The Story of Sushi Read Online Free Page A

mirin, a sweet rice liquor used in cooking. The mixture is heated and reduced briefly, and is then ready to use. Nikiri is a kinder, gentler, and more complex soy sauce, with a broad array of flavor compounds appropriate for enhancing sushi.
    The Hama Hermosa restaurant attached to the California Sushi Academy provided its customers with straight soy sauce. But at the sushi bar, Toshi and the other chefs frequently painted a sheen of nikiri across the top of pieces of sushi with a basting brush. This was the traditional method of seasoning sushi. The chefs were forever handing sushi to customers and admonishing them, “No soy sauce!” Most sushi chefs in America don’t make this effort.
    The deliciousness of dashi and soy sauce intrigued a Japanese chemist named Kikunae Ikeda, who in 1908 figured out that glutamate is what makes kelp broth so delicious. He realized that the stuff could be manufactured. The product was called monosodium glutamate, or MSG.
    A few years later, a colleague figured out what made bonito broth so tasty. It was the IMP. Much of what makes all fish delicious is IMP, created when the ATP in the fish’s muscles breaks down after the fish’s death. Scientists discovered that IMP could be manufactured, too, and like MSG used as a flavor additive.
    Western scientists believed that the human tongue could taste only four fundamental flavors: sweet, salty, sour, and bitter. The Japanese scientists argued that there was a fifth fundamental flavor, triggered by amino acids like glutamate and compounds like IMP, and epitomized by foods such as dashi and nikiri. They called this fifth flavor “tastiness,” or in Japanese, umami.
    For decades, Western scientists were skeptical that umami was a fundamental flavor. Finally, in the past few years, scientists at the University of California, San Diego, have demonstrated that the tongues of humans and other animals possess specific receptors for umami.
    Today, MSG is manufactured by the ton and added to all varieties of processed foods. Most Americans associate MSG with Chinese food, but it is also added to canned foods, soups, salad dressings, chips, and fast food. On product labels it is usually disguised as “hydrolyzed vegetable protein.” It is even added to much of our processed meat and poultry because modern industrial production has robbed animal flesh of its own flavor. The Buddhist vegetarian condiments of ancient Japan are now used to make American factory meat palatable.
     
    After class, Kate drove to McDonald’s, as she’d been doing every day after class. She bought a Big Mac. She drove home. She sat on the one chair in her lonely little house in Torrance, surrounded by her unpacked boxes. She stared at the floor and slowly chewed her Big Mac.
    After two weeks at the academy, Kate was afraid her family had been right to be skeptical. During the second week, the classes hadcovered more basics of Japanese cuisine. None of it had much to do with sushi. Every day she wondered what she was doing there. She had given up everything in her life that she knew and entered a world where she didn’t belong.
    At least the Big Mac felt familiar and comforting. One of the ingredients of its “special sauce” was hydrolyzed vegetable protein.
    Friday morning, at the end of the second week, Kate dragged herself back to class. Zoran announced that they were going to make sushi—finally. He gave the students a crash course in nigiri and te-maki, or “hand rolls.”
    Nigiri are the little rectangles of rice topped with slices of fish and other toppings that sushi chefs squeeze together with their fingers. Hand rolls are an informal sushi roll that don’t require a bamboo mat to make. The chef places half a sheet of nori—the crisp, dark-green Japanese seaweed paper—on his palm, presses on a blob of sushi rice and a piece of fish, and rolls it up like a waffle cone. The nigiri and hand rolls that Kate made looked ragged and fell apart.
    Then Zoran told