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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2280 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 26, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What is the appeal of sushi? Specifically the raw fish. I decided to try a big bowl of raw fish at my local sushi bar, and like, it was fine. I ate it, but all I could think about was how much better it would be thrown on the grill with some MSG.

There are several issues with isolating this complaint, mostly because "sushi" is so broad a category as to be almost useless. Seasonal or non-seasonal ingredients? Gunkan or nigiri?

Compounding this issue as with most raw food there is a world of difference between mediocre sushi and great sushi. I've seen the sad jokes masquerading as sushi sitting out in supermarket aisles, and if that's people's exposure to it I can easily see them write it off as a hipster food like poke or avocado toast - not worth the price and advocated for by people who hate meat and potatoes.

But on the other hand I've rarely seen anyone ever turn their nose up at well prepared otoro or even chutoro nigiri, and never in person. It's buttery, rich, and balanced well against vinegared rice. And many sushi chefs (with fairly good reason, imo), noting the high demand and the seasonality of the product, consider tuna an overrated sushi ingredient that doesn't show off the skill of the chef!

Like pizza, I've discovered that due to the simplicity involved, that any flaws or issues with the product are obvious. Every last detail is important, from the ratio of rice to topping to seasoning of every element to the knifework and preparation.

To be fair, the best sushi I've ever had in my entire life was not a primarily raw component but some pickled/cured mackerel/shime-saba from a place I won't publicize for fear of anyone finding out. I'd rather not spill the beans because of an unfortunate tendency the internet has to ruin everything it loves.

Every time I've tried sushi, I've had them take it back and cook it. I can eat raw steak and venison and dove meat(deep backwoods east Texas thing) and bacon, but fish never seems right. I'll stick to Cajun-style seafood.

You ask for your sushi to be cooked?

When I am talked into trying sushi, yes.

I decided to try a big bowl of raw fish at my local sushi bar

I'm not sure if this is an exaggeration, but if you did just eat a bowl of fish with no dipping sauce or other accompaniments then that's the equivalent of eating an unseasoned boiled potato and wondering what the big deal is with said tuber. While, as others have pointed out, the main attraction of raw fish is the texture, there are some that taste a lot better to me than others e.g. I would choose raw over cooked salmon any day, but raw tuna can have an off-putting metallic flavor unless it's of the highest quality. Also, if sushi just isn't your thing, I would suggest giving ceviche a try instead, if you can find it (especially if you ever happen to find yourself in Peru).

Apart from the texture comment in the sibling post, raw fish tastes different from cooked fish. Personally, I really like raw (and smoked) salmon and tuna, but find cooked versions to range from merely okay to bad (tasteless, tough, dry). (Finnish salmon soup is perhaps an exception, but even there, for it to be good you need to poach the fish very carefully so it just barely cooks.)

The soy sauce you dip the sashimi in is basically MSG.

For me, the main appeal is texture. I've always been someone who prioritizes texture over flavor, though both are important, and sashimi is by far my favorite food. If it weren't cost-prohibitive I would eat it every day fro 2/3 meals, mercury poisoning be damned.

Sashimi has a huge quality range with a bottom-heavy distribution. If your bowl is mostly days old tuna and tilapia it's easy to walk away unimpressed. I'd recommend giving it another chance at a quality location. High quality tuna (maguro) is great, doubly so if its a fatty belly (otoro/chutoro) cut. Yellowtail (hamachi) or amberjack (kanpachi) are amazing as well. Salmon (sake) has a more narrow quality distribution but a high floor so it's pretty reliable wherever you go. In contrast, I've never been a fan of the squid (ika) or urchin (uni).

the main appeal is texture

This is the key. In some East Asian cuisine, while the flavor matters it's just one dimension. (Interesting substack. TW descriptions of disgusting food.)

Okay, I lost a whole lot of sympathy for the Chinese.

I thought they ate all the weird shit because of the longer period of high density population and famines.

Turns out, they were just depraved hedonists.

I always assumed it was because the Cultural Revolution erased whatever food culture they previously had.

It wasn't long enough for that.

I recall reading somewhere that like WW2 POW camps, Chinese cities didn't really have a rodent problem in the early modern era. Not sure if it's true. I'm probably misremembering. In any case, Chinese in 19th century were living on the edge of starvation. Someone fired from a job was liable to literally starve to death in a few months even in normal (non famine) times.

Here's an excellent westerner account of early 20th century China.

You weren't exaggerating about that being an interesting substack. Just spent a couple hours reading around it, thanks.

No one else seems to have mentioned that you possibly just had some low-grade or older sashimi. You're working from a single data point.

Good sashimi has lots of flavor. There must be two dozen sushi restaurants in my area, but I only go to one. If I somehow have leftovers, the next day they taste like the 'fresh' sushi anywhere else.

Also, different types of fish taste very different. From your post it's not clear how much variety was in the bowl. Some are certainly much more subtle than others.

There is likely a genetic component to how much you enjoy certain kinds of food. Just like how some people find cilantro to taste like soap or Hershey's chocolate to taste like bile, there could be something just genetic that impacts your ability to enjoy sushi to the same degree that other people do.

Personally, I enjoy the fact that I can actually taste the fish when I eat sushi. I also find the sushi rice in Nigiri sushi to just be delicious in and of itself, combined with the fish it really elevates it to the next level for me. Technically, the rice is the most important part of the sushi, otherwise you'd just be eating sashimi if you wanted to focus on the raw fish. There's sushi with cooked fish, just eat the type that you like the most, although I find variety to also be an enjoyable experience and my goal when I go to a sushi restaurant is to try every piece at least once before getting seconds on the ones I enjoyed the most that day (except raw squid sushi, I never enjoyed this one in particular).

I think Makizushi sushi, which are the rolled type, are the one most people outside of Japan would think of when they think of sushi. In American sushi restaurants you'll typically find all types of rolls with a mix of ingredients like tempera shrimp, imitation crab, mayonnaise, avacodo, cucumber, etc, and I think these are more popular than actual nigiri sushi, because it fits a flavor profile more accustomed to the western palatte.

Some people like their red meat actually dripping red. Maybe it's similar with fish; though it's by no means necessarily the same people. For myself, it's fresher and juicier and there's less to distract from the taste of the thing itself.

Obviously I do not appreciate sushi soaked in sauces and toppings.

It tastes good and it’s healthy. The roll balances carbs with fat/protein together in one bite. I would eat sashimi or lox every day if I could. I don’t like cooked fish at all, lox over cooked salmon every day

For me ot just changes things up. Sometimes I like fried chicken, sometimes grilled....

I really like the taste of raw fish. Seabass, butterfish, mackerel (which is usually slightly cured), fatty tuna, the taste of sashimi isn’t mild to me, and of course there’s soy sauce and wasabi (real or fake) too.

As a man who's lived in Japan 25 years, and who goes to sushi restaurants regularly, but does not eat the sushi that is served in these restaurants, I do not know. I do know that the people around me who eat sushi and enjoy it have various levels of quality in mind to rate sushi and sushi restaurants, and sushi restaurants outside Japan are always relegated to "not really sushi" by these people. Even in Japan people are finicky. There is a conveyor-sushi up the road from me where we sometimes go, and if my father-in-law ever is up to visit and goes there with us he will either not eat or eat one or two pieces grudgingly and you can see he is trying to hold back his disgust. (Edit: Because he thinks their sushi is shit. He only goes to places he thinks have high quality sushi.)

Japanese tastes are not my tastes. Fatty tuna or マグロ maguro (see the correction to my innacuracy in this below from /u/bonsaii ) is generally held to be a delicacy. But then so is Kobe beef which I find interesting but it doesn't feel like eating beef to me when I eat it. More like something you would eat on another planet where they bring out something and say "We have tried to create something that is similar to your earth-food, but we feel we have improved upon the taste and texture" in their alien language that you can understand for some reason. You then eat the wagyu Kobe beef and you see what they mean, but you know that you will enjoy more that tenderized beef off the grill at your buddy's house more. A lot more. And where are the baked potatoes? Not in Japan, I will tell you that right now. I won't even get into chawan mushi or natto or namako or the many other foods that I see people eating and enjoying as if they are all part of an elaborate prank to get me to also eat it and rave about it. I refuse.

I recently went to Japan (at long last) and decided to give a conveyor-belt chain place (I think it was Hama Sushi?) a try. It was shockingly mediocre - the best things I could say about it is that the automation was cute, the food was obscenely cheap and Japan being Japan I did not need to tremble in expectation of certain food poisoning. In terms of flavour, you can do much better for not too much money in any medium-sized Western city if you look hard enough. In the end this was the second worst meal of the whole trip.

I always feel poignancy when I think about how most people in Japan have never had a good American-style inauthentic burrito before.

All they've had is taco bell, at most. I ate there once and found it to be extremely strange. Every random tacqueria I go to is similar to each other, even if they vary in quality, and taco bell was very different. In a not-good way.

Out of curiosity what was the worst?

Sausage curry with cheese omelette at a highly-rated lunch café near the Hirayu Onsen bus terminal. The cheese (of which there was a lot) was disturbingly flavourless, the salad on the side made me wonder how you can even grow tomatoes to be so pale in a place where you are constantly fighting off sunstroke, and the curry I can only describe as what I'd expect to happen if you took packaged curry base and kept it simmering with no added vegetables for a day while periodically adding water. To add further injury to injury, their coffee was doing the "no flavour apart from bitterness" thing that I am told some salarymen like because they want their coffee break to be a microcosm of their life. (That final misfortune befell me repeatedly as I was trying to figure out what shops would not do that, but on their own I don't count those events as meals.)

(I have no beef with Japanese curry in principle, and in fact had a great pork kakuni one at a hipster shop in Yoyogi later on.)

All in all, the trip was an overwhelming success in terms of food; the curry encounter would have amounted to an everyday gastro dud over here. If you were hoping for a proper tale of culinary gore, I did pass through China for a few days on the way back...

Sausage curry. I am imagining small little deep fried wieners, three maybe, laid crosswise the curry and rice. It's really hard to screw up curry and rice, though not, as your account gives testament, impossible. Interesting food write-ups in the links, thanks.

Your mental image is on point. I see you are indeed familiar with the lay of the land.

Maguro usually refers to tuna cuts as a class. Fatty tuna is either otoro or chutoro depending on the specific cut, in contrast to the standard red akami. Akami in particular has a bottom heavy quality distribution, with average and below quality akami having a grainy, stringy texture with a bland flavor.

Maguro yeah is just the word for tuna, with toro the belly or fattiest bit. Thanks for the correction.

I think that sushi is enjoyable in occasional doses. I wouldn't eat it all the time. I do find the taste of the sushi rice pleasant, and some fish are tasty when raw. I also think that, as someone else said, sushi rolls are quite nice with the different textures and flavors you can get.

Also, as with all things, us Americans have taken sushi and converted it to our tastes so you can get some stuff here which I would imagine would never fly in Japan. For example, here's a roll they serve at a sushi joint in Denver: "Cream cheese, California mix and smoked salmon, tempura fried and then broiled in a spicy Japanese aioli and drizzled with sweet soy". I'm sure that if he saw this, your father in law would spontaneously manifest a grave just so he could roll in it, lol. But it is good even if it's the least traditional thing you could possibly get in the realm of sushi.

I'm with you on fatty tuna though. I tried it once because I know it's highly regarded, but it was pretty meh. I didn't hate it, but I don't think I'll ever order it again. Not really very good, and way too expensive on top of that.

I'm a chain conveyor belt sushi pleb, although I will say quality varies greatly depending on location. As with most things in Japan, it's all better up in Hokkaido imo.

I have to push back on the chawan mushi, it's absolutely delicious in the winter. My mother in law makes it with chestnuts and chicken, really hard to beat. Natto-maki is the best way to eat natto.

I'm glad you like it My wife and one of my sons, do, as well. I was given a cup of it once and bad things happened. I remember choking most of it down politely, or what I hoped was politely. I suppose part of it is what they might put in it, because presumably that can vary. But I have doubts and I have no real interest in revisiting chawan mushi. I'd have to be one hungry dude to go there again.

Novelty, I’d say.

There are few things like sashimi, the raw fish aspect. If I had to eat it more than once every two weeks I’d likely quickly hate it, but once every two months or so it’s a great change-up for dietary Coolidge Effect-reasons.

It’s also great for bodybuilding as a protein source.

I'm with ya. I don't get it. Gattsuru did a great counterpoint to you but I've tried to like sushi really hard and failed. It hit me a few weeks ago that it's really expensive, not particularly nutritious, and worse than any other "Asian" food to my palate.

It tastes amazing? The best sushi I've ever had had a lot of smoked fish pieces.

Smoked imparts a flavor above your usual sushi though.

Yeah, it was omakase so they had a really wide variety of flavors.

Personally I think fresh, high-quality raw fish always tastes better (and has better texture) than cooked fish. Why, in your opinion, would it have been better cooked?

a big bowl of raw fish

That's an odd way to do it. Most raw fish foods combine several different textures to compliment the distinctive raw fish texture.

I like ahi poke, but the sesame and soy marinade is pretty important, as are the fresh chips. Ceviche is also quite good, and also has a fair bit of marinade involved, and it's usually served on a tostada or something for crunch.

As for sushi rolls, they look nice, and have an interesting texture from combining soft and crunchy foods inside a band of chewy food. And, yes, they should be dipped in at least soy sauce, probably a bit of wasabi, and I'm a fan of eel sauce as well.

Most sushi is intended to be eaten immediately after being partly-dipped in a mix of soy sauce and green horseradish 'wasabi', so the MSG part's usually covered in that context.

Meat alone-style (sashimi) and meat-on-rice-alone-style (nigiri) are... well, advocates will call them 'subtle' flavors, and if you do have sensitive tastes for meat or fish there are some interesting things better shops do with a light glaze that can't be done with cooked fish, but they're also still going to be pretty bland.

For rolls (maki or uramaki), much of the purpose is to make flavor combinations that wouldn't work otherwise. You could make a plate with grilled salmon, marinated with mango and cucumber, topped with seaweed flakes, served over rice, but it'd be drastically different than the sweet-vinegar rice and uncooked mango common to sushi rolls -- cooked cucumber can't be crisp, mango used in a marinade will be less intensely sweet, and the cooked plate would almost always want a long-grained rice with little seasoning or even a 'wild rice' for flavor. For sushi, the meat is more there to provide a strong base and some mild fatty flavors (modulo smoked salmon in heavily Westernized sushi), while the nori (dried seaweed) and other fillings are supposed to play a bigger role in what you describe as the taste.

((And even smoked salmon rolls avoid the intensively fishy smell of pan-fried or grilled fish. I don't mind it, but a lot of people do find it to detract from the meal.))

Some purists will still complain that Americanized maki goes too hard on, and I'll even agree with them in some cases (Flaming Hot CheetosTM Sushi is an abomination that not even Taco Bell has been willing to accept, yet), but the typical store or homemade maki leaves a lot of space to make it flavorful without making it overpowering.

Alternatively, look for 'poke' bowls, which tend to mix a lot of the same base materials with a lot more fixings, and can give a better intro to the underlying core flavors will still having a heartier feel and texture to them.

Just as an aside, I think I have pretty much always had real wasabi here in Japan. Like shaved off the thing into a little bowl. I quite like it when I can find something to eat it with, but you know what I like better? Yuzu-koshō, which is an actual lingering spice but to me has a better range of foods that it can be eaten with.

Happy to see more sushi discussion. I thought I was the weird one for not caring that much about nigiri sushi. However, I did have some unagi nigiri that was actually worth eating, but it's like $10 for two pieces. Edit to add I also really like yellowtail with ponzu, which, does that count as sashimi??

Try some ponzu sauce next time you make sushi if you haven't before, I really like to dip my rolls in that now.

It's the "X vs X, Japan" syndrome.

Other cuisines have popular raw fish dishes too.

Yes, and I like me some stroganina and crudo, but I don't consider sushi to be superior to either.

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