鯛 (Tai); Red Snapper

In any cuisine there are certain dishes or ingredients that automatically elicit respect. If what's in front of you has anything to do with foie gras, foam, Belgium, molds, whole animals, or a named blue cheese, even the non-foodie is going to view the dish on a different level than football-night buffalo wings. What's interesting is when you start crossing oceans and cultures and are proudly presented with food that might provoke emotions ranging from disbelief to horror in your own culture.

Japan is big on fish. You heard it here first. Fish get a respect that transcends their actual role as a foodstuff in a way that chicken and pork will never have, no matter how big of a role they play in the modern Japanese diet. In addition, the more a fish looks like it just leapt out of the ocean and onto your plate the better. A sanitized, cooked fillet is the lowest rung on the fish latter, 活け造り (ikezukuri, a fish filleted alive and presented still gasping), the highest. Fish guts, testes, eggs, and heads are all eaten with gusto. The guest of honor is traditionally presented with the head of the fish being served.

Tai (red snapper) in particular has been a celebration meal staple for a long time. The god of luck/happiness Ebisu (dude on the Ebisu beer cans) is pictured holding a tai. It is a pearly pink color, and red also being a symbol of good luck, it is often the main course at weddings, birthdays, etc. One popular dish that my restaurant just did a run of is 鯛飯 (tai meshi, red snapper rice) in which the rice is cooked in fish stock rather than water and served with the tai on top. The less deconstructed the tai the more high-class the dish; so a really expensive place might serve a whole, non-filleted tai. Other methods (listed in progressively less awe-inspiring order) are splitting the tai in half, using just a fillet, or mixing shredded meat into the rice.

I believe the average American would be pretty horrified at opening the lid to find an open-mouthed fish staring up at them (by the way, the eyes turn white and pop out of the sockets when heated, and if you're not careful, disconnect from the head and roll into the rice; very uncool presentation). The dish itself is nice, but to the disinterested palate a bit underwhelming considering the hype surrounding it. Tai is a good fish. So are a lot of other cheaper and easier-to-cook fish. But this works both ways; a former Japanese teacher confided in me that when she went to America and saw a whole Thanksgiving turkey squatting on the holiday table, she felt physically ill. There's a whole lot of culture and expectation dictating how we feel about a meal. Food isn't just about taste.

Doing it Yourself

In America, every restaurant I worked at had professional cleaners doing their laundry. I'm not talking about issued T-shirts or hats that you might be expected to wash yourself, but the napkins, towels, aprons etc were as a matter of course picked up, washed with industrial bleach, and returned to the restaurant super-starched.

Maybe it's because the restaurants in Japan tend to be so much smaller- instead of the average restaurant seating 200 people, it might seat 20-50, 100 if it's really a good-sized chain. This is naturally much more noticeable in Tokyo. In any case, most restaurants do laundry themselves, usually aided by an ancient-of-days rickety washing machine usually located outside, and the wet things line-dried since owning a dryer in Japan is an almost unheard-of luxury. The restaurant I'm in now professionally launders the 白衣 (hakui, chef's whites), but we have to wash and dry the towels ourselves. I'm sure that would be violating all sorts of health codes back the States but it's actually nice to be able to control how many dry towels you have on hand. All the other restaurants I used to work at were nazis about the distribution of towels. On the other hand, during Japan's rainy season, there's no such thing as dry anything.

The washing machine's water is shut off with a little standardized key that you can get at a 100-yen shop. We also leave the washing detergent beside the machine, just off the street. I wonder if the bums have figured this out yet.

Squidward's Revenge

I don't know why me and squid just can't seem to come to terms. This is what I found in the last squid I cleaned, and as I pulled it out of the dead bundle of rubber and ink and slime you can bet I got the willies. The complete scrub-your-hand-on-your-hip, little-shudders-running-down-your-spine, hairs-standing-on-end heebie-jeebies experience. I am proud of the fact that I didn't audibly yelp when I discovered that face-huggers infect more than just humans. After I regained control of myself I set it on top of a fridge to show the other cooks later and forgot about it; it dried out for a few days and I found it again. I stuck it in my bag to take home and show my SO and it stunk my bag up terribly and attracted my cats and I had to throw it away before anyone but Fugu Senpai saw it. This blurry photo is the only evidence remaining to prove that the alien invasion is once again underway.

Using Your Noodle

Noodles are a big deal across Asia and Japan is no exception. The two most popular varieties are 蕎麦 (soba; buckwheat noodles) and うどん (udon, wheat noodles). Soba is the snobby northern noodle, thin and grey, and udon the cheaper, more laid-back southern variety, thick and slippery and white. Japan newbies often take to the chewy udon noodles more quickly, but they are devilishly tricky to eat with chopsticks; they slip away, slither around in the bowl, and if you get them hot, splash broth all over you in retribution. I've been witness to a visiting friend grab an escapee noodle and hide it under the table cupped in her hand because the waitress was approaching and she couldn't get it into her mouth with the chopsticks in time.

Udon, containing more gluten than soba and thus forming a stronger dough and less fragile noodle, is easier to make than soba and so the noodle novice starts there. The dough is formed from a medium-strength flour (less gluten than bread flour but more than cake flour). You start by mixing flour and salt water in a large lacquer noodle bowl, let it rest a while, then through that shit on the floor in a plastic bag and stomp all over it for a while. This is very therapeutic in addition to kneading the dough. Rest, repeat for a total of three times, then roll it out using a special technique that forms the now very-stretchy dough into a square.

This is scattered with flour and folded over, and now true skill comes into play: cutting the noodles by hand. Noodle knifes are wickedly big and heavy and look like a massive cleaver with the handle over the blade instead of to the side so that your weight is evenly distributed along the blade and you can cut straight, sliding a board across the dough with your left hand to guide it.

Fugu Senpai let me use his new blade; it set him back $800.

My first try, closely supervised, went pretty well. I've been chopping enough vegetables to have achieved a lower-level zen with my knives and this was basically the same movement even though the shape of the knife was different. My noodles were mostly the same size and didn't break. My keepers were pleased.

Modern Conveniences

A counter restaurant's main visual feature is, not surprisingly, the counter, a long bar of wood that guests sit at while the chefs work directly across from them. Although we have tables and a tatami room too, the counter is definitely the focal point. Unlike Western cooking, where the atmosphere of a nice restaurant is concentrated on providing a sterile environment where servers melt in and out bringing dishes from the magical faraway realm of the kitchen, counter chefs work right in front of you, trying to accomplish inherently messy jobs with elegance. One of the reasons for the popularity of this system must be because so much Japanese cuisine is served raw or with minimal preparation.

One common denominator on both sides of the Pacific is the fantasy that chefs prepare all the food from the dirt/ocean up; guests like to imagine chefs visiting farms and selecting individual vegetables, buying whole fish directly from the fishermen, creating all the sauces from scratch. The reality, which sometimes needs to be concealed to keep up our cool image at the counter, is that all restaurants rely at least partially on pre-prepared foods. I was let in harshly on that fact back in the States when I went on a hunt for the recipe for my favorite restaurant's best dessert sauce, only to find out it came in a bag.

Japanese cuisine is no different. One of the things that surprised me was the fugu situation. Fugu requires careful, time-consuming preparation by a licensed chef, and it's not practical to do it yourself when you're putting out the volume we are. It turns out you can order your fugu already disassembled and skinned with all the little bits wrapped up and boxed. Each fugu has a license number (in case we end up killing someone after all), and all we have to do is get it out of the box and cut it up the way we want it. We just take care to unpack the fugu when nobody is in the restaurant so the guest can still imagine his chef choosing each fugu carefully at the fish market and we can actually get our work done, and everybody's happy.

Washing the Octopus

...will be the name of my band once I learn an instrument.

Processing a raw octopus is a laborious task and unless you get your octopus from a fish market you're going to be getting a pre-boiled cephalopod. Raw octopi are grey-blue but turn purple-red when cooked. But before you get all excited about firing up the pot, you first have to work off the slime and dirt that gets stuck in the suckers and tenderize it by kneading the octopus in a bowl with either grated radish or salt for about an hour. When you're on a tight schedule in a kitchen with a limited number or chefs, taking one of them out of the game for that length of time isn't really an option, especially when your boss orders two or three octopi in secret so you get 24 tentacles worth of surprise right before your lunch break. Fugu Senpai cleaned out the innards and beaks and vanished with them, only to come back 45 minutes later, announcing that the laundry was done. I assumed I was misunderstanding the Japanese at first, but it turns out he actually laundered the octopi in the washing machine to tenderize them, proving that modern technology can be employed in the most surprising circumstances.*

*Japan Chef in no way endorses the use of unauthorized and untrained laypersons to engage in the activities described in this blog post. The actions here were executed by professionals. Please do not try this at home. **

**Or if you do, just leave out the laundry soap and remember to run an empty cycle afterwards so as not to cover your next laundry load in octo-goo.

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.)