Is your sushi really a California roll and are you eating it properly? Should you eat it at all?
"starting with the same intentions, the Japanese got sushi. We got salt cod and pickled herring."
As I understand this very esoteric food, you have real sushi on the left (well it looks like salmon, so not quite real), and California rolls on the right.
It was a dieting day, so I thought I might try sushi for my dinner. Our local Woolworths has a sushi bar in the fresh food section so I decided to give it a go. They're healthy and slimming aren't they? And it was easy to buy some there. I've been meaning to write about the ubiquitous sushi for a while now so this was the time to do it. The picture is not of my own Woolworths, but it's a very similar setup to this.
Most of what I have learnt in the course of my very rudimentary research I have learnt from an article by Alex Renton in the always reliable Guardian. I do recommend you read it if you are interested in sushi. It's informative and entertaining, though with a British slant of course. All of my quotes today are from his article. Plus I read a bit of Wikipedia and other bits from here and there.
It seems that sushi don't even originate in Japan, but in South-east Asia.
"It was a street food, a working-class dish - as so often, haute cuisine borrowed and tarted up a staple of the poor."
It was originally salted fish that was stored in fermented rice for several months. The rice was discarded before the fish was eaten. Later vinegar was added to the rice to speed up the fermentation, and finally the fermentation process was abandoned altogether. From South-east Asia it travelled to China and from there to Japan, reaching Japan in about 600 AD. In Japan in the medieval period the rice and the fish were pressed into shape with bamboo moulds. In the Edo period fresh fish was finally just placed on the vinegar rice and modern sushi was born. It probably wasn't raw though - raw fish on rice was probably not common until refrigeration. And salmon is a very recent addition - it being rather more available than blue-fin tuna and other endangered species.
There are several different types of sushi all with distinctive names, but I am not going into that here - basically I confess I'm not all that interested. If you want to know - just go to Wikipedia although there are probably other sources too. Because I'm not a sushi fan really. Altogether too bland for me. However, one thing I did learn is that what I thought of as sushi - those seaweed encased rolls of rice with something in the middle are really California rolls.
The origins of the California roll are a bit disputed - a Los Angeles or Vancouver chef? Since it's called a California roll, let's go with Los Angeles. As Alex Renton says they are the spaghetti bolognaise of the sushi world.
"a confection of cooked crab, avocado and mayonnaise inside a roll of sushi rice, probably bound with a strip of nori seaweed. It is an international cliché, but it was the crossover hit that took sushi out of Japan and on to the path to global dominance. If sushi were Abba, the California roll is Waterloo." Alex Renton
And, of course it led to a profusion of fillings. Many times I saw it described as an inside out sushi - because apparently the seaweed should really be on the inside. And this kind of thing is mostly what you see in ordinary sushi bars, though I did notice that were some sushi in Woolworths that looked more like the traditional version.
Then along came Robert de Niro and his Japanese chef friend and Nobu was born. There are at least 15 Nobu restaurants across the world now - some with Michelin stars.
"A combination of celebrity, surprising ideas and cool design made the tipping point." Alex Renton
Nowadays Japanese food is very, very fashionable both at the high end and the low supermarket end. There are sushi bars everywhere - at least two in Eltham not counting Woolworths and I actually think there are more. Every shopping centre has at least one. Why?
"As with the sandwich - invented by an 18th-century Earl of Sandwich as handy food for eating when gambling - convenience was and remains the selling point." Alex Renton
I think the health thing is the other major selling point. It has a healthy reputation. But is it? Well not necessarily. The rice may well have significant quantities of rice and salt. You may not have sufficient protein if you go for vegetarian options. I must say that most of those that I saw in Woolworths had significantly more rice than anything else in them. Some of the meat and fish (like mine today) has been cooked in a tempura batter - also full of calories. Not a lot of nutrition I would think.
Then there has been the parasite scare. Somebody died in Lisbon from eating sushi with fish that had a parasitic worm in it. Always a danger with raw fish anywhere, but I think in Australia at least the fish will have been pretty thoroughly inspected before it's sold. And if it is snap frozen - as it most likely is - then the parasite will have been killed. Just watch out if you are eating it somewhere in the back lots of Asia.
And how do you eat it? The Japanese are a ritualistic bunch and there is very definitely a correct way to eat it - even the street food type of the fish on top of rice.
"rice fingers with their fish topping were and still are eaten usually by hand, upside-down, in two mouthfuls. Westerners have their own method with nigiri sushi - we take up the chopsticks and try hopelessly to scissor them in half. Then we may dunk the mouthful in a bowl of soy sauce until it disintegrates so we have to eat it grain by grain. Or we prod the whole nigiri into our mouths in one go - and choke. This is why many Japanese people would rather not watch Westerners eat sushi: it's not just gross, it's wrong." Alex Renton
I confess I ate mine with my fingers, and I didn't even dip it in soy sauce - I just poured it over the top. Thus, really the only real flavour I got was of soy sauce. And yes I had to pick up the disintegrated grains of rice. For I cut it in half. It was quite large and a bit too much for my lunch. (I've decided not to fast today, so I thought I would eat the sushi rather than a yoghurt). And did you know that most of the wasabi you get is not really wasabi - which is pretty expensive, but horseradish with green colouring and some other additives.
Then just to finish off with another negative. If you want to eat high-end sushi with the correct kind of fish, then you are risking making bluefin tuna, in particular, extinct. You would also have to be very rich. 'Real sushi' costs.
"Having survived 2,500 years of changes, sushi faces its greatest challenge just as it goes global: the catastrophic decline of the basic raw material. Almost every staple sushi and sashimi fish is threatened in the wild, most of all the bluefin tuna ... Akihiro Izumi in Bangkok told me customers demand crabsticks - 'they prefer it to real crab'. He thinks this is blasphemy, but I say: keep it coming. Mock fish means more bluefin otoro moments for the rest of us." Alex Renton
I will admit it's very pretty and also very handy for finger food for parties, but no I'm not a fan. And having read all of this, I'm not sure I shall be having much in the future - or at least I shall be choosing different ones next time.
