Raw fish? Well, sort of...
One of the TV shows recently showed us some of the back story for the sushi that we all enjoy here in Japan. Negitoro, kazunoko, and amaebi.
You might know negitoro. That's the little circle of nori -- seaweed -- with rice on the bottom, filled with minced tuna, and a little spring onion on top. I love it, and so do many others. Traditionally, though, this was made by scraping the leftover tuna off the skin and bones after cutting the good meat off in chunks and slabs. Gleanings! And there just wasn't much of it left in a tuna. But people really like it. So, how do they meet the demand?
Take regular tuna -- those chunks and slabs. Drop it into a large meat grinder/mixer. Start by turning it into mincemeat. Now add -- what looked like a bucket of lard, but turned out to be a corn oil product. That's right, they add corn oil to help give it that fatty content. Mix well. Now add a dose of sesame oil and mix again. There you go, instant toro ready for the sushi restaurants in Japan.
Kazunoko. That's the little yellow fish eggs. When it comes out of the fish -- herring -- it's a fairly large pair of pouches, in various odd shapes. But by the time it sets on sushi rice in Japan, it's just about the right size -- much smaller -- and fairly consistent in shape. What happened?
Okay. Take the frozen buckets packed full of fish eggs. Thaw and wash, so you have a slurry of individual eggs. Add a secret ingredient -- some kind of binder. Now mix well. Next, put this into a machine that pushes it out of little tubes and cuts blobs of it into molds going by on a conveyor belt. Squish! Now freeze the molded eggs. There you go.
Incidentally, you might look at what is on your sushi and say, "These two aren't the same shape." Yes, the molds have been modified so that there is a set of slightly different shapes. All close enough to the standard to make sushi production easy, but it gives the illusion of natural variation. Don't worry, it's still processed.
Ama ebi. Sweet shrimp. This is wild. First go to Canada. The ocean between Canada and Greenland, icy, snowy, cold, has ships that seine tons of shrimp at a time. On board, they are sorted and frozen. Now, 700 tons of frozen sweet shrimp are shipped to China.
In China, they are unfrozen and cleaned. By hand. Rows of Chinese women, stripping the head and top shell and legs in one step, the middle shell and legs in a second step, and the lower legs in a final step. Three steps to clean one shrimp. The top producer does one shrimp every 2 seconds, and says it's restful. Now from the cleaners, the trays of cleaned shrimp go to sorters, who straighten and sort them by size. Then they are stacked into packs. Finally, women use tweezers to clean the sand veins. Then they are frozen again for shipping to Japan.
What fun. "Raw" fish? Well, sort of. They're not cooked, I guess. But if processing counts...
You might know negitoro. That's the little circle of nori -- seaweed -- with rice on the bottom, filled with minced tuna, and a little spring onion on top. I love it, and so do many others. Traditionally, though, this was made by scraping the leftover tuna off the skin and bones after cutting the good meat off in chunks and slabs. Gleanings! And there just wasn't much of it left in a tuna. But people really like it. So, how do they meet the demand?
Take regular tuna -- those chunks and slabs. Drop it into a large meat grinder/mixer. Start by turning it into mincemeat. Now add -- what looked like a bucket of lard, but turned out to be a corn oil product. That's right, they add corn oil to help give it that fatty content. Mix well. Now add a dose of sesame oil and mix again. There you go, instant toro ready for the sushi restaurants in Japan.
Kazunoko. That's the little yellow fish eggs. When it comes out of the fish -- herring -- it's a fairly large pair of pouches, in various odd shapes. But by the time it sets on sushi rice in Japan, it's just about the right size -- much smaller -- and fairly consistent in shape. What happened?
Okay. Take the frozen buckets packed full of fish eggs. Thaw and wash, so you have a slurry of individual eggs. Add a secret ingredient -- some kind of binder. Now mix well. Next, put this into a machine that pushes it out of little tubes and cuts blobs of it into molds going by on a conveyor belt. Squish! Now freeze the molded eggs. There you go.
Incidentally, you might look at what is on your sushi and say, "These two aren't the same shape." Yes, the molds have been modified so that there is a set of slightly different shapes. All close enough to the standard to make sushi production easy, but it gives the illusion of natural variation. Don't worry, it's still processed.
Ama ebi. Sweet shrimp. This is wild. First go to Canada. The ocean between Canada and Greenland, icy, snowy, cold, has ships that seine tons of shrimp at a time. On board, they are sorted and frozen. Now, 700 tons of frozen sweet shrimp are shipped to China.
In China, they are unfrozen and cleaned. By hand. Rows of Chinese women, stripping the head and top shell and legs in one step, the middle shell and legs in a second step, and the lower legs in a final step. Three steps to clean one shrimp. The top producer does one shrimp every 2 seconds, and says it's restful. Now from the cleaners, the trays of cleaned shrimp go to sorters, who straighten and sort them by size. Then they are stacked into packs. Finally, women use tweezers to clean the sand veins. Then they are frozen again for shipping to Japan.
What fun. "Raw" fish? Well, sort of. They're not cooked, I guess. But if processing counts...