“Now, to farming,” Zoran said. He explained that most salmon served in sushi is farmed salmon.
Industrial pollution began killing off wild salmon in major rivers around the world as early as the nineteenth century. In England, the last salmon in the Thames were caught in 1833. The construction of dams destroyed many salmon runs as well.
Norway pioneered the farming of salmon in the 1970s, followed by Scotland. The Europeans expanded salmon farming into Canada, the United States, and Chile. Today, a handful of multinational corporations control much of the industry, and farmed salmon account for half of all salmon sold. Fishermen who catch high-quality wild salmon have trouble staying in business because cheap farmed salmon glut the markets.
Salmon farming has made salmon more plentiful, but in a sense it has also created a new kind of fish. And for sushi, most Americans prefer this new kind of fish. The reason is simple. As Zoran liked to put it to his customers at the sushi bar, “Farmed salmon don’t work for a living.”
Wild salmon work hard. In the wilds of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, free-swimming salmon continue to throw themselves year after year into the grueling marathons that return them to the streams of their birth. To fortify themselves for the trip, they hunt a variety of wild prey, including miniature shrimp called krill.
Krill eat algae. As a result, they are full of a photosynthetic pigment called astaxathin, similar to the carotenoid that makes carrots orange. Many kinds of fish absorb this pigment, giving their skin a red tint, but only salmon absorb it into their flesh, which is why salmon meat has a unique, orangey pink color. Flamingos eat small crustaceans similar to krill and are pink for the same reason.
To a sushi chef, salmon doesn’t qualify as a red fish. It’s a white fish because the color doesn’t belong to the fish. Salmon farming operations must add pigment to the feed or their farmed salmon will turn out white and disappoint the consumer.
In the wild, salmon gain flavor as well as color from their prey. As they hunt, they swim hundreds of miles to return to the mouths of their native rivers. By the time the fish are caught, they’re well-exercised.
By contrast, farmed salmon are couch potatoes. They mill around in pens, gorging themselves on rich, oily fish meal. Companies manufacture the meal by grinding up fatty fish such as mackerel, herring, sardines, and anchovies in giant industrial blenders.
Sometimes Zoran would serve his customers two different nigiri, one topped with wild salmon, one topped with farmed salmon. The flesh of the wild fish was usually dark, pungent, and—depending on when and where it had been caught—relatively lean. It didn’t melt in your mouth; you had to chew it. The taste was strong and the flesh had texture.
The farmed fish was soft, pale, and striped with thick streaks of fat. And, by comparison, it tasted bland.
The recent popularity of fatty tuna in sushi has led people to value a rich, fatty, melt-in-your-mouth sensation over flavor and texture. The aquaculture companies have been happy to oblige. Fat, lazy salmon are what they do best.
Unfortunately, lack of flavor and texture isn’t the only downside. All that fat in farmed salmon is loaded with around seven times the PCBs—polychlorinated biphenyls, likely a cause of cancer—that wild salmon contain. Since 3 pounds of smaller fish are necessary to produce 1 pound of salmon, the salmon “bio-accumulate” more of the toxic PCBs from eating the smaller fish than they would from eating krill directly.
Many farming operations also pump their salmon full of antibiotics, as disease can run rampant in the crowded pens. On the other hand, farmed salmon are less likely to transmit parasites to humans.
Traditionally, the favorite sushi toppings in Japan were lean, firm fish like snapper and flounder. In the past, Japanese fishmongers sliced off the fatty portions of their fish and tossed them on the floor for their cats. When an entire fish had a high fat content—mackerel, for example—they salted it and marinated it with vinegar to cut through the oil, just as Kate and her classmates had learned to do. But after Western food became popular in Japan, the Japanese started to include the fatty cuts of fish in sushi, too. That said, Japanese chefs tend to consider farmed fish inferior.
In the United States, the preference of diners for bland fatty salmon has been a bonanza not just for aquaculture but for sushi chefs as well.
“If you want to open a restaurant,” Zoran said, “salmon is your moneymaker. Very cheap to buy.” He meant farmed salmon, of course. “You can make a lot of sushi from a big salmon fillet.
“Now,” Zoran said, “I have a problem. I ordered salmon with the head on, but I got salmon fillets. Sorry.”
No fish heads? Kate was not upset by this news. Zoran unwrapped a green cellophane package.
Most fish are either fairly thin or fairly plump. For example, a snapper is a tall, narrow fish, while a tuna is a wide, tubular fish. Both extremes cause complications when breaking fish down into neta blocks that can be sliced easily for sushi. But a salmon is just right—a relatively big fish, thick enough in cross section, but not round. So cutting salmon is simple—another reason sushi chefs like it.
Zoran laid his palm on the featureless orange slab of salmon flesh and sliced off a rectangle the width of his hand. The resulting block was ready to be wrapped in plastic wrap and stored in the fish case at the sushi bar.
Zoran laid his palm on the fillet and cut off another large rectangle. “See, four finger wide.” He looked around at the students. “Got it?”
They nodded. Zoran distributed several fillets around the table and the students paired up. First, they felt the flesh for pin bones to extract with their tweezers. Bent over the stainless-steel table in their white coats, with their steel blades and instruments, they looked like surgeons.
Kate had crossed over to work with one of her classmates. He took his Western-style chef’s knife from his case and cut the fins off the fillet, then handed the knife to Kate.
Kate laid her palm on the fillet. It was slimy. She sawed through the flesh to create a hand-sized block. When the knife hit the skin on the underside of the fillet, it stopped cutting. She gave up and handed the knife back to her classmate.
He couldn’t get his knife to cut through the skin, either. Zoran noticed. He grabbed the knife and tested it on his thumbnail.
“Whose knife is this?” Zoran asked, looking at Kate.
“Mine,” the other student said.
Zoran stifled a laugh. “It’s not sharp!” He tapped the blade theatrically on the flesh of his palm. Kate winced, but the knife drew no blood. Zoran glared at the man and shook his head. “You can’t cut fish if your knife isn’t sharp.” He strode away.
Kate jogged back to her station and fetched one of the knives she hadn’t used since they’d been sharpened. It cut through the skin with one quick slice. They broke the rest of the fillet down into blocks and wrapped them in plastic wrap.
“Think about what flavors go well with salmon,” Zoran instructed them. “Because now I want you to come up with salmon sushi of your own. Your own style. Fusion is okay. Whatever you want.”
The students frowned.
“Come on!” Zoran yelled. “Let’s go. Salmon sushi, your style!”
Zoran burst into action. He squeezed out six quick salmon nigiri. He topped one with sesame seeds and an ultra-thin wedge of lemon. On another he sprinkled bonito flakes over a sliver of rinsed white onion. Another he topped with a dash of teriyaki sauce, and another with creamy sesame dressing. The fifth he painted with sweet miso and egg yolk, then he seared it with a blowtorch. He peeled up the last slice of salmon and slipped half a perilla leaf between the fish and the rice.
“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 whil
e 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.
31
CONGRATULATIONS FISH
Kate 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.
The Story of Sushi Page 18
