sushi properly
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Things I didn’t know:
- sushi started as fast food
- When you touch the soy sauce with sushi, it has to be quick, almost like a fish jumping up from between the waves
- If you eat very rich fatty-tuna in the beginning, your tongue might become too numb to enjoy the sensitive taste of red snapper after that
- [that pinky ginger stuff] is called gari because of the sound it makes in your mouth, “gari gari,” a way of describing the sound of your teeth biting into a fiber-full substance
- rolled sushi is largely an invention of the US, especially the kind like avocado rolls, hot spicy tuna rolls, and many more complicated-named rolls, and has now been imported back to Japan as a hot trend
It’s a nice little series, I hope it continues, there are other sushi ‘howtos’ around … and they all kind of hang together for a sort of lore of sushi. Bourdain wrote a great section in Kitchen Confidential about eating in Japan, in particular a late night sushi bonanza, check it out.
