Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jaredklewis | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

My favorite example of this is Japanese sushi. In Japan, where totally fresh fish is abundant and easy to purchase, the focus is entirely on the fish and rice. Most every dish is just raw fish and rice.

There are simple rolls which wrap, fish and rice in seaweed. Sometimes wa few, sparse other ingredients like shallots or cucumbers make there way into the roll.

Then, Sushi gets taken to America, and what I can only assume was a creative solution to the problem of limited access to fresh fish, sushi was transformed into the decadent "maki" rolls that dominate sushi menus in the US. Cheese, fruits, vegetables, fish, meats. US maki rolls that have nearly a dozen ingredients are not uncommon.

Both styles of sushi are amazing, though very different. More like cousins than the same type of cuisine.

Reminds me of how cocktails were invented during prohibition to mask the bad taste of moonshine. Japanese shushi is to American maki what wine is to martinis.

I think when cuisines get transported to foreign counties, they get changed to adapt to their new environment.

Actually rice is the main focus in Japanese Sushi - it needs to be treated perfectly - soft and grained, yet sticky enough to just hold together, with salt and vinegar added to a point, pressed and eaten very quickly. Fish is just there to round off the rice. That's why Sushi chefs train for years just preparing the rice - cutting fish is the last step to learn.

I'm sure rife is important, but you're way over correcting. Fish is just there to round off the rice? Please.

I stand by my comment. Any trained Sushi chef knows how to cut the fish properly, all they need is access to a good wholesale fish market like Tsukiji or one of its resellers to offer you some very nice fish - but the way they treat the rice is where you see the biggest difference between a trained sushi chef and a master. No matter where you go in Japan it's still way beyond what you'd get in expensive places abroad with a high likelihood though.

How long can it take to learn how to cook rice? Couple of hours?

How long can it take to learn how to make a list of things for a computer to do? Couple of days?

Here's a start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamae

>It is a common Japanese legend that the truly great itamae-san ("san" is an honorific suffix) should be able to create nigirizushi in which all of the rice grains face the same direction.

While that's definitely an exaggeration, it gives you an idea of the importance of rice in Japanese sushi. Basically, it's taking something that's naturally chaotic (like cooked rice grains that just stick together in whatever fashion), and bring their entropy down to become something ordered by using the most efficient motions possible. For that purpose they use hand fans and wood to control the moisture as well as very finely trained hand motions to control the shape of the nigiri as well as the alignments of the grains.

All of that, just so the guest can pick it up with his/her chopsticks, and have it effortlessly fall apart in the mouth, in an explosion of flavour, like a two stage guided cluster bomb targeting your taste buds ;-).

So, yes, you could probably just use an automatic cooker for the cooking process (although the masters sneeze at that of course, but it sure is standard in Japan nowadays up to a certain price level) - but cooking is the easy part, the fun starts after that.

> Any trained Sushi chef knows how to cut the fish properly, all they need is access to a good wholesale fish market like Tsukiji

This isn't a convincing argument at all, I could just as easily say "any trained sushi chef knows how to cook rice properly, all they need is Amazon and access to a good rice cooker like Zojirushi".

For what it's worth, I don't believe the idea that rice is the main focus -- it just sounds like the sushi chefs are fucking with people when they say something like that.

There's an easy Test you can do: Go to Japan and do a few taste tests. Try 7-11 sushi, kaiten-sushi (big chains that serve on turnstiles), a small neighborhood sushi restaurant that serves lunch for 1000 yen and a master's sushi restaurant (usually 10000 yen up to 25000 yen, but you may be able to get a better deal through a Japanese contact). Then report back on what you find. All I can tell you is from my experience, and that is, for most fish the difference starts diminishing at the 1000 yen mark, but the texture of the rice and the care going into the condiments is what you pay for when going to a master. I'm not trying to have a debate, just sharing my experience from living in Japan for years.

I guess that makes sense. The value-add of a sushi chef to good fish is almost nothing, they just have to cut it and make sure to serve it fresh. The variability the chef introduces to rice is a lot bigger (i.e. rice can be really shit if you cook it wrong), so in order for sushi to rise from its piece-of-fish-on-rice street food beginnings to cult cuisine status of today, they had to pick some part to idolize and ritualize (in typical Japanese style), and rice was it.

You could at it this way, yes - Sushi is a bit like Pizza in that

a) it was born a few hundred years ago (Edo period) as a take-away food / fast food

b) some forms of it have become a high craft or even art that you can spend a lot of money on (compare to high status Pizzerias in Napoli)

Now whether that's legitimate or not is of course up for discussion - in my opinion it's a legitimate and fulfilling experience that you can have by going to a Sushi master if you can appreciate this kind of craft.

Good comparison. They both are delicious, simple, affordable foods widely enjoyed by the "peasant" class, which nonetheless have a rarified purist/snobbish following as well. I enjoy both, hope I can one day afford to judge for myself whether the high falutin varieties are worth it :)

I've done all this, I felt there was a (marginally decreasing) increase in quality at all levels of that chain you described. Maybe the marginal increase in quality of the fish was less than that of the rice; I don't know. I certainly couldn't tell -- they both seemed to taste better and better to me.

I am pretty sure parent is "right" from my limited understanding. That being having watched some interviews etc with sushi "masters" I have heard some of them say same thing. If I remember where I will respond again and apply link.

Iirc sushi means rice in Japanese

Cocktails weren't invented during prohibition. http://www.snopes.com/cocktails-came-out-of-prohibition/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com