I doubt whether even the Japanese feel that a sharkskin wasabi grater is an essential element of their kitchen arsenal. There was certainly no evidence of one in the kitchen of Mrs. Shinobu, with whom I had a lunch date the next day.
Sixty-year-old Etsuko Shinobu is doing her shopping. “A small tin of ‘sea chicken’; that’s what we call tuna,” she says, dropping one into her basket. “Some eggs—we prefer brown eggs in Japan; taro root; and some Kyoto sake.” She shuffles around the aisles in a violet kimono, and I follow right behind.
I had found Mrs. Shinobu on the website for Japanese travel company H.I.S., which offered some interesting food-themed experiences in Tokyo, so I signed up for three cooking lessons: one at the home of a “typical” Japanese housewife, Mrs. Shinobu; the second with a Japanese chef; and finally a sushi-making class.
After Mrs. Shinobu had paid and collected her reward points, we trooped out of the shop to her nearby house: a well-manicured two-story concrete box overlooking a railway line (as most homes seem to do in Tokyo), where she lived with her husband and grown-up daughter. I removed my shoes at the door in exchange for some undersized red vinyl slippers and followed her upstairs to the kitchen–living room. She was going to cook us lunch, and I was going to help, Mrs. Shinobu announced. She invited me to put on a tenugui, or head scarf, and set me to work chopping daikon into matchsticks.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Shinobu set the rice steamer in motion, rehydrated some dried mushrooms, and made some dashi with Ajinomoto instant powder. She made a paper-thin omelet with egg, salt, sugar, and a little mirin in a pan, which she first heated, then removed from the heat before adding the egg, letting it cook in the residual heat only. She lined a bowl with strips of the omelet, then filled it with rice and the tinned tuna, which she had heated with some soy sauce.
“They recommend that you eat thirty different ingredients every day,” she said, gently adjusting my knife grip (she had given me a sashimi knife, which works only if you slice by pulling it toward you in individual strokes). “So I try to do that. My motto is ‘a little of everything.’ The difficult thing is that my husband is rarely home from work before eight, and my daughter sometimes doesn’t come home until midnight. I learned how to cook from my mother, but my daughter isn’t interested. I do worry how the next generation is going to learn this.”
Lunch was ready, and we moved through to the tatami living room. As I stepped onto the mat, I felt something grabbing me from behind. It was Mrs. Shinobu, looking aghast. “No, no, you must take your slippers off before you go on the tatami mat,” she said.
More etiquette: it is rude to hover with your chopsticks over food; don’t use chopsticks to move bowls and dishes around; never lick your chopsticks; never leave your chopsticks sticking down into rice; and never, ever pass food from your chopsticks to another person’s—that is a funerary tradition.
I attempted all of these during our lunch. But to her credit, my Japanese host didn’t bat an eye. Afterward, we adjourned downstairs to Mrs. Shinobu’s tea ceremony room. It takes years to learn how to orchestrate a tea ceremony, and the correct procedure has been the subject of controversial debate for centuries. To give you an idea of the Olympian levels of pedantry involved, the tea ceremony schism starts as you enter the room—one school of thought believes it should be left foot first, the other the right. Both agree that there must be no excess of movement, and so each motion is strictly choreographed and laden with meaning, most of which was lost on me as I knelt at a point exactly sixteen ridges of tatami mat from the wall, beside the tokonoma—the display alcove—occupied by a vase holding a single peony, watching Mrs. Shinobu purify, brew, swirl, pour, and sip. This went on for a good forty minutes, during which time I initially lost all sensation in my legs, before the numbness was relieved by a million agonizing pinpricks.
Finally, after some frothing with a delicate little bamboo whisk, Mrs. Shinobu handed me a bowl of perfectly warm tea, instructing me to turn it twice counterclockwise before drinking from it, then to turn it clockwise before replacing it on the mat. The tea itself was thick, frothy, a vivid bright green, and awfully bitter, with notes of soil. Each of our two bowls was different, I noticed. Though beautiful, mine was slightly asymmetrical. Mrs. Shinobu spotted me examining it. “You know,” she said, “this may be the only time you will ever meet that bowl; you should cherish this moment. The Japanese have a phrase for making the most of fleeting encounters: ichigo ichie. It means ‘one encounter, one chance.’”
I cherished my tea ceremony encounter and my morning with Mrs. Shinobu. How many visitors get a chance to see inside the home of a Japanese person, let alone make and eat lunch with someone as wise and dignified as my gentle, smiling host?
Next stop on the H.I.S. food experience tour was Hifumi-an, a traditional restaurant and cooking school in Kagurazaka, a former geisha neighborhood of central Tokyo, now renowned for its top-quality but elusive restaurants. Our chef for the afternoon was Takamitsu Aihara, a welcoming but stern man with twenty-four years’ experience and a recently earned Michelin star. It was his mission to impart to us the techniques and etiquette of traditional dining.
“The color of food is very important to the Japanese,” the chef began. “It reflects the seasons—spring is green, then dark green for summer, autumn is orange and brown, winter is white. It is all reflected on the plate.”
The half dozen students and I took some cold mashed potato, which we patted out into discs on plastic wrap. On top of this we placed a minced chicken filling, then pulled up the dough to form something the size of a tennis ball. Next, the chef gave us a dashi master class.
After showing us how to make ichiban dashi—in much the way the chefs had at the cooking competition at Hattori’s school in Tokyo, though with less katsuobushi—the chef went on to explain how you can use the same katsuobushi and konbu to make a number two, or niban, dashi by boiling them gently for another ten minutes. “Ninety-nine percent of Japanese stock is water,” Aihara said, adding just a dash of sake, some light soy sauce, and, finally, arrowroot flour to thicken it as a sauce for the potato-chicken bun.
Next came a sashimi lesson. “You cut the fish as if you are drawing a line on the board toward you with your index finger,” the chef said, carving up a fresh bonito fillet, black-skinned with dark red flesh. He set a torch to the bonito to char the flesh slightly, then placed the slices on top of a bowl of rice, sprinkled a fine julienne of Japanese ginger over them, and in the middle placed an egg yolk that had been marinated in soy sauce until it had firmed up. We all had a go and ended up with a meal that was original and pretty.
The final part of my cooking lesson trilogy was the sushi class, which took place in a rather down-at-heels local sushi restaurant in southwest Tokyo, our session squeezed in between the end of lunch service and the start of the dinner rush.
Chef Eiji Hayashi had the face of a boxer and the physique to match. He was a tough, no-nonsense sushi chef, with over two decades’ experience on the front line serving the most discerning sushi eaters in the world, in the city where nigiri was invented.
“There are no female sushi chefs,” he announced gruffly, eyeing a couple of female students. “Their makeup and perfume taint the fish and rice. Also they have a higher body temperature, which warms the fish.” (This is not actually true, but I wasn’t about to contradict him.)
He showed us how to mold the rice for nigiri by using two bowls of cold water, one for washing our hands after each molding, the other for wetting them to stop the rice from sticking. He formed his hands into a ninjitsu—so named because it resembles the secret ninja hand signal—by placing the index and middle fingers of the right hand across the palm of the left hand, where they press a bite-size block of rice into a small rectangular box.
The rice had been steamed with a small piece of konbu and some sake, the chef explained, then tipped out into a hangiri, a traditional, round, shallow cedarwood tub. “It doesn’t have to be cedarwood, but metal bowls might react with the rice,” the chef said. “The tub must be wet, though; otherwise, it will soak the moisture from the rice.” In the tub, the chef cut through the rice—now slightly cooler, but not too cold—with a wooden paddle, cooling it further and mixing in the vinegar, salt, and sugar. This rice seasoning—typically seven parts rice vinegar to five parts sugar with a half teaspoon of salt—is the real reason, I suspect, that sushi has caught on to such a degree in the West: it consists, after all, of essentially the same flavors that keep us coming back for Big Macs—sugar, salt, and vinegar. The rice for making sushi should be neither too hot nor too cold—according to Eiji-san, around 77°F is optimal, although others say it should be warmer, ideally body temperature. The main thing is it should act as a contrast to the chilled fish.
The better restaurants use expensive, short-grain rice, the best being koshihikari, which is dried naturally in the sun, but most use medium-grain japonica, often grown in the States (domestic Japanese rice production can’t meet demand). Many also add an MSG-laced flavoring to their rice called miora. “When I was training to be a sushi chef, I had to spend a year just making rice before I was allowed near a fish,” Eiji-san said, adding that the total period of his training had been six years, average for a sushi chef in Japan.
He invited us to try to make our own nigiri as he had shown us. We each held the lumps of unformed rice in the palms of our upturned hands, curled the fingers of the same hand up to form a coffin-shaped hollow, closed the thumb over one end of the “coffin,” and then pressed the rice into shape with the index and middle fingers of our right hands. Then the chef did something odd. He showed us how, once he had made what looked like a perfect oblong-shaped block of rice, he took his index finger and pressed down in the center, spreading the rice out once more, before re-forming it again. He did this “to air out the rice,” before adding with the carefree chauvinism common to chefs the world over, “Like treating a woman. You don’t want the rice packed too tightly; you want it to just hold together long enough to get into the mouth, where it should fall apart easily. And the top of the rice should be slightly pointed so that the fish stays on better.” Though how this equates to “treating a woman,” I still don’t understand.
But this “airing” just made my blocks of rice look even more ragged and shapeless, like lumps of clay randomly squeezed by a five-year-old child, prompting open laughter from the chef and the six other students, most of whom were Japanese. I tried again, this time with more success.
I asked the chef if it was true that the best sushi chefs can get all the grains of rice in a nigiri pointing the same way. He dismissed the idea. No, that wasn’t possible, he said. You should try instead to be “natural,” a word he repeated several times during our demonstration.
Next we made gunkan maki (gunkan means “battleship,” which they vaguely resemble), in which the block of rice is wrapped with a sheet of nori seaweed and topped with, say, sea urchin or crab. Nori is a type of algae. In its natural state, it is a reddish brown, but it turns green when it is dried. In the better sushi restaurants, the chef will briefly wave the sheets over the grill to get them really crisp before using them. Shizuo Tsuji points out that one side is rough, the other smooth, and that you should be sure to make your maki rolls with the smooth side pointing outward. The trick with gunkan maki, the chef explained, is to anchor the nori with a single grain of rice.
That was quite straightforward, but I made an almighty hash of my ura maki, or inside-out rolls. The trick here seemed to be to spread the rice evenly and thinly over the large sheets of nori, summon all the courage you have, and then lift the whole thing up, turning it over on your maki mat, or makisu. When I lifted mine, the rice avalanched inelegantly onto the table.
The best sushi chefs don’t provide soy sauce for dipping, the chef continued, but make their own milder blend of dip, called nikiri, with dashi, mirin, sake, and soy (63⁄4 ounces soy; 8 teaspoons dashi; 4 teaspoons sake; 4 teaspoons mirin, briefly heated together). And they don’t provide extra wasabi either—the wasabi they add within the nigiri or maki should be enough. Anyone spotted mixing wasabi in with his or her soy will immediately be marked down as a novice—after all, how can you expect to have any sensitivity left in your taste buds if you blitz them with artificial wasabi? I had already noticed that many Japanese don’t use chopsticks to eat sushi; they just pick it up with their hands, and so Japanese chefs will generally pack their nigiri more densely for foreign diners who insist on using chopsticks, believing it to be correct. Sashimi, on the other hand, should always be eaten with chopsticks.
One of the other students asked the chef which was his favorite nigiri topping. Was it toro? she wondered. No, he said, he preferred uni or engawa, the frilly bit from the edge of flatfish (which Western chefs often discard).
The chef gave us some other useful tips: If you want really great service from a Japanese sushi chef, it requires just one word: omakase, which means, “I’ll let you decide.” And if you want to really piss a sushi chef off, just keep ordering tuna, which many restaurants sell as a loss leader. If they bring you miso soup to start, the place is probably run by Koreans or Chinese. Miso soup should come at the end of a sushi meal, as it is thought to aid digestion of the fish. Meanwhile, if you are picking from a conveyor belt, choose white fish or lighter fish to start before working your way to the salmon and tuna. Ignore spiced-up maki rolls, often employed to disguise the taste of aged fish.
In her introduction to A Simple Art, M. F. K. Fisher recalls how “fish leapt from glass tanks to the cleavers and pans and then into our mouths, in a ballet of accumulated motions and flavors,” but in truth, fresh fish is not always desirable for sushi and sashimi. As with meat, fish needs to be left for some time—days, even—after being caught in order to reach its peak flavor. There are some exceptions, of course: eel, shellfish, and squid are worth keeping alive until the point of preparation and shouldn’t be left too long after, and mackerel is notoriously perishable, but with most fish the enzymes in the flesh need time to break down the proteins and connective tissue and produce the all-important and very tasty inosinic acid that goes so well with the glutamate in dashi or soy. The bluefin tuna, for example, is better a week after it has been defrosted—kept well chilled, of course; sea bream needs a day; fugu, or blowfish, apparently is best aged between half a day and a day. The world’s greatest sushi chef, Jiro Ono, now ninety-one, the subject of the famous documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, and who still works every day in his Ginza restaurant, will wrap tuna in ice for ten days until it reaches the ultimate flavor; with white fish, he might leave it for three days.
Some final sushi advice: if you enter a restaurant and see fish with what Tsuji describes as “the flaccid look of hospital patients,” turn and flee, pausing only to make a quick call to your local health authority. Instead, he offers this useful advice: “When I enter a sushi restaurant, I can tell at a glance by the texture of their skins—like the bloom of youth on a young girl—whether the fish is really fresh.”