Product Description

From Hiroko Shimbo, the well-known and widely admired authority on Japanese food, here is the most comprehensive, engaging, and instructive book that has ever been written on the fascinating world of sushi—the delights of eating it, preparing it, and savoring it in its many forms.

Shimbo introduces you first to the history of sushi (it started out as a way of preserving fish) and shows how it has evolved into the phenomenon it is today, relished by food lovers the world over. She then takes you into a typical sushi bar—guiding you in all aspects of the experience, from the ordering of sushi and the etiquette of eating it to the appropriate exchange with your sushi chef—all in Japanese, of course (you can tear off this sheet and the one on the back flap to tuck into your pocket so you’ll have these valuable tips with you the next time you visit a sushi bar).

For the home cook there are step-by-step illustrated instructions on how to make sushi rice properly and how to shape the rice around a variety of delicious fillings (primarily of cooked and preserved fish and seafood, omelets, vegetables, and seasonings). There are sauces and accompaniments to complement the sushi meal. A new world will open up as you discover sushi pouches, tossed and arranged sushi salads, sushi for the lunch box, and sushi dolls to make with your children.

Now, along with the professional chef, you are ready to tackle raw fish and seafood, and Shimbo gives you all the tools—what fish to buy, how to be sure that is safe to eat raw, and how to slice it expertly.

It’s all here in this all-encompassing, gloriously illustrated book, along with stories about fishermen, knife makers, tea growers, wasabi farmers, and sake brewers, to inspire American cooks to create, and enjoy, our own perfect sushi.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #156532 in Books
• Published on: 2006-10-17
• Released on: 2006-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 304 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781400042081
• Condition: USED - LIKE NEW
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Hiroko Shimbo is a trained sushi chef, restaurant consultant, cooking instructor, and author of The Japanese Kitchen, which was a Food & Wine magazine “Best of the Best” winner and an IACP Julia Child Cookbook Award nominee. She has also written for Saveur and other magazines. A native of Japan, she lives in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The History of Sushi


Ancient Sushi

The tale of sushi begins centuries ago. Sushi originated not from a desire for novelty but from economic need—the need to preserve fish, an important source of protein. The first sushi—freshwater fish salted and pickled in fermenting rice—originated not in Japan but in the rice-growing region of northern Southeast Asia, where the method is still used. That primordial sushi making soon spread to China but disappeared there during the thirteenth century, when the Mongolian nomads who subjugated the country introduced a very different food culture. Before the Chinese abandoned this method of fish pickling, though, their frequent contact with the Japanese brought the practice to my country. No one can say with certainty when sushi crossed the Sea of Japan, but the earliest written references to it appeared in the eighth century AD. Over subsequent centuries, this ancient form of sushi evolved into today’s world-famous sushi cuisine.

In ancient times, the most common way to preserve fish was to salt it, and this method is still used throughout much of the world. But fish that is salted and dried gets hard as a board, such as bacalao, the salt cod of Europe and America. Using rice as well as salt in hot, humid areas of Asia created a product markedly different in flavor, aroma, and texture. The cooked rice fermented, producing lactic acid, which both aided preservation and imparted a pleasant sharp, tart flavor. (Some scholars believe that the word sushi comes from an older Japanese word meaning “tart” or “acid.”) At the same time, the plump, moist rice grains kept the fish tender and moist.

But there were drawbacks to this early preservation method. The pickling took at least a year, and when the process was through, the rice was too pasty to eat. It was wiped off the fish and thrown away. This wasted the always valuable rice crop.

Primitive sushi making is still practiced in some rural areas of Japan. In Shiga Prefecture, funa-zushi is made from local funa, freshwater carp, which is pickled in rice and salt for a year. Proud locals enjoy watching the reactions of outsiders who taste this delicacy for the first time. Most tourists—and I mean Japanese tourists, not foreigners—are so repelled by the smell of funa-zushi that they shun it without taking a bite.

I find that owners of funa-zushi souvenir shops, who sell gift-wrapped boxes of the delicacy to curious out-of-towners, like to exchange stories about their experiences. Some have received angry phone calls from customers: “The sushi was spoiled when I opened it; I had to throw it away! Send me back my money.”

Locals lament that the world doesn’t appreciate the strong smell and distinctive taste of funa-zushi, which they compare to mature Roquefort cheese. One 8-inch funa-zushi, however, can cost eighty dollars, much more than a generous slice of Roquefort cheese. Alas, these die-hard traditionalists are unlikely to succeed in bringing funa-zushi to the world.


The Evolution of Sushi

By the fourteenth century, sushi began to change. Although agricultural improvements had greatly increased Japanese rice production, rice was still an expensive food, and the Japanese had come to believe that it shouldn’t be wasted in preserving fish. So a new sushi evolved, nama nare-zushi, or short-pickled sushi. With the shorter fermentation time, the fish grew only mildly tart, and because the rice didn’t disintegrate, it was good to eat along with the fish.

By the seventeenth century, the Japanese were producing rice vinegar, and this new product inspired the development of an even faster sushi. Rice vinegar and sake, rice wine, now served as preserving agents in place of lactic-acid fermentation. By the nineteenth century, haya-zushi, quick sushi, had nearly replaced the ancient, slow method of preserving fish in fermenting rice.

But soon even haya-zushi was found too slow. It was the beginning of the mercantile age in Japan, and busy artisans and merchants needed a fast lunch; travelers wanted a tasty snack. Inevitably a quickly produced item such as oshi-zushi, pressed sushi, would become the vogue. It was called hako-zushi, boxed sushi, because of the way it was made. Vinegar-flavored rice was laid in a round or square wooden mold about one foot across. Sliced fish was laid over the rice, and a lid that fit inside the mold was pressed on top of the fish and rice. The mold was removed, the sushi was cut into bite-sized pieces, and presto—there was the world’s first fast food. As boxed sushi became popular, eggs and vegetables joined fish as toppings for the rice. In the Kansai region around Osaka and Kyoto, this sushi is still popular today.

But in Edo—the city now known as Tokyo—even boxed sushi was soon considered too slow. With more than a million residents, Edo was Japan’s political and business center and the capital of the powerful Tokugawa shogunate, whose regimes spanned the interval from 1600 to 1868. During this feudal era, when Japan was closed to nearly all foreign trade and influence, the domestic economy flourished, peace reigned, and Japanese culture and arts, including the culinary arts, reached their zenith.

Imagine that you had a sushi stand in Edo, then the largest city in the world. You would have served nigiri-zushi or even invented it. You would have cooked the rice, tossed it with salt and sake lee vinegar (page 25), and waited for a customer to approach. Upon receiving his order, you would have formed a small rice ball in your hand, carefully laid a slice of fish on top, and immediately handed the ball to the impatient customer standing in front of you. No pressing in a box, no cutting, no waiting. Such a morsel was nigiri-zushi, the ultimate fast food. It was an instant success, and its popularity was contagious. Sushi stands, sushi caterers, and sushi restaurants sprang up like mushrooms on every corner of this busy city. The demand for sushi grew so great and the sellers so greedy that the embarrassed shogun government arrested two hundred sushi chefs for drastically overcharging their customers.

In those early days, nigiri-zushi was always topped with cooked or cured fish or shellfish, such as kohada (gizzard shad), maguro (tuna), aji (horse mackerel), miru-gai (gaper clam), anago (conger eel), awabi (abalone), kuruma-ebi (kuruma prawn), or ika (squid). The use of raw fish, the essence of today’s sushi, began only after World War II, when the development of high-speed transportation and modern refrigeration and freezing equipment made it possible to transport and store raw fish safely.

Early nigiri-zushi was different from today’s in another way: it was almost three times as large. There is a curious bit of history behind the shrinking of sushi. At the end of World War II, Japan faced a severe rice shortage. The American occupational forces set up a rice-rationing system and decreed that all sushi restaurants must close. Kataro Kurata, a well-known chef at Sushi-ei (a restaurant still operating in the Ginza district of Tokyo), appealed to the staff at general headquarters: “Sushi plays as important a role in Japan’s culinary culture,” he said, “as the sandwich does in America’s.” When the appeal reached the highest levels, sushi restaurants were allowed to reopen—on the condition that the chefs use only rationed rice brought in by their customers. And so a standard was set: each cup of raw rice made ten pieces of sushi, including seven nigiri-zushi and three pieces of a traditional thin roll. Although a few heretical restaurants are now supersizing sushi to satisfy the American craving for larger food portions, the postwar prescription is still nearly universally followed. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur himself may have set the size of modern sushi.


More Sushi!

In the nineteenth century, other kinds of sushi developed: thick and thin rolls (maki-zushi and nori-maki), stuffed tofu pockets (inari-zushi), and sushi rice served in a bowl (chirashi-zushi).

Nori-maki and Maki-zushi. Both the thin sushi roll, nori-maki (nori roll), and the thick roll, maki-zushi (sushi roll), first appeared late in the Edo period. The thin roll arose in Edo (now Tokyo) and the thick roll in the Kansai region (Osaka and Kyoto prefectures). Both rolls are made with nori, a sea vegetable known as laver in England and Wales. In Japan, nori is harvested from bays, formed into thin, dark green sheets by a process similar to papermaking, and dried. For nori-maki and maki-zushi, nori is rolled around sushi rice and a filling, and then the roll is sliced into white rounds with a green perimeter and colorful center. Both thin and thick sushi rolls are frequently prepared at home as lunch box fare.

The Kansai thick roll, futo-maki, uses a whole sheet of nori plus an added quarter-sheet for strength; traditional fillings include simmered kanpyo gourd, shiitake mushrooms, omelet, and sweet fish flakes. Today’s thick rolls may have other ingredients, such as raw fish and tempura shrimp.

The Tokyo thin roll, hoso-maki, uses only a half sheet of nori, and in the early days, kanpyo gourd was the only filling used. Today’s thin rolls come in many varieties, including kappa-maki (with cucumber), tekka-maki (with tuna), and oshinko-maki ...

Customer Reviews

Truly "everything" sushi book
Hiroko Shimbo's "The Sushi Experience" is indeed everything anyone would (possibly could) want to know about sushi. For food writers, restaurant reviewers and ambitious caterers in a sophisticated marketplace, this book would be ideal. It's an excellent reference book, and any caterer/chef trying to upgrade their skills for clients trending toward Asian cuisine would find it a current, insightful addition to their reference/resource materials. The techniques are brilliantly photographed and fully explained, but they are intricate. The equipment needed is also rather specialized.

This is not a book for novice cooks, whether they be fans of sushi and Japanese cuisine or not. It would be interesting for you to have around the house, but it would likely be awhile before a beginner, start from scratch sushi cook, was created. If you really want to learn to prepare sushi and use this book as your guide, Shimbo will get you there, but it can be intimidating to flip through the armada of techniques, ingredients and recipes she's assembled.

Now that the audience for the book has been identified: Shimbo does a fabulous job detailing the history, development, evolution and vast genres of sushi and Japanese cuisine. The book is heavier on text and "paragraph form" information than almost any "cookbook" I've ever seen; indeed, it's more like a textbook, and a fine one at that.

Her explanations of the different ingredients, textures, colors and compositions of sushi is fascinating and written with the understanding of the American palate. Some of the recipes are suitable for children, and many of the sauces are fine with other seafood dishes -- meaning they don't have to go with sushi and are fine in their own right.

Photos are vivid, both on the recipes and in the step-by-step demonstrations. A must resource, if you're intensely interested in learning how to prepare sushi and the subsets of cuisine related to it.

The Best Available
Another reviewer commented on the lack of picture illustrations. At first, I had that problem. After reading more of the book, I realized procedure pictures were scatter throughout the book. She demonstrates an easy block-shaped cut for beginners in the middle of the recipes section, and I couldn't find the angular cut most restaurant chefs use. At the beginning of the recipes section, there are diagrams of the angular cut under "master cut." The organization could be more intuitive. That aside, the recipes are delicious and compare with some of the best sushi I've had in Los Angeles. She's enthusiastic about authenticity, but does reluctantly give a page to American sushi mayonnaise recipes. Fantastic buy.

Pretty good
This isn't the greatest cookbook in the world as it is unfortunately very lacking in comprehensive diagrams of essential mechanical procedures, forcing the reader to divine the correct series of manual actions to perform from textual descriptions of them. It is however chock full of incredibly detailed information on many aspects of Japanese culinary history and well worth every penny it goes for here on Amazon for this reason alone.