.A.’s oldest Japanese fish market—International Marine Products, opened in 1968 by the same company that built the Tokyo Kaikan restaurant. The showroom was about the size
of a basketball court. In the back, behind a heavy curtain of clear plastic strips hung across a wide doorway, was a cavernous storage freezer.

This place was tiny compared with the central fish market in Japan. On a trip to Tokyo with Toshi the previous year, Zoran had visited the famous Tsukiji Fish Market, Japan’s main seafood clearinghouse. He’d walked through the maze of Tsukiji’s twisting alleys in awe. Tsukiji is easily the world’s largest fish market. It sprawls across a slab of wet concrete the size of forty football fields, and is home to the equivalent of thirty New York Fulton Fish Markets, with more than 1,600 seafood vendors.

Tsukiji is crowded and noisy, housed under dark, low ceilings, and lit by naked bulbs dangling overhead. The stalls are crammed together. Every morning between 5:00 and 9:00, the narrow alleys teem with sushi chefs and retail fishmongers hunting for fresh supplies, along with sweating workers dragging dilapidated wagons piled with seafood and men racing go-karts laden with fish. It’s estimated that some 50,000 people do business at Tsukiji each day. Enough seafood passes through the market in one day to serve more than 5 million meals.

Zoran had spent three days in Tsukiji. It seemed that everything that lived in the sea was for sale, including whale, and it came from all over the world. Japan had long since depleted many of its local supplies and had turned to the rest of the world in its insatiable demand for seafood. Zoran had watched workers drag 500-pound tuna across the auction floor. He’d seen men cutting big frozen fish apart with industrial table saws.

In L.A. this morning, Zoran tossed a boiled octopus from Japan and several other items in his shopping basket, dodged a dolly loaded with pallets, and strode over to a stack of Jacuzzi-size tanks. A worker fished in the tanks with a dip net. He dumped dozens of large, live shrimp into a bin. Zoran bent over the pile of snapping tails and culled through them. He snatched a dozen of the animals and dropped them in a Styrofoam box with a few inches of chilled seawater.

Zoran hauled his purchases to a hectic checkout counter and met up with Tetsu, who was lugging his own selections. The counter was staffed by Japanese men bundled in thick coats. Piles of Sty
rofoam boxes and plastic bags full of fish and shaved ice sat waiting to be delivered to restaurants around the city. Zoran handed over a check signed by Toshi.

Back in the van with their purchases, Zoran and Tetsu pulled out of the parking lot and drove past a prostitute on the sidewalk. Tetsu stared at her. It was 6:30 a.m.

“She looks sixty years old,” Tetsu said.

Zoran laughed sharply. “I’d need another cup of coffee for that.”

They raced east toward the railroad tracks. At the Play Pen Totally Nude strip club Zoran turned left and pulled into another warehouse lot. This was the competitor of International Marine Products, a newer operation called Ocean Fresh.

Zoran and Tetsu pushed through a curtain of clear plastic strips into another frigid industrial showroom. Tetsu pulled a crumpled shopping list from his pocket and bent over bins of sea cucumbers, abalone, and slipper lobsters to examine a slippery octopus leg. He straightened up, lifting the leg until it dangled free. It was three feet long. He peered at the suction cups, then returned it to the tub.

Zoran surveyed rows of fish on palettes. He passed over jumbo flounder and red perch, but he crouched by a selection of bonito. They looked like a row of heavy artillery shells, waiting to be shot from a canon. Each had one large eye staring at the ceiling. Zoran picked the one with the clearest eye. It was nearly the length of his arm.

Besides the bonito, Zoran and Tetsu collected squid, giant clam, gizzard shad, conger eel, dried baby sardines, nori, and shoots of Japanese ginger. Tetsu had also located some fatty bluefin tuna belly, flown in from a fish farm in Croatia. It wasn’t cheap, and he asked for nearly 6 pounds of the stuff. The pale slab of fat came to $230.

The two chefs strode across the wet showroom floor to settle their tab. Passing a set of double doors, Zoran saw flashes of silver, orange, and red through the small windows. Scraping sounds came from the room, and blasts of hissing.

A worker shoved through the doors, propped them open, and carted in a huge tuna fish. Frigid air burst through the opening. The chamber inside looked like a city morgue, with cold stainless-steel walls, long stainless-steel tables, cavernous steel sinks, and flexible steel wash-down hoses dangling from steel pipes. Hispanic
men in floor-length yellow rubber suits bent over piles of yard-long salmon, swiping descaling brushes across the fat silver bodies with a sound like machine-gun fire. Scales flew in all directions.

They hosed the bodies off with blasts of high-pressure spray and heaved them onto a steel table, where another man wielded a long blade like a samurai sword. He pulled a fish toward him across the metal and slashed a series of precise incisions into the shining body. Seconds later he peeled a single huge slab of fat-striped orange flesh from each side. He shoved the carcass into a bin and grabbed the next fish.

In the far corner of the room stood a taller Hispanic man, older than his colleagues, and wearing a floor-length rubber apron. The market value of the single fish he was cutting was equivalent to that of twenty or thirty salmon, so he moved with less speed and more care. In front of him lay a tuna weighing probably 150 pounds. The animal’s tail had been sawed off, leaving only a bloody stump, and its gills and guts had been gouged out.

With fluid strokes, the man drew his blade through the fish, then slid a massive cut of meat off the beast and onto the table. The flesh hit the steel with a slap. The swordsman wiped his blade clean on a cloth.

It was 7:00 a.m. when Zoran pulled out of the parking lot. The morning was already hot. He rolled down his window for some fresh air and gestured to the Play Pen Totally Nude sign across the street.

“Tetsu, you have an account there, right?”

Tetsu managed a weak chuckle. The only flesh on his mind at the moment was belly fat.

“Price of
toro
going up,” Tetsu said.

Zoran nodded. “Somebody is making a lot of money.”

A few minutes later Zoran hit congestion on the freeway. The van slowed to a crawl. The morning sun streamed into the rear window of the van, turning the back into an oven—an oven filled with hundreds of dollars of seafood on ice.

Z
oran arrived back in Hermosa Beach with only minutes to spare. He checked the boxes of seafood. They were still cool inside. He stowed his purchases in the walk-in and rushed to the head of the classroom table.

“Today we grill
saba
!” he announced.

Kate didn’t know what
saba
was.

Zoran asked the students to read aloud from their textbook again, from the section on grilling. Japanese-style grilling was another cooking technique that a sushi chef needed in his
omakase
arsenal. Even a sushi chef had to admit that sometimes fish tasted good cooked.

Zoran pulled out a plastic tub and ripped off the top. Packed inside were shiny foot-long mackerel, like giant sardines. Each fish had a bullet-shaped head, a thick body, and a tail that tapered to a set of fins like an arrowhead. Wavy black stripes ran across their backs like ripples on the sea. Their bellies were silver. Until now, the students had encountered their fish in disembodied rectangles. These were whole fish.

Kate stared at the fish. Suddenly she felt like she was back at the first day of class, staring down into her knife case. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to her that making sushi would actually involve whole fish.

Zoran slapped a mackerel onto his cutting board and made a quick incision just behind the head on both sides. Kate grimaced.

“You don’t want to cut all the way through,” Zoran said. He would explain why in a moment.

Next, Zoran aimed the point of his knife at the mackerel’s anus.

“Here’s the poop hole,” Zoran said. “From his bum to his neck you cut a slit—” Zoran sliced along the silver belly. Red goo oozed out the edges. “—and take out the guts.”

Zoran stuck his hand inside the fish and ran his fingers through the visceral cavity. His hand came out covered in slime. He grasped the fish around the eyes and twisted the head off like a screw top. Bones cracked. He pulled off the head, and a cluster of organs and intestines popped out through the neck after it, hanging from the fish’s head.

“You see,” Zoran said calmly, “you don’t cut all the way through the head because you want the guts to stay attached.”

He tossed the head and viscera in the trash. Kate heard them land at the bottom of the can with a thump.

Zoran carried the body of the fish to the sink. He ran cold water into the belly cavity and scrubbed vigorously with his fingers. Next he produced a thin bundle of bamboo shish-kebab skewers held together with a rubber band and used it to scrape the fish’s spine inside the cavity. Globs of coagulated purple blood slid down the drain.

Kate took a deep breath.

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. Some people eat them.

Fish as we know them today began to branch off from the big worms around 400 million years ago and developed a more sophisticated circulatory system. Fish have a simple, two-chambered heart that pumps blood in a loop. From the heart, blood rushes first to
the gills, then on to the rest of the body along a central artery that runs down the spine.

Zoran had just scraped out that central artery. Chefs call this the bloodline, and if not removed, it can ruin a dinner of fish by contaminating it with the overpowering taste and smell of blood.

Zoran gave the mackerel a final rinse and stuffed it with paper towels. “This, we’ll grill,” he said. “Okay, get yourselves a fish.”

Kate let the others go first. When it was her turn, she lifted a fish from the box and held it aloft at arm’s length. At her cutting board, she sized up the fish. It looked plump and felt slippery. She was afraid it would slide around when she tried to cut it. Slicing sushi rolls frightened her enough, and they stayed in one place.

In the comic book
Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job,
the young female chef Kirara borrows a worker’s knife at the fish market and guts and cleans a fish with such speed and skill that a crowd gathers. As a woman, she can’t be squeamish or hesitant around blood and guts, or the male sushi chefs won’t take her seriously.

Kate faced a similar challenge. She grasped the handle of her willow-leaf knife lightly between her thumb and fingers, at the very back end of the handle, as if holding the bow of a violin. Touching her knives as little as possible made her feel safer. She pressed the knife against the fish and sawed. The blade sank straight through the fish and cut its head clean off. She stared at the decapitated animal. Blood leaked out onto her cutting board.

She looked around the room and saw that her classmates were forging ahead. She stared back at the decapitated fish in front of her. She slit a gash down its belly. She leaned to the side and peered in. Parts of organs protruded through the crack. She poked the tip of her blade at the guts, as if her knife were a magic wand that could make them disappear.

She dropped the head into the nearest trash can. She picked up her fish and held it over the can. She stuck her knife inside the belly and wiggled it. Organs tumbled out into the trash bag with wet slaps. After a while things stopped falling out. Kate couldn’t take it anymore. She laid the fish back on her cutting board. She didn’t wash it or scrape out the bloodline. Zoran didn’t notice.

“Okay, bring your
saba,
please!” Zoran yelled, heading for the kitchen.

It was time to grill. But Zoran and his Japanese colleagues at Hama Hermosa did not use a grill. It was better just to poke a few skewers into a fish and hold it over flames, or better yet, over glowing charcoal. Japanese chefs didn’t use ovens, either. Baking isn’t part of Japanese cuisine. Even modern homes in Japan, outfitted with all manner of appliances, seldom have ovens unless the house is completely Westernized.

Zoran stabbed three steel skewers into his mackerel to form the shape of an oriental fan and grasped the base of the skewers with one hand.

“You want a lot of salt on the tail and fins,” he said, sprinkling white crystals on the fish, “so they don’t burn.” He cranked up the biggest burner in the kitchen. Blue and orange flames leapt into the air.

Zoran held the mackerel over the flames and yellow sparks popped around it as the oil in the fish combusted. The aroma of sizzling flesh filled the kitchen. It smelled fantastic.

When humans started burning animal flesh on sticks, one benefit of the practice was safety—heat kills bad bacteria. But there were two other reasons. One has to do with gravity. The other has to do with our noses.

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 muscles up and running against the constant drag of 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 sinews of horses is boiled to make glue. Human skin wrinkles with age because it loses collagen; pumping collagen back into tissues is
part of cosmetic surgery. A third or more of all the protein in the body of a land animal is collagen.

The process of cooking meat—slow roasting, especially—transforms collagen into gelatin, making the meat tender and easier to eat. By breaking apart the collagen walls and the membranes of the muscle, cooking also releases the juices inside, bringing out flavor.

In addition, cooking “browns” the meat, creating chemical reactions on the surface that produce hundreds of aromatic smells. When we think of “flavor,” much of what we sense is actually smell. Try cooking your favorite dinner and eating it with your nose pinched the entire time. Much of the experience vanishes.

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 terrestrial creatures. What’s more, although cooking creates appealing aromas in fish, just as it does in meat, these smells come at the sacrifice of taste. The reason has to do with where the taste of fish comes from in the first place.

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 when the high-energy power pellets called ATP break down after the fish’s death. Like free amino acids, tasty IMP is more abundant in fish than in animals.

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 briefly cooked—at least when it comes to texture and taste.

When it comes to aroma, 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.

Mackerel, however, is a good candidate for cooking. Mackerel are little cousins of 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 inside the flesh, sufficient IMP and amino acids remain to generate mouth-filling taste.

“Cooking time should be about five minutes,” Zoran said, flipping his mackerel to sear the other side.

Marcos stabbed three skewers into his fish and leaned against the kitchen table, waiting for his chance at a burner.

“I’m going to kill you guys,” he said. He drummed his hands against the edge of the table. “I was the best marshmallow griller in my Boy Scout troop.”

Several students stood at the burners and cooked their fish.

“I could do this back at the hostel,” Marcos said, still waiting. “I bet it would impress the ladies.”

Marcos had met a few girls since arriving in Hermosa Beach. But when he’d told them that he was studying to be a sushi chef, so far the response had been lukewarm. ‘A sushi chef? That’s pretty random.’

‘Not many men can cook, you know,’ Marcos would say.

Now he imagined himself in the kitchen of the hostel where he was living, surrounded by admiring young women, all waiting for him to grill them a fish. He hopped about, testing different stances
with his skewered fish. He decided that the coolest posture for fish grilling would be to hold the skewers behind his back, like a pool player executing a behind-the-back shot. In his head, the girls went wild. He laid his fish back on the table and raised his hands, palms down, like a rock star trying to suppress applause.

“One at a time, ladies, one at a time.”

Kate paid him no attention.

“Cutting that fish was
disgusting,
” she was telling one of the other women in the class. The other woman hadn’t been bothered by it, but she offered Kate a sympathetic smile. Kate went on. “I mean, he just gave us a
fish.
”

In a few minutes, Marcos and Kate advanced to the row of burners. Zoran strode into the kitchen and sniffed the air.

“Kate, you didn’t clean your fish properly!”

From the flames, Kate’s mackerel stank of burnt blood, intestines, and bacteria.

Marcos was still preoccupied. “To really impress the ladies with sushi, I think I need to become a
freestyle
sushi chef,” he said. He pretended to toss his mackerel up and slice it in midair, with sound effects. He sighed and stared at his fish. “It’s looking all juicy.” He pulled it from the flames and held it up to his face. The skin was a crisp golden brown. “
That’s
some marshmallow skill, right there.”

Afterwards, the students ate their fish, but Kate had no desire to eat her stinky mackerel. She knew she’d failed to prepare it to specification. But as she packed up her gear after class, she felt a peculiar sense of accomplishment. She had done something that she could never have imagined herself doing before. She had cut the head off a fish.