The Story of Sushi

by Trevor Corson

  Octopus and squid once possessed shells. A few hundred million years ago, they looked much like today’s nautilus, a cousin of the octopus and squid that still lives in a shell and that uses a bubble of gas inside the shell to stay afloat. Octopus, squid, and nautilus are called cephalopods, which means “head-foot.”

  Shells offered early cephalopods some protection. But new predators evolved, notably sharks and bony fishes, that drove cephalopods into deeper water. If a nautilus swims too deep, the pressure of the water overwhelms its gas bubble and its shell implodes. Shells turned out to be a liability.

  The ancestors of octopus and squid lost their shells and gained the ability to escape into the depths. Instead of floating on a bubble of gas, they evolved into muscular swimmers, moving by squirting water through a siphon and, in the case of squid, flapping their fins like wings. All that swimming required more food, so they evolved into hunters with keen senses and fast reflexes. Transformed into aggressive predators, some of them returned to shallow water and multiplied.

  From the refrigerator, Zoran produced a black lacquer tray. In the center sat a bundle of tightly curled pink tentacles, covered with white suction cups.

  Zoran had tried to buy a live octopus, but outside of Tsukiji Fish Market in Tokyo, live octopus are hard to come by. Most sushi chefs buy their octopus pre-cooked, like this one. Japan consumes about two-thirds of all octopus caught around the world. Many of them come from West Africa. But the best sushi chefs insist on purchasing octopus alive so they can prepare it themselves. Had Zoran succeeded in acquiring a live octopus, it would almost certainly have taken first place on Kate’s disgustingness list.

  For starters, by the time a live octopus goes on sale, the fisherman or fishmonger has usually sliced out the animal’s internal organs. Despite losing its guts, the octopus continues to move around in its tub of water. This is possible because each of an octopus’s eight tentacles possesses its own brain. These ganglia receive a single command from the primary brain—such as “grab that crab”—and then execute an entire subroutine of action independent of the primary brain’s control. The tentacles require their own brains because their movements are so complex. Lacking a skeletal structure, each tentacle is capable of infinite degrees and directions of movement.

  Jiro Ono, the respected sushi chef in Japan, sets the bar for sushi preparation techniques. After he returns to his sushi shop with a still-moving octopus, he gouges out the eyes with a knife. Then, to soften the animal’s tough flesh, he gives the octopus a full-body massage.

  The animal continues to writhe under Ono’s hands as he massages it, and after about ten minutes the octopus oozes slime from its skin. Gradually the tentacles stop moving. Ono gently cleans off the slime and continues the massage for another thirty minutes, until the tentacles become fully relaxed and no more slime appears.

  Now that he has softened the octopus’s tissue, he hangs the animal by its head from a hook and dips the tentacles repeatedly in boiling water, until the legs spread out and curl up, as he puts it, like a flower. Then he drops the whole animal in the water and boils it for about fifteen minutes.

  In the comic book Sushi Chef Kirara’s Job, during a televised cooking contest, Kirara prepares a live octopus using a similar technique. The judges and audience regard the process with revulsion, but Kirara defends the technique as the only way to tenderize the flesh.

  Less often, sushi chefs serve raw octopus as well, a preparation called nama tako. Zoran had returned a few times from the fish markets in L.A. with a long, slippery raw octopus leg. Before serving it, he pounded it with a peeled giant radish. The pounding and the natural enzymes in the radish helped soften the flesh.

  Now Zoran picked up the pink cooked octopus and pressed his hands into the animal’s head. Out popped its beak-like mouth.

  Kate’s head snapped back.

  Zoran shoved it toward Marcos and yelled. “Alien!”

  He laughed and tossed the bundle of curled tentacles and suckers onto his cutting board. He decapitated it with a couple of quick incisions, then whacked two of the tentacles off the bundle of legs. He pressed one of the spirals of pink and white flesh to the cutting board and sliced into it on an angle. As he cut, he twisted his wrist from side to side, so that his knife traced a zig-zag through the flesh. He pulled off the slice—it was an oval strip of milky-white flesh encircled by a deep purple rim. He showed the students the wave pattern he’d created across the surface. Then he tipped his knife toward the ceiling and tapped the slice all over with the heel of the blade, poking small dents in the rubbery flesh. Finally, he squeezed it onto a nigiri.

  “When you go to get a job,” Zoran said, “if I were testing you, I’d ask you to make tako sushi.”

  He set the octopus aside.

  “Also, we have squid.”

  “Ika,” Zoran said, using the Japanese word for squid. “Not calamari—completely different! They are ugly. But very good to eat. Though not much taste.”

  Like fish, cephalopods counteract the osmotic pressure of the salty ocean by filling their cells partly with free amino acids, but mostly with the amine TMAO, which is tasteless. Another component they contain in substantial amounts is taurine, popularly thought to impart strength and virility, and often obtained from ox bile. Taurin was an ingredient in the Red Bull and Monster Energy drinks that Kate liked to sip in class.

  “How many legs does ika have?” Zoran asked.

  Kate guessed twelve. Marcos said eight.

  “You’ll see in a minute,” Zoran said. “Ika is so chewy that we score the piece in a cross-hatch pattern. Today we’re going to do a sashimi arrangement. See how you guys do.”

  Zoran darted into the kitchen and returned with five packages. He handed out four of the packages. He ripped the last one open and extracted a squid. Its skin was a fine patchwork of small brown dots.

  Cephalopods have the most extraordinary skin in the animal kingdom. Squid skin contains tiny elastic sacs full of different pigments, as well as arrays of tiny mirrors. In a relaxed state, the sacs are closed and don’t reveal the color inside. By contracting certain muscles, the squid can expand some sacs and not others, and flip their mirrors on or off, revealing a wild array of patterns and colors. Most cephalopods are able to take a quick look around them and instantly transform their skin to match the colors and patterns of their surroundings, for camouflage. In the excitement of mating, squid also flash dramatic patterns and colors across their bodies. Some species even light up. Japanese researchers have used squid skin as a model for a new polymer for computer display screens.

  “How many legs did you say they have?” Zoran counted out eight. Two appendages remained. “These two aren’t legs, they’re tentacles.”

  Squid hunt by lunging at crustaceans and fish, grabbing them with their two long tentacles and wrapping up the struggling prey with their eight legs. The legs are covered with bowl-shaped suckers armed with tiny teeth that dig into the prey. There is no escape.

  The mouth of a squid, like that of an octopus, is located in the center of the legs and is nearly identical to a parrot’s beak. The squid uses it to chomp bites out of its immobilized prey. Like bears feasting on salmon, squid in a school of fish often take only a few bites before tossing away one fish and snatching another.

  “We cut below the eyes to get the tentacles off.” Zoran sliced off the two tentacles and tossed them in the trash. He cut off the legs in pairs. He yanked out the head and guts, then he grabbed something else—he tugged and tugged. Finally, out popped a transparent spear. This was all that remained of what had, hundreds of millions of years ago, been a shell. A squid was, in a sense, a highly sophisticated clam, turned inside out.

  He peeled the brown skin from the body, using a towel for grip. All that remained was a glistening white piece of flesh, shaped like a cone. He sliced the cone open and spread it out to make a flat triangle.

  “Now, remove all the skin on the inside.” He wiped it off with a towel, then cut off
the bottom edge and carefully pulled away the inner skin. “It’s up to you how to divide it into slices for sushi, to get the best yield.”

  Humans aren’t the only ones who like to eat raw squid. Sharks devour squid. Salmon eat squid and octopus. Swordfish have a unique approach to catching squid. They race into a school of squid and slash around wildly with their bills, then swim back through the carnage, gobbling up parts. Squid themselves even eat squid.

  Mackerel eat small squid, and tuna eat big ones. Large tuna are one of the few fish in the sea fast enough to overtake big squid as they jet away. In Japan, some sushi connoisseurs believe that the best tuna are caught in the northern Japan Sea, where the tuna feast on squid instead of fish, giving the tuna’s flesh a unique taste.

  Squid are one of the few marine creatures that humans appear not to have wiped out by overfishing. Probably that’s because humans have wiped out huge numbers of the fish that eat squid. According to some scientists, all wild fish populations will have disappeared by the year 2050. Squid could turn out to be the last wild-caught species that will be served in sushi.

  Each student took a squid. Kate stuck her fingers under the edge of her squid’s mantle. She twisted, then pulled. The body of the squid broke away from the head and legs, spilling guts onto her cutting board.

  Kate pondered this. She examined the tentacles, the big squid eye looking at her, and the spilled innards on her cutting board. Squid, she decided, definitely qualified for the rank of third-most disgusting in her disgustingness list. She felt better already. She’d handled worse. She was becoming a pro.

  Kate turned to Zoran and pointed at her tentacles. “Cut below the eye?”

  Zoran nodded. “Yup.”

  Kate set her blade on the squid’s head, just below the eye. She stuck out her lower lip. She started to cut, but stopped and yelped. “Ew!” She took a deep breath and forced herself to continue. But she couldn’t watch. She turned and looked off into space while slicing through the rest of the squid. She’d sharpened her knife again, and it severed the squid easily.

  Zoran showed the students a shrink-wrapped package.

  “Most sushi bars use this—frozen ika, already prepared, already scored. Squid’s not so popular for Western customers. They don’t usually order it too much. But if you have really fresh squid and you serve it to them, they love it.”

  While the students worked on their squid, Zoran constructed an ingenious platter of squid sashimi. It had layered square towers, rolled spirals, draped sheets, and clever garnishes. Where his earlier sashimi displays had resembled Zen gardens, this one was an avant-garde sculpture park.

  The students practiced making platters of their own. Kate puttered with her squid. She used the white body flesh to squeeze together two nigiri, and then she hid slices of perilla leaf between the squid and the rice. She built three more nigiri, each topped with bunched perilla leaf and the tip of a squid tentacle, tied down with a belt of nori. She scored another section of flesh and rolled it into a spiral around a bunch of perilla. She arranged her work on a ceramic platter in an asymmetric formation. She added a bit of radish sprout for garnish and stepped back.

  It was gorgeous. It was Japanese-style gorgeous. Kate had combined her own aesthetic imagination with Japanese tradition and achieved the sushi Zen that had been eluding her. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she knew that she had produced something at a new level of mastery.

  She stayed after class and sharpened her knife.

  Upstairs in the restaurant offices, the news was not good. Toshi had called together all his chefs for a staff meeting. Afterwards the men filed out, looking grim. Not enough customers had come back, and not enough of Toshi’s charisma had returned. The restaurant was losing too much money to stay in business.

  38

  GIANT CLAM

  On Wednesday, Zoran began class with an announcement.

  “You have a test on Friday,” he said. That would be his last day. “You’ll be tested on knives, uniform, sashimi, and nigiri.” Toshi would administer the test.

  Kate’s knife-sharpening skills had improved. She’d achieved an element of Zen with her sashimi. The question that remained—for her and for the rest of the students—was whether their nigiri-making skills would pass muster with Toshi. On Friday they would find out.

  Zoran moved on to the day’s lesson.

  “Today we have mirugai,” he said. “What’s mirugai in English?” He wrote the English names on the whiteboard: giant clam, geoduck, horse clam.

  “These are all the same thing!” Zoran seemed cheerful. “There are probably more names.”

  Indeed, there are. For example, “Nature’s dildo.” But Zoran didn’t go there. “Guys,” he said, “I’m being politically correct today.”

  From the fridge, Zoran extracted a long, erect, fleshy shaft. One bulbous end was sheathed in a protective shell. Again, Zoran said nothing. Other commentators throughout history have been less restrained. For example, one wrote that “the geoduck looks pretty much like a long, thick, monster cock.”

  “Mirugai are bloody expensive,” Zoran said. “Not too many left in Japan now—mostly fished them out. This one is from Washington, farmed.”

  In the 1970s, the Department of Fish and Wildlife in the state of Washington encouraged people to harvest geoducks because the mudflats of Puget Sound were overrun with the things. But few people were interested in digging them up. The clams fetched ten cents a pound at best.

  Originally, Native Americans harvested geoducks, and white settlers did too, using them as cheap chowder meat. A Canadian folk song pays tribute to the geoduck, in the form of a lament from a fellow whose girlfriend has left him after discovering a particularly fine specimen. Among scientists, geoducks go by a couple of different names—usually Panopea abrupta, but sometimes also Panopea generosa. The folk song makes no mention of which one the lady prefers but the answer seems obvious.

  While geoducks may have provided a degree of pleasure, in chowder or otherwise, few people knew them as an expensive delicacy. Then harvesters in Washington heard about sushi. They began shipping geoducks to Japan, and by the mid-1980s, as sushi took root in the United States, prices for geoducks shot up. Poachers supplied a thriving black market and threatened each other with physical violence. In 1998, Washington State authorities clamped down and convicted several criminals for clam rustling.

  Aquaculture operations now grow geoducks in large numbers. In addition to the sushi market, buyers from Hong Kong and Shanghai pay top dollar for geoducks for Chinese cuisine. In North America, apart from connoisseurs of sushi and fans of casual West Coast fare, most folks still haven’t warmed to the geoduck’s charms, at least in the kitchen.

  Zoran held up a slip of paper that had been in the bag with the clam. “You must keep this ticket for three months. If someone eats a giant clam and gets sick, and they trace it back to you, you’ve got a lawsuit coming—unless you have this ticket.”

  Clams are susceptible to red tides, especially during summer months. These blooms of toxic algae can produce nerve poisons a thousand times more powerful than cyanide. Many clams and related shellfish also lose flavor in summer, as they deplete themselves through spawning. In Japanese, a traditional saying goes, “Not even dogs eat summer clams.”

  Zoran put the ticket on the table and laid his hand on the huge clam. The shell was nearly 6 inches long and the protruding shaft added another 8 inches. Left alone in the wild, geoducks can live for 150 years and weigh up to 15 pounds. The part that looks like an erect penis is actually a sort of snorkel, called a siphon. The clam lives deep in the mud and sticks its snorkel up to the surface of the mud, where it sucks in food and water and squirts out waste.

  “Mirugai is not a good product for the sushi bar,” Zoran explained, “because it must be alive to be eaten raw. The max shelf life is three to four days. Not many people like the taste. It’s a strong, oceany taste. Chewy. Crispy.”

  Yet in old Tokyo, clams of various k
inds were exceedingly popular sushi toppings. While fish and cephalopods balance the osmotic pressure of the sea mostly with the tasteless amine TMAO, along with some amino acids, clams rely completely on tasty amino acids, especially glutamate, which produces the flavor of umami. And like cephalopods, clams can’t store energy as fat, so any excess food they consume goes to the production of a variety of additional flavor-producing amino acids. Generally, clams are more flavorful than fish. And the saltier the water, the greater the flavor.

  “The meat must be firm,” Zoran said, “and it should move when you slap it.” He laid the clam on his cutting board and slapped the tip of the long siphon. It writhed. “But if you keep slapping and moving, slapping and moving, it will get tired, and die quicker.” A few of the male students snickered. “Butter knife is the easiest way to open it,” Zoran said. “Watch out—sometimes when you do this they’ll pee on you.”

  He pried the clam open and scraped inside the shell to detach the organs. They looked like bulbous testicles.

  “Guts and nuts!” Zoran said, decorum forgotten. He held up the defenseless clam, the siphon drooping downward. “Can’t use these.” He ripped off the parts that looked like testicles and tossed them in the trash. The men in the class looked stoic.

  In the kitchen, Zoran dunked the clam in boiling water. Marcos winced.

  “Is it still alive?” Marcos asked.

  “Yup.”

  After five seconds Zoran yanked it out and dropped it in an ice bath. Back in the classroom, he pulled out a knife.

  Zoran held his knife at the base of the siphon and, without apparent empathy, cut the thing right off. He skinned it, then pressed it sideways onto the cutting board and inserted the point of his knife into the end.