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| Wasabi plants in cultivation |
The cuisine of Japan cannot be imagined with ingredients anything less than most fresh. This is easy to understand in the case of raw fish, which changes its taste rapidly and can host dangerous bacteria very quickly. In Japan, fish must be fresh enough to not develop any “fishy” odour. On the other side, Japanese cooks put much less emphasis on spices and flavouring; it is seen more desirable to let the ingredients' flavour stand for itself. The pure and clean pungency of wasabi fits very well to this somewhat Spartan concept of tastes.
Even in Europe, the Japanese are well-known for their affection to raw fish,
but love to this exotic foodstuff is not restricted to Japan at all (see lime about Mexican ceviche). In Japan, the simplest form of raw fish is called
sashimi [刺身, さしみ]
and consists simply of absolutely fresh fish in thin slices which are dipped into
soy sauce and wasabi paste. More known in the West is sushi,
which very often, but by no means necessarily, contains raw fish.
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| Wasabi plant |
Basically, sushi (properly spelled zushi in compounds) [鮨, 寿司, すし, スシ] is short grain rice cooked with sugar and vinegar (and thus tasting slightly sweet-sour). After cooling, the rice is brought to a flat, plain shape and topped with some flavourful food (nigiri-sushi, nigiri-zushi [握り寿司, 握り鮨, 握鮨, 握りずし, にぎりずし]). As an alternative, the sushi may be placed on dried seaweed (nori [海苔, のり]) and then rolled up; thus, the cylindric rice bits famous in the West are obtained (maki sushi, maki zushi [巻鮨, 巻寿司, まきずし]. A variant of this design is the so-called inside-out, where the rice is outside of the nori leaf. Some maki types may be seasoned with sesame oil for extra flavour; toasted sesame seeds are a common coating for the rice surface of the inside-out maki.
The most common variants of sushi contain raw fish or raw sea foods, e.g., salmon (sake [鮭, さけ, しゃけ]), tuna (tekka [鉄火, てっか] or maguro [鮪, まぐろ]), shrimp (ebi [蝦, 蛯, 海老, えび]) or squid (ika [烏賊, 墨魚, いか]), but there are also sushi types without fish: Scrambled egg (tamago [卵, 玉子, たまご] “egg”), fresh carrot or cucumber (kappa [かっぱ]), and pickled vegetables, predominantly radish (oshinko [お新香, 御新香, おしんこ]). Sushi employing fried or boiled (or even raw) meat is less common, but not unheard of. Sushi is commonly served with soy sauce, wasabi paste and pickled ginger, of which there are two types: gari [がり] is young ginger pickled in vinegar and sugar which has a pale to white colour; beni shōga [紅生姜, べにしょうが]) is a similar product that also contains perilla leaves to which it owes its pink colour. Fragrant herbs like perilla, water pepper or young leaves of sichuan pepper (kinome) are also possible decorations for sushi.
Since sushi
is so popular in Western countries, new variants are being created every
day, some of which use ingredients which are not at all typical for Japan
(avocado, cheese, tomatoes with basil).
Indeed, sushi is as versatile as the Western concept of
sandwich and it can be seen as a special Japanese version of sandwich that
substitutes bread by another processed cereal, boiled rice. From that analogy
it becomes more understandable that almost everything that can appear on top
of a slice of bread has also been tried to make into a sushi – often (though certainly not always)
with amazing success.
