Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - All About Sushi

Episode Date: September 13, 2022

You can find restaurants serving Japan’s greatest cultural export all over the world: sushi.  While many people enjoy sushi, most people have no idea of the origins of sushi beyond the fact that it comes from Japan.  There is also a great deal of confusion about what proper sushi etiquette is and what constitutes real sushi.  Learn more about the history of sushi and the global sushi industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Subscribe to the podcast!  https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Darcy Adams Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com Search Past Episodes at fathom.fm Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ Everything Everywhere is an Airwave Media podcast." or "Everything Everywhere is part of the Airwave Media podcast network Please contact [e-mail] to advertise on Everything Everywhere. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All over the world, you can find restaurants serving Japan's greatest cultural export, sushi. While many people enjoy sushi, most people have no idea of the origins of sushi beyond the fact that it comes from Japan. There's also a great deal of confusion about what proper sushi etiquette is and what constitutes real sushi. Learn more about the history of sushi and the global sushi industry on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night and how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR.

Many people would be surprised to learn that sushi's earliest origins aren't actually in Japan, but most probably in China. Somewhere in southern China or Southeast Asia, there developed a technique for the preservation of fish during the rainy season. Fish would be pickled in barrels along with salt and rice. When the fish was later unpacked for consumption, the rice, which served as a packing material, was usually thrown away, and the fish was consumed separately. The rice that was thrown out wasn't anything that looked like rice after the fermentation process. It was more of a slime at this point. This fermented fish became known as Narezushi. It was considered a delicacy precisely because the rice was thrown away, making it a luxury.

The fish was nothing like the fish served with modern sushi today. Narazushi first appeared in Chinese written records in the 4th century. Sometime in the 8th century, pickled fish crossed the sea and arrived in Japan. Over several centuries, the taste of the Japanese began to change, and they began removing the fish from the pickling barrel earlier and consuming it with the rice it was packed in. This became known as Nomenari. This might have just been a matter of preferring the taste of just partially fermented fish or consuming it in such a way as not to waste any rice.

The change was recorded between the mid-14th century and the mid-16th century. Around the late 16th and early 17th centuries, there was a huge change in Japanese diets. Most people began eating a third midday meal. Boiling became more popular than steaming for cooking, and most importantly, vinegar became added to the list of common cooking ingredients. The beginnings of something that you might recognize as sushi began during the Edo period, which took place from the early 17th to the mid-19th century. A new style of consumption developed known as Hayasushi or fast sushi.

The big difference between Hayazushi and the previous Narazushi was the use of vinegar. Hyasushi was not fermented and didn't contain the latic acid from the fermentation process, but rather acetic acid from vinegar. This completely changed the taste and also made it much quicker to produce. The new tradition of a midday meal, combined with the faster preparation time, made this food style very popular all across Japan. The modern form of sushi, which is known as Nagiri sushi, was developed in 1820 by a Tokyo chef by the name of Hanaya Yohei.

While this bore a resemblance to modern sushi, and he did coin the name Nagiri sushi, there were several major differences. For starters, the vinegar rice ball served with the fish was much larger than the amount of rice served today. And second, the fish wasn't totally raw. In the early 19th century, there was still no refrigeration, so food spoilage was still an issue. Hanaya would actually lightly cook the fish or marinate the fish in either vinegar or soy sauce. The fish was still pretty fresh, but it couldn't be refrigerated or frozen once caught and taken home from the fish market, because 19th century.

Here I should note something that often confuses people. The word sushi doesn't refer to fish. Sushi refers to the vinegar-infused rice that the fish is served with. So, while sushi is more often than not served with fish, it isn't the fish. that makes sushi sushi. After Hanaya, Nagiri sushi spread quickly throughout Ito, or what is today, Tokyo.

In 1852, one writer noted that you could find two Nagiri restaurants for every one Soba Noodle restaurant. During this period, another type of sushi developed. In the mid-18th century, a sheet form of edible seaweed was developed known as Nori, and it led to the development of fish and rice

rolled up inside the seaweed sheets. These roles of nori became known as maki sushi. Throughout the 19th century, sushi in Japan was basically the equivalent of fast food. It wasn't a high-end dining experience. It was something fast and cheap that you could have gotten from a neighborhood sushi stand. As I alluded to before, refrigeration was one of the biggest technical innovations that changed the world of sushi. Refrigeration and freezing allowed fish to remain fresh for much longer periods of time. This meant cooking or marinating fish was no longer.

necessary before it was placed on the sushi rice. And it was really refrigeration that allowed for the form of sushi that we know today. And it also allowed for the eventual global popularity of sushi. While sushi was popular in Japan, it wasn't really known anywhere else. Japan was close to the rest of the world until the Meiji Restoration, on which I did a previous episode. Even as Japan opened up to the rest of the world, sushi wasn't something that caught on anywhere else. It was the migration of Japanese outside of Japan that brought sushi to the rest of the world. One of the first countries outside of Japan where sushi restaurants could be found was in the United States. The first recorded sushi restaurant in the U.S. was in the Little Tokyo

neighborhood of Los Angeles in 1906. Japanese culture became a fad in the United States in the very early 20th century, and sushi was often served at high-class events where the people throwing the event wanted to appear trendy. However, this was a rather short-lived trend, as the United States and Japan agreed to stop Japanese immigration into the country after 1907. With the outbreak of the Second World War, almost all Japanese restaurants in the country, the vast majority of which were in California, were forced to close down. After the war, sushi began to appear again in Japanese communities around the world. Yet decades after the war ended, well into the 1980s, sushi was still a relatively obscure

Japanese food you had to go out of your way to get. In major cities such as Los Angeles or Vancouver, you could probably only find a small number of sushi restaurants, and the vast majority of people around the world had probably never even heard of sushi, let alone tried it. Nonetheless, a few sushi restaurants during this period began to innovate on their own. The California roll was developed, not surprisingly, in California. The role's origin is in dispute, as several sushi chefs claimed to have invented it. It simply replaced fatty tuna, known as Toro, with avocado in a maki sushi roll with crab and cucumber. The first mention of a California roll,

appeared in print in 1979, and it soon found its way back to Japan and on sushi menus there. One of the things that really kick-started a revival in Japanese cuisine was the 1980 television miniseries Shogun. It was shot on location in Japan with Japanese actors, and it was a ratings hit. Innovation, such as the California role and the spicy tuna role invented in the early 1980s in Los Angeles, made sushi more palatable for Americans. Once they got in the door, however, they soon discovered just how great sushi was. Further American innovations, such as rainbow rolls and Philadelphia rolls, further modified sushi for Western tastes.

Today, sushi is a huge global business. You can find sushi restaurants in most countries and in most major cities around the world. The entire global sushi industry today is estimated to be close to $100 billion, with most of the industry located in the Asia-Pacific region. While sushi has become global and popular, There are some quirks about the industry and the etiquette of eating sushi that many people are not aware of. One of the first deals with the legendary fish known as fugu or pufferfish. Pufferfish has a gland inside of it which produces tetrodotoxin.

Tetrodotoxin can be very lethal if consumed. There are specialty restaurants in Japan that serve fugu. However, sushi chefs who serve fugu must be specially licensed by the Japanese government, requiring at least three years of training. Deaths are very rare, but not unheard of, and according to legend, the Emperor of Japan is not allowed to eat Fugu. I have personally never tried Fugu nor had the opportunity, but if it's something that strikes your fancy, I would never, ever, ever try eating it outside of Japan. One question that many people have is, what is the proper way to eat sushi?

Are you supposed to use chopsticks, or are you supposed to use your hands? And the answer is that either is fine. I've been to high-end sushi restaurants in Japan and all over the world, and I've seen people do both. Personally, I use my hands for eating nagiri and maki sushi, and I'll use chopsticks for any special roll with something on the outside, or if I'm eating sashimi, which is raw fish. A piece of nagiri, or any piece of a roll that is cut, is designed to be put in your mouth whole, so eating just half a piece of it in one bite would be considered bad etiquette. When you enter many sushi restaurants, the chefs will often shout, Yerashimease, which means welcome in Japanese. You aren't obligated to say anything in return, but if you want to impress them with some Japanese, the proper response would be Ojama Shimasu,

which means I'm sorry for disturbing you. If you ever try to make your own sushi, be aware that you can only really make sushi out of saltwater fish. Freshwater fish have bacteria in them, which requires them to be cooked before consumption. And this is why you will never see sushi made out of smallmouth bass or trout. If you visit a sushi restaurant, unless you're with a large group, I always recommend sitting at the bar rather than at a table. If you sit at the bar, you can start up a discussion with the chef. If you find the sushi chef to be good, you can order a dish, omacase, which means entrust in Japanese. You basically let the chef serve you whatever they want.

And if you were to visit a super ultra high-end sushi restaurant, the entire menu and a restaurant is omacase. You eat what you are served, and most probably the only seats in the restaurant. restaurant are going to be at the bar. How can you tell if you're eating at a quality sushi restaurant? Having eaten at sushi all over the world and all over Japan, here are three things that I personally look for. Very few restaurants will have all three of these things, and again, this is just my personal opinion. The first is Ama Ebby, also known as sweet shrimp. This will be the most common of the items you'll find, but the top restaurants will also serve the heads of the sweet shrimp deep fried. They're quite crunchy and tasty. The second item is Ankemo or monkfish

liver. This is fantastic and is often served with dicon radish, but it's very hard to find and most places will not have it on their menu. The third thing is if they serve Tobico or Ikura, this is flying fish row and salmon row respectively. Most sushi restaurants will have this, but what will set a restaurant apart is if they have the option of serving it with a raw quail egg. Now, just because a sushi restaurant doesn't have any of these things on the menu doesn't make it bad, but I've always found that if they do, they're probably very good. I'll end this episode by making one other suggestion. If you should ever happen to find yourself in Tokyo, I would make a special trip to the Toyosu fish market.

This is the world's largest fish market, and it's where almost every sushi restaurant in Tokyo goes early in the morning to buy their fish. You have to wake up really early, or stay up really late as I did, but it was where you're going to, it will be an experience unlike anything else. I had the pleasure of visiting the old Skeekegee fish market, which the new Toyosu market replaced. They also have several sushi restaurants right on site, and you can have some of the freshest breakfast sushi in the world. And if you also just happen to be there in the first week of the year,

you might catch the New Year's tuna auction, which is known for regularly setting records for the world's most expensive fish. The current record is over $3 million set in 2019, for a 278 kilogram or 612 pound bluefin tuna. Sushi is unique among the world's cuisines. It mostly involves food that isn't cooked, yet training to become a sushi chef can be far more demanding. But sushi isn't a food, however.

It's an art form that's designed to delight all of the senses, as well as allow you to take part in a centuries-old Japanese cultural experience. Everything Everywhere Daily is an Airwave Media podcast. The executive producer is Darcy Adams. The associate producers are Thorne Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just wanted to extend a big thank you to everyone who is supporting the show over at patreon.com. I have show merchandise available there, including hoodies, t-shirts, and stickers. Plus, it really just helps me get this show out every single day, including, of course, weekends and holidays.

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