The Story of Sushi Read Online Free

with sugar and a little salt, to make it tangy and sweet.
    Kate and her classmates had been under the impression that what made sushi delicious was the fresh ingredients. In fact, the fundamental flavors of sushi—soy sauce and rice vinegar—depend on infecting certain foods with fungus and letting them get moldy.
     
    Kate enjoyed the field trip. It was a welcome diversion from the routine. Back in the classroom, Zoran made the students practice cutting cucumbers every day. Then he started them cutting giant white radishes using the same technique.
    Zoran continued to yell at Kate, close beside him at the head of the table. When he wasn’t yelling at her, he treated her like some sort of special-needs student, giving her extra help while the rest of the class watched or moved ahead. Kate had always prided herself on pulling her own weight in a group, on being “one of the guys.” But here, she was certain her classmates had already written her off as a total flake. At the end of every day she considered quitting.

4
TASTE OF THE SEA
    ‘T hese are bonito flakes,’ Zoran explained, showing the students a bag of fluffy beige flakes. He was teaching them to make a broth called dashi. Dashi is highly flavorful, and it is a cornerstone of Japanese cuisine. Dashi is the soup base to which miso is added to make miso soup. Like soy sauce, dashi plays a supporting role in sushi, but the method for making dashi is very different.
    First, Zoran had simmered slabs of kelp, a type of seaweed with broad leaves. Now he switched off the heat and sprinkled the bonito flakes into the pot. Kate watched the flakes melt into the steaming water. She gathered that bonito was a kind of fish. She’d seen those flakes before, sprinkled on food at Japanese restaurants. She’d always thought they were bacon. After a few minutes, Zoran removed the kelp and bonito flakes with a strainer. The remaining broth was dashi.
    Kelp—like miso, soy sauce, cured ham, Parmesan cheese, and tomatoes—is loaded with tasty glutamate. Called konbu in Japanese, kelp is the first half of what makes dashi delicious.
    The second half of dashi’s magic is the bonito flakes. Bonito are a type of tuna, also called skipjack tuna. Like their larger tuna cousins, they swim fast, sometimes in bursts that reach 40 miles an hour. They accomplish this feat by loading their muscles with high-energy power pellets that provide fuel to their cells. These power pellets are called ATP—adenosine triphosphate.
    The manufacturers of bonito flakes simmer fillets of bonitobefore smoking the fish for ten or twenty days. Like the makers of miso, they infect the fish with mold and lock up the fillets in a box. After two weeks they pull out the moldy fillets and lay them in the sun. They scrape off the old mold, add new mold, and lock them back in the box. They repeat this procedure three or four times.
    Just as with miso and soy sauce, digestive enzymes break down the proteins in the fish into tasty amino acids. The ATP gets broken down into a series of other molecules, resulting in a delicious compound called inosine monophosphate, or IMP, which the human tongue savors nearly as much as glutamate.
    After a few months of molding and drying, the bonito fillets are hard, like pieces of wood. To make the flakes, the fillets are shaved with a tool like a carpenter’s plane.
     
    Dashi’s role in sushi usually goes unnoticed, particularly in the United States. Most Americans think they are supposed to dunk all their sushi in soy sauce. But full-strength soy sauce overpowers the delicate flavors of raw fish. A good sushi chef adds all the flavoring the sushi needs before he hands it to the customer. He mixes his own sauce and uses it behind the sushi bar. This sauce is called nikiri. Each chef has his own secret formula. Most are a variation on a standard recipe, and dashi is a key supporting actor. To 100 parts soy sauce, the chef adds twenty parts dashi, ten parts sake, and ten parts