The Story of Sushi (9 page)

T
he students swung into action, assembling cooked appetizers. Kate froze. An hour and a half later, she’d managed to cut only a few pieces of vegetables and fish, and she hadn’t figured out how to cook any of them. Zoran critiqued the other students’ steaming hot dishes. He pretended not to notice Kate’s cold plate.

The next morning he moved on to a new lesson.

“Set up your sushi stations!” Zoran barked.

For the party at Paramount, he’d taught the students to make hand rolls. Now it was time for them to make proper sushi rolls, using a bamboo mat.

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, at Tokyo Kaikan, one of the first restaurants
to open a sushi bar, and the premier Japanese eatery in L.A. The California roll’s inventor was a chef there named Ichir
Mashita.

The California roll has come to be seen as a stroke of genius: the chef who devised it must have read the American mind, the thinking goes, and adapted sushi to American tastes.

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.

First, Mashita tried mixing avocado with shrimp to give it a reddish color and the flavor of seafood. Later, he settled on crab meat. He served the mixture inside a traditional sushi roll—to his Japanese customers—to remind them of the fatty tuna back home. According to one report, three months passed before someone came up with the name “California roll.”

It wasn’t until later, as sushi spread beyond Little Tokyo and chefs started to appeal to American customers, that someone hatched the idea of making an inside-out roll. The point of the inside-out roll was to hide the seaweed.

According to an oft-told tale, in the late 1800s, the first Americans to visit Japan saw people eating the thin, crisp sheets of seaweed called nori and reported with shock that the Japanese ate black paper. In a sense, that wasn’t far off. Nori was invented in Asakusa, a district of Tokyo famous for its paper making. The first nori manufacturers borrowed traditional Japanese paper-making techniques and applied them to seaweed.

The Japanese have been eating seaweed for more than two thousand years. By contrast, the Greeks and Romans disliked seaweed and fed it only to livestock, and only in emergencies. Yet the ancestors of many Americans enjoyed a version of nori. In the British Isles, coastal residents simmer the same type of seaweed, called
laver, to make a paste that can be formed into patties, rolled in oatmeal, and fried to make laverbread, a breakfast treat accompanied by bacon.

Nori is simply dried laver. Laver is actually a kind of red algae that turns dark green when dried. The best nori, sushi chefs say, is so dark it’s nearly black. Sheets of nori are so common today that it’s hard to imagine that nori was once a luxury in Japan. Japan alone now produces around seven billion sheets a year. Much of the nori in the United States is produced in China and some of it in Korea.

But nori started out as a rare commodity. It was precious because harvesters were limited to what they could pull from the rocks at low tide. In the 1600s, people began to cultivate nori on nets in the water, but still yields were low. It was hard to grow because no one could figure out where laver came from. There didn’t seem to be any seeds.

Through the first half of the twentieth century, laver growers relied on luck. Some harvests were good, some were bad, and nori remained expensive. Sushi rolls weren’t common. Most sushi was
nigiri.

The nori mystery was solved in 1949. The sleuth was not Japanese. It was a pioneering botanist in Britain named Kathleen Drew-Baker.

One of the first women to graduate from Manchester University, Drew-Baker was fired from her teaching job after marrying a fellow scientist in 1928—married women weren’t allowed to teach. She dedicated her life to the study of seaweed and began collecting samples in old jam jars.

Drew-Baker gathered tiny, wormlike algae that bored into clamshells and oyster shells and grew them at home on eggshells. She discovered that one of these shell-boring algae was actually not a separate species, but in fact was the “parent” of the seaweed laver.

It turned out that the large red “leaves” of laver that people eat are basically sex organs designed to produce eggs and sperm—simply an intervening stage in the life of the microscopic shell borers.

The tiny shell borers send out spores from their hiding places. The spores grow into the red leaves. But the leaves have only half
the chromosomes of the tiny parent. Some of the leaves produce clusters of male sex cells and some produce clusters of female cells. The female leaves build little bridges through the water to the male leaves, so the male leaves can fertilize them. If humans did the same thing, men would hide under rocks and ejaculate out sperm, which would grow into flags the size of skyscrapers. Women would do something similar with their eggs. Having sex would involve constructing bridges between the skyscrapers.

Drew-Baker’s discovery meant that laver farmers in Japan could finally seed their nets instead of relying on luck. Today, nori manufacturing is efficient and predictable. In long rooms a bit like greenhouses, employees sprinkle tiny shell-boring algae from watering cans onto oystershells. The workers hang the shells on ropes in pools and let the algae bore and grow for about five months. After the borers release their spores, the workers wrap nets around big drums and roll the drums in the pools like water wheels. The spores catch on the nets and take root.

Laver farmers can then freeze the seeded nets and use them later, or they can transport the nets directly to a quiet bay and string them on frames in the seawater. The male and female leaves grow for forty or fifty days, until the harvesters trim them off the nets, shred them into flakes, and dry them so that they form sheets. A sheet of nori is basically a nightclub orgy of boy and girl seaweed, pressed into an edible piece of paper. As it happens, the orgy is loaded with glutamate and inosinic acid, or IMP, the delicious double whammy of
umami
taste that makes both dashi and nori so pleasant to the human palate. Old-fashioned sushi chefs still toast their own sheets of nori, preferably over charcoal, to make them extra crisp.

Kathleen Drew-Baker died in 1957, unaware that she had single-handedly laid a foundation for Asia’s modern nori industry. In the process, she paved the way for sushi rolls to conquer the West.

But she was not forgotten. In southern Japan, a group of nori farmers collected donations for the construction of a granite pillar on a wooded promontory overlooking the Ariake Sea, where much of Japan’s nori is grown. On the pillar is a portrait of Kathleen Drew-Baker in bas-relief, with a short English inscription that says “Mother of the Sea.”

Japanese people still mostly eat
nigiri
sushi. Without Americans, who are crazy for rolls, the nori business might still be languishing, even decades after Drew-Baker’s discovery.

“Today,” Zoran said, “I’m going to show you
ura-maki
”—American-style inside-out rolls.

Zoran covered his bamboo rolling mat in plastic wrap so it wouldn’t stick to the rice. People often asked Zoran what sushi chefs in Japan had used before wrap. Zoran would laugh because Japanese sushi chefs had never wrapped their rolling mats in anything. Traditionally, they didn’t make inside-out rolls.

Zoran told the students to watch while he constructed a California roll. He set out half a sheet of nori. He wet his fingers so the rice wouldn’t stick to them, clapped his hands together to knock off any excess water, and spread a fistful of sushi rice across the nori. After a sprinkling of sesame seeds he flipped the pad of rice and seaweed over. The layer of sticky rice remained attached to the seaweed and was now underneath. He tapped his fingers in a line across the center of the nori to create a valley where he would load the filling.

Next Zoran sliced an avocado. He laid a couple of wedges of the green fruit in the valley across the center of the nori. He tossed on crabmeat and cucumber. He lifted the edge of the rice and nori pad, pushed it over the filling, tucked it into the far side of the valley, and rolled it just a quarter turn to form a loose log. The nori had disappeared. The outside of the roll was rice, scattered with sesame seeds.

Zoran dropped his wrap-covered mat over the log of rice and gave it a quick squeeze, his fingers and thumbs tapping it flat on the sides and top. Inside-out rolls aren’t so much rolls as squished rectangles.

Zoran dipped the tip of his long willow-leaf knife in his dish of water. He tilted the knife toward the ceiling and tapped the back of the handle on the cutting board. A drop of water rolled down the blade. A wet blade has the advantage of not sticking to the rice.

Zoran swept his knife horizontally across the cutting board. The blade passed under the roll and out the other side, severing the sticky rice from the wood. He swiped his blade down with another quick cut through the middle of the roll, spun half the roll around so it was side-to-side with the other half, and executed two more quick cuts through both halves at once. He turned the six slices on their sides, revealing the colorful cross sections.

“Your turn,” he said.

They tried. Mostly they piled on too much filling. Avocado and cucumber spurted out of the ends.

At the party at Paramount, Kate had made so many hand rolls for customers that she’d gotten pretty good at them. Now she managed to construct a California roll, and it held together.

Slicing it was another matter. She was still afraid of cutting herself. She handled her willow-leaf knife gingerly. Her slices came out slanted, and the pieces were all different lengths. Her California roll looked like a miniature obstacle course.

“Okay,” Zoran ordered, “now,
kappa-maki.
” It was time to master Japanese tradition—the basic cucumber roll.

The basic cucumber roll is a type of
hoso-maki,
or “thin roll.” For the most part, thin rolls are the only rolls eaten in traditional Japanese sushi. There are only a few types of thin rolls, and the fillings are always simple. The two main kinds are cucumber and tuna.

Thin rolls have the seaweed on the outside—usually half a sheet. But the earliest record of a rolled form of sushi is from a 1776 Japanese cookbook, and the recipe calls for a more exotic wrapping than seaweed. It says to lay the skin of a poisonous blowfish on a bamboo window blind, spread rice across it, and lay fish along the center. Then roll the window blind up tightly, squeeze it into the shape of a square, and press it with something heavy. Today’s bamboo mats for rolling sushi look like miniature window blinds because that’s precisely what they are.

The cucumber roll gets its Japanese name,
kappa-maki,
from a mythical water sprite called a
kappa,
believed to inhabit lakes and rivers.
Kappa
are known for gobbling up children and generally
causing trouble by farting and looking up women’s kimonos. In old Japanese paintings, these ugly green water sprites look rather like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. In fact, in one of the
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
films, the turtles travel back in time to medieval Japan and get mistaken for
kappa.
The only food
kappa
prefer over human children is cucumbers. Thus, the name of the cucumber roll.

The other common thin roll, the tuna roll, is called a
tekkamaki.
Most Japanese people think the name comes from the slang term for a gambling den. The gamblers wanted to eat sushi without getting their fingers sticky—so the story goes. But the name more likely comes from the original meaning of
tekka,
a red-hot shaft of iron. The red strip of tuna in the center looks like a red shaft, and the wasabi creates a burning sensation. And some would say that the raw, iron-rich tuna flesh tastes metallic.

Cucumbers are a lot cheaper than tuna, and Zoran liked to brag that he still practiced ten cucumber rolls a day, the way a concert pianist practices scales. He took pleasure in making his students do the same. Regardless of the scheduled lesson on any given day, without warning Zoran was liable to instruct the students to set aside their work and begin practicing cucumber rolls. He would stroll around the room and say, “I’ll tell you the secret of mastering these.” The students would all look up, expectant. Zoran would grin. “Practice.”