This focus on frozen and non frozen fish made me want to look into the issue a bit more. Since rules and regulations always just seem to be implemented but never go away, I wanted to see if anyone had tried and solve this issue from a “foodie point” of view. Not a health official point of view kind of. Because I don’t think most of them will ever be into sushi. They just know too much about what these little parasite buggers can do to you. 
This adorable old Japanese woman is 84 years old, and has been making nori maki since she was a little girl. Here she shows how to make saikuzushi, or festival sushi. This is considered an art form where rice is tinted different colors, sectioned off and rolled. When it is sliced, complex images are created. They say in this story that in that area, if a girl can’t make more than three of these rolls, she can’t marry!
Making saikuzushi is really hard, I have tried a couple of times and just gotten frustrated and the patterns have turned out looking nothing like art. I guess it takes a lot of practice. Good thing I am already married!
Mmmmm. Sushi in LA is just fabulous! This summer I spent a month there, and one of my goals was trying out as many sushi places as I could. We ended up eating a lot of sushi…
I did go for known favorites, though. I read up in advance on sushi websites like citysearch and chowhound.com to avoid having too much mediocre or just plain bad sushi.
The funny thing was that I went to LA thinking I was mostly into fusion and modern sushi restaurants, while I actually turned out to be quite a traditionalist… Super famous restaurants like “The Hump” did not even make it to my top 5 list… But that might be a different story. More on that later. Well. Here is my list.
>> Continue reading ‘My top five sushi restaurants in Los Angeles’
Bentō (弁当 or べんとう) is a single-portion takeout or home-packed meal common in Japanese cuisine. A traditional bento consists of rice, fish or meat, and one or more pickled or cooked vegetables as a side dish.
Containers range from disposable mass produced to hand crafted lacquer ware. While bento are readily available at convenience stores and bento shops (弁当屋, bentō-ya?) throughout Japan, it is still considered an essential skill of a Japanese housewife (Hey!? What about the skills of the househusband? Huh?) to be able to prepare an appealing boxed lunch.
Chow.com one of the most popular web sites devoted to food and drink, and a lot of their users are seriously devoted to sushi! Their goal is to inject that sensibility into its smorgasbord of recipes, restaurant reviews, party hints, video tutorials and coverage of the marketing and culture of food. What I have used the most is their reviews of sushi restaurant. If there is a place I have heard of, I can be almost sure that it has a review on this site already. Here is what they say about themselves:
About 1,300 people participated, both young and old in “Top of Japan jumbo paste tuna roll rally”. The maki was a tekka maki (Tuna roll) and consisted of 240 kg of big eye tuna, 490 kg of sushi rice 490, 2,020 sheets of nori and as mentioned - 1,300 people, young and old did the deed. Fantastic! I have a problem rolling them with only me involved…
Writing about the new EU-regulations and the reaction they got in the UK, I also wanted to find out what this means for Norwegian sushi restaurants. I think they already have to comply with these regulations. This is a factsheet I found on the Norwegian Food Safety Authority’s website, which go in more detail about what is legal to do with raw fish in Norway.
To summarize: Norwegian farmed fish does not need to be frozen to be eaten raw, but most other imported and wild fish must be (fishrasism? :)). The frozen fish must reach an internal temperature of - 20 °C or lower for at least 24 hours. This has to be documented - both of the supplier and the restaurant. Restaurants etc. must be able to document also how they ensure control of the potential health risk posed by food sold. In the end I guess it is up to us sushi eater to ask for these this documentation, but I can’t ever see myself actually doing that. I want to trust that the sushi chef wants me well.
>> Continue reading ‘Sushi factsheet - Norwegian regulations’
In 1994, Karen “Suedy” Sasaki saw an announcement in a magazine for a national cookie contest and wondered if she could come up with something to do with a cookie that had not been done before…
Then one day when she was pressing a sticky cookie mixture into a pan, it reminded her of pressing rice onto nori when she made sushi with her grandmother. That was it! A cookie-based sushi with chocolate and confections for the toppings and fillings.
Sushi chefs claim that a European Union health and safety directive about freezing fish would ruin the quality of their food.
I think there will always be a fight between health inspectors and raw fish makers… Sushi chefs who train for years to become sushi masters, will argue that freezing and then defrosting the fish can ruin the quality, especially the texture of popular breeds such as salmon, mackerel and whitefish. Health Safety Agencies are more concerned with that people accidentally get sick from eating infected, raw fish.
>> Continue reading ‘EU fish regulations upsets sushi chefs’
Greg Lippmann, a securities trader at Deutsche Bank in New York eats (at least ate) sushi as many as six times a week. Having grown tired of friends’ endless requests for recommendations, he created The Sushi Spreadsheet.
The list was last updated back in 2004, so I am not sure if all of these are still around, or that his ratings still apply. But we are happy that people do such things. It is in good Sushi or Death spirit and we applaude mr. Lippmann!
Links and attachment
The Lippmann sushi list - New York (pdf)
Most Excel-lent Sushi - original article
