Sushi

The secret to making sushi is saran wrap. Or at least that was what I thought for a while. Preparing sushi is less about the temperature dance of ordinary cooking (with the rice being the only thing that gets hot), and more about structural engineering combined material science. The rice must be sticky, the seaweed must wrap, the fish needs to flop, and the watsabi must glue. Squeeze too tightly and everything gets a rock texture. Relax and everything falls apart. It is a messy balance and in my beginning sushi class my ingredients either spilt across the table or clung to my fingers. I made mounds of sushi shrapnel.

This is why you need saran wrap. Safe sushi employs the same principles as the safe sex kit I got my freshman week: spend a great deal of time figuring out if you have the right ingredients and if you decide to go for it, wrap everything in plastic to prevent accidents.

There wasn’t much advice about what to do with the smell.

Our instructor, an elderly Japanese man, hopped around on one leg that almost seemed like he was the losing teacher in Karate Kid XII: The City College Years. He was the same combination of firm yet supportive discipline that his own sushi must have. He was also a genius with a knife to the point that whomever did something to his leg probably hasn’t been heard from again.

He wasn’t too pleased with my saran wrapping of the sushi mat, and I was quite worried not just from a personal safety perspective but also that if I couldn’t actually fold the mat correctly I feared I was going to be useless when it came to real fish. My first two rolls came out okay, and I grew needlessly arrogant. My third roll exploded and I cheated by using a second sheet of seaweed. I don’t think the instructor caught me.

Somebody asked him where to buy fresh fish, and I, too, wondered having visions of an exotic fish market at the edge of town with seagulls flying about and rows of aquariums with strange tentacles things pouring out of them like props in a Star Wars movie. In my imagination the place would be run less by a Jabba the Hut figure, but more with a small woman with long fingers who had a dozen or so cats. Perhaps she could be missing an eye in the same battle that caused my instructor to break a leg. You would have to knock three times just to enter such a market.

The place that my instructor actually recommended was a supermarket about four blocks from where I live. I felt like and idiot having paid thirty dollars for someone to tell me, "Oh, by the way you live at the edge of Japan Town." I think there are times where we want things distant, where we cherish mystery. That sushi is better when you haven’t translated what the piece is you are eating and just hope it comes from something that has a tail. That you can see the perfectly arranged plate and have no idea the guy behind the counter still has rice stuck on the back of his hands. Of the places that I had hoped sushi came from, aisle three wasn’t one of them.

Still any good mystery has a denouement. You don’t need an entire reveal, but a sense of how some of clues came together leads to an appreciation of the structure and deeper pondering of what else is there. Exploring is good.

But if you do go out into the world keep that touch of caution. Adventures need structure where even as everything seems to be falling apart, there is a safety line that pulls things together. Bike, but carry extra tubes. Jump out of a plane, but make sure you have a reserve chute. And if you want to try making sushi remember the saran wrap.