黒マグロ (Kuromaguro)-Bluefin Tuna

I listen to a lot of food podcasts from the States, and one of the big issues that's being batted around the food world is sustainability, especially for fish. Fish farming techniques tend to result in inferior product, and most Japanese food encyclopedias include descriptions and pictures in each entry on how to distinguish the two at the market. Farmed fish are usually fatter and have softer flesh and less flavor than their wild, hard-swimming cousins, and this is especially pronounced in muscular fish like tuna. American sports fishermen used to throw their bluefin tuna catches away until Japan started importing it, but now the worldwide sushi boom has depleted stocks to the point of the bluefin about to become listed as endangered.

One of my spouse's fellow flower-arrangement students comes from a tuna-fishing business and she lent us a DVD that followed the issue to a sushi competition in Britain. The whole program's tone was that of indignation that bluefin was not served there and that the whole issue is an attack by foreign countries on a Japanese way of life.

Interesting points:

1) The whole point of the sustainability argument, i.e. the fact that if bluefin is fished at this rate, it will disappear within a decade. Rather, it was repeatedly stated that this was a direct attack on a Japanese way of life and that the Japanese have a right as citizens of the country that invented tuna to claim priority on world stocks which are being 'stolen' from them by other countries (even if the tuna is imported from said countries).

2) The program's tone was derogatory towards those who avoid eating bluefin because of the conservation issues surrounding the fish, but Japan in general maintains the contradictory feeling of being the victim of the worldwide sushi boom driving down bluefin stocks and causing prices to jump. Shouldn't Japan be happy that people are avoiding consuming something seen as being Japanese for the Japanese?

3) Other types of tuna are not presented as an alternative to bluefin, so most people think that if bluefin becomes unavailable, all tuna is out.

My spouse pointed out that the average Japanese's opinion is shaped mostly by media (like the average citizen in any country) and that the media surrounding bluefin fishing in Japan is mostly likely controlled tightly by the fishing companies and the government officials receiving payout from them. I agree, but it's scary how such a relatively cut-and-dry issue has become so patriotic.

There is a push for Atlantic bluefin exports to be banned. I think this article is a pretty good example of the tone that I'm talking about.

(Note-I'm not blameless on the bluefin issue myself. I eat the scraps of bluefin we get thrown at the restaurant and I eat tuna other places too. But writing this entry may have been the final push for me to make my stand and ask if what I'm getting is bluefin or not and stop putting out cash for a vanishing species.)

Failure

With a job as exacting as kaiseki cuisine, there's going to be a lot of failure at first, and a fair bit even down the line. Chefs make mistakes, have bad ideas, and ruin food often. If it's the owner or the top chef doing something funky, it's overlooked, but us little guys get hauled over the coals frequently for screwing up, whether it was really our fault or not. I was recently subject to a full-on explosion when I didn't vinegar mackerel correctly and the flesh broke apart. Never mind that the fish was too fatty to take the salting and vinegar (salt will melt the fat and make fish with lots of fat disintegrate), it was my responsibility to turn out a class product regardless of the original materials. As my direct superior, Fugu Senpai got it twice as rough as me for not following my every move. I felt terrible about that; it's not as if he doesn't get ripped up by Soba Master every day without me contributing to his stress load.

The upshot of all this is that when you do obtain the stray phrase of approval (usually expressed along the lines of 'that's acceptable', or by not getting yelled at), it means so much more. Japanese kitchens are not there to built up future chefs, they are there to rip you to your bones, extract every mistake and weakness, and reform you in their image. It's a very rough life, but that's why Japanese food is the classiest in the world.

Eyeballs

I know you've been wanting to see this ever since the squid post. Here are the eyeballs in person, along with the beaks and unwanted long sections of the tentacles. Eyeballs have been following me today- after completing this job, I politely refused the offer of eating as part of my dinner a fish eye rivaling the size of my palm. You're supposed to put the whole thing in your mouth, squish and drink up, and pull out the surrounding cartilage ring. Dude.

Choking it Down

One of few nice thing about working the hours that I do is that I get fed twice a day. The flipside is that the Japanese adhere to what your mom always told you: clear what's on your plate with no comments. Japanese restaurants don't do food waste. If something can't be served anymore, we get it. I'm lucky; the owner of my restaurant eats with us, and he makes sure we eat pretty good (sometimes great) and will pull food that isn't the absolute freshest and give it to us instead of hanging onto it until it goes bad. At another place, I've seen fish that had actually started to stink being broken out and served to the staff.

However...I don't mind choking down the occasional not-tasty, odd, or maybe gross thing at a friend's house, and I consider myself pretty open to most foods. But I've been an adult for a long time, and having the restaurant dictate the majority of what I consume is hard to bear. It's very much like being a small child, and taking whatever Mom dishes up. Fugu Senpai is also under a lot of pressure to spend as little as possible on ingredients and to cook them as fast as possible, so that the instant the last customer leaves the restaurant, we are sitting down to eat. This leads to a lot of stir-fries and fried food. Which is where my real problem comes in. I've been really sensitive to oil since I was a child, finally cutting it from my diet altogether. I just can't stomach it. I tried to just eat less when fried food was served up, but I felt like crap for the rest of the day. Fugu Senpai is a nice guy and he's been trying to accommodate me by using different preparation methods for my food. I really appreciate it, since observing special dietary needs aren't part of his job description. It does make me realize how much I enjoyed cooking for myself, though, and is getting me more motivated to be the one to cook the meals at the restaurant.

Hands

Every chef knows the agony of hands. Having them, I mean. They crackle on the ends of your wrists, catching on cloth and smearing blood unexpectedly. Bend your fingers and feel the skin strain to breaking over your knuckles. Try to put them in your pockets and let the grimace of pain break through your tough-guy face. All chefs have half a dozen cuts, burns, cracks and scrapes healing half-heartedly on their hands at all times, but the real enemy is dryness. Your hands are wet most of the day, washed uncounted times, in contact with soap and cleansers and bleach for hours. You may try the girly glove approach for a while, but you nearly always ditch them when you've gotten into that hardcore cleaning drive that barely allows you time for the bathroom, much less tracking down and pulling gloves already your already-devastated paws.

Forget fashion magazines or bath shops. Cooks are the ones that can tell you about skin creams. Having naturally dry skin to begin with, I suffer doubly, and in the winter my hands are twin suns of radiating pain. I've tried the range of lotions from Wal-Mart to department stores where they sell it by the ounce, all the Burt's Bees products, antibiotic cream, Bag Balm, shea butter, cocoa butter, pure petroleum jelly, prescription medical cream, etc. I've done it all, man. This is the bottom line and the only thing that keeps the pain at bay: pure lanolin. Not anything lanolin-based; you need the 100 percent smelly sheep's fat, and you need to smear it thickly on your hands at least every other night and put on cotton gardening gloves to keep it on your skin instead of on your sheets. (Rubber gloves make your hands break out and do weird stuff if you use them every night.) The gloves make hitting the snooze button interesting in the morning, but add a certain Fight Club atmosphere to the bedroom.

RIP TMNT

Any job entails you do stuff you don't wanna do, and it gets more hands-on and gritty the further down the social chain you go. Being a chef, despite the celebrity status it is often given, is a blue-collar job. You don your uniform, scrub and wash and chop and work with your hands for long, unusual hours and weekends to serve the people with normal jobs. You are also occasionally faced with moral dilemmas.

Chefs in America cook food. Chefs in Japan prepare food, the preparation of which may or may not require cooking. This means you need fresh materials, and fresh means either extremely recently deceased or still living when you get ahold of it. One of the more gruesome tasks is dispatching turtles, which are made into a 鍋物 (one-pot dish), several of which have come our way recently. You have to cut off the head, slice up the still-moving body, clean the meat, and get it in the pot. The heart keeps beating until it is actually simmered, even when the turtle is in pieces. (You have to be careful of the head too, which can continue to bite for up to half an hour after you cut it off.) Octopus is another grisly job. Casually slaughtering an animal that may have lived up to 10 years or is estimated to have the intelligence of a 2-year-old isn't easy and may not even be right. I have pretty strong vegetarian tendencies and almost never prepare meat at home, and I'm pretty torn about how to take all this. I've taken the stand that I'm still the apprentice and need to know about this stuff, even if I decide not to do it or serve it when I break out on my own professionally; basically a suspension of decision. I also decided not to post the picture of the turtle seconds after it was killed. Turtle blood is as red as human blood.