Poisonous blowfish

I ended up by chance watching a chef dismember a poisonous blowfish. I walked into the restaurant thinking it was a seafood place, and only found out halfway through my meal that the head chef was a certified blowfish handler.

It was a bit creepy when I first walked in, since Kakashika is located in a basement, and as I opened the doors, there was nobody inside except the staff. Normally I’d walk away, but hurrying up the stairs didn’t seem like a realistic option, and the waitress was already hushing me to my seat. Since I was the only person on the counter, the chef and I quickly started talking, and I think they were mostly amused at my interest in Japanese food. Somehow we got to the tale of me eating a pulsating shrimp, when a second chef came in from the back holding a massive blowfish and proudly announced that this one had just stopped shaking

I immediately asked if I could stay to see how they chop the fish. My biggest surprise was how much of the fish is inedible. I had somehow assumed that the liver was the dangerous part, and that it would be a small section of the fish. No. I’d say that about 2/3 of the fish, including the skin, ended up in the garbage bin.

I have to say that it seems pretty stupid to eat a fish that can kill us if handled incorrectly, and which doesn’t taste so good anyhow. The chef himself admitted to the flavour being unremarkable. When I pressed him to describe it to me, he said that unless he was told it was blowfish, he wouldn’t be able to tell, except that the meat is tough.

I ate alligator meat once, and it was damn tough. Maybe there’s a reason why we don’t normally eat these animals: they can kill us back, and they’re not so tasty to begin with. Almost nobody dies though from blowfish if handled by a certified chef — most deaths occur from people trying to slice the fish at home after buying it from a unscrupulous purveyor.

Unfortunately I didn’t get a tasting to form a strong opinion on blowfish (my wallet is not that deep), but you can read my review of their lunch service and find the contact info here.

Deconstructed peanut butter sandwiches

This is my feeble attempt at being original.

I got the idea while commuting; I started thinking how I could combine the flavours of a peanut butter sandwich in a different way. I also knew that I wanted to learn how to use agar-agar (a seaweed extract that works like gelatin, quite common in Japan), which has become quite common in avant-garde kitchens.

The idea was the following: take grape juice (in lieu of grape jelly) and set it with agar agar. Then, mash peanut butter and bananas together into a paste, and sandwich it between two layers of set juice. The result? Peanut butter sandwiches in which the jelly turns into the casing.

The problem was that I didn’t know how to work with agar agar. I was under the impression that simply warming it up would make it set the juice. Instead, the juice never set and became a gooey mess. The goo tasted alright, but it was a mess to eat and see.

Two weeks later I took another stab at it, and this time I boiled the agar agar. What a difference that makes! The cubes worked well, and I was quite pleased with the results. I wouldn’t say this tastes awesome, but you can definitely recognize the flavours of a peanut butter sandwich.

The tart wife

Bartending can turn into a menial job. After a few months, you know the recipes by heart; since I’m at a Mexican restaurant, I make the same margaritas night after night. I don’t have to think anymore…just give me the bottles and I’ll pour the right amounts out of pure muscle memory.

Once settled into a routine, it’s little details that can keep the job interesting. For me, it’s been two: continuing to practice latte art with the espresso machine, and coming up with the occasional new cocktail for the regulars.

My most popular off-the-menu cocktail is a passion caipirina. I’ve noticed that the cocktails I make tend to hide the punch of alcohol and turn the drink into something super easy to sip. This passion caipirina is no exception, and customers usually down the glass fast. It is however on the tart side, and I felt compelled to warn a table once about it.

“If you’re looking for something different,” I said after they grilled me on every cocktail on the menu, “I could always make a passion caipirina. But, I must warn you that it is quite tart.”

“Tart? Well, it’ll be just like my wife.”

Dead silence on the table of two couples dining together. Finding nothing better to say, I go back and make the drinks. As the night wears on, the tart wife watches in silent horror her husband pound back five passion caipirinas while all she has is a glass of red.

Passion Caipirina
60ml of cachaza
20-25 grams of passion fruit puree
10-20 ml of simple syrup (depends on the passion fruit)
1/2 lime cut into small pieces

Pour all the ingredients into a heavy glass and muddle everything. Top the glass with crushed ice, and more cachaza if you want.

Hanami

It’s hanami (cherry blossom viewing) season in Japan, which means only one thing…it’s perfectly acceptable to get drunk midday at a park (and be blown away by how beautiful the trees are…but really, it’s all about the beer)!

I can’t give up butter

Japan has a shortage of butter…it’s been brewing for sometime, but now it’s reached the tipping point for a butter lover like myself. I cannot find butter at grocery stores anymore. All that is available is super expensive stuff or margarine (you can read a news story that explains the whole thing here).

I hear that some people find out when the stores get their shipments and go that day to get their butter fix. I haven’t done that yet, but I ran out of butter last week. In my desperation, I hit several stores trying to find the coveted curdled milk fat to no avail.

I finally caved in because I bought some amazing bread and had no butter to spread on it. I lined up for close to an hour (pretty stupid if you ask me) to get bread from Dominique Saibron, who is supposed to be Paris’s top baker, and who just opened his first store in Tokyo.

I paid a whooping seven dollars for 200 grams of ordinary butter, when I was used to paying about 2.50 for it.

It seems that the markets will twist my arm and force me to cut down on butter I should consider getting a cow…

Tuna cravings

“Sushi, fuck yeah” — the ubiquity of sushi hits me in the face as I listen to the theme song of the parody movie “Team America.” The plot goes like this: America has run out of ideas to win the war on terror, and they are in desperate need for help. They enlist the best actor they can find in Hollywood, and tell him to infiltrate terrorist cells by way of his acting skills. The theme song — America, fuck yeah — is a long list of all the Middle East will experience once it is dominated by America. High notes include are “liberty, fuck yeah,” “porn, fuck yeah,” and “Wal-Mart, fuck yeah.” Interestingly enough, only two foods are mentioned: one is mayonnaise, and the other is sushi.

Fifty years ago it would have been unthinkable to think of sushi as a cultural export of the United States to the Middle East. Sushi was the food of the enemy. Japan’s image in the United States after WWII was that of a people who were crazy about their emperor, and were also crazy enough to fly a kamikaze mission or commit harakiri.

Fifty years ago it would have also been unthinkable to predict how our appetite for tuna would change. Tuna was considered, both in Japan and the United States, cat food. Fishermen thought of it as a nuisance and would often throw it back into the sea if they caught one by accident. All of this has changed. Nowadays tuna populations are severely overfished, and thousands of people make a living supplying fresh, sashimi-grade tuna to restaurants across the world (not to mention the canning business).

Until I came to Japan, I had never seen a whole tuna. My closest contact had been a respectable hunk of meat at a sushi restaurant in Vancouver, or the countless cans I’ve bought over the years, but neither of them begins to reveal what a tuna looks like. It wasn’t until I found myself at 6 am at Tokyo’s Tsukiji market that I first saw fisherman slice the tunas with meter-long knives or with a precision chainsaw. It wasn’t until I was walking in the old district of Asakusa during a festival and found a store that bought a whole tuna and was selling every bit of it, that I came to realize the sheer magnitude of the fish.

I don’t think of tunas as fish anymore; I think it’s better to think of them as ocean buffalos…wild, indomitable, and massive! And our hunger for them continues to increase.

Unfortunately for tunas, they are caught in a legal limbo of our making. For most of humanity, the oceans have been regulated by the concept of mare liberum. This means that the ocean, and its resources, belong to nobody. However, the moment one of us catches something, it becomes our private property. Of course this is a recipe for ecological disaster because we all know that if we don’t catch something now, somebody else will, and there might be nothing left later.

Over time there have been numerous attempts to reign in our appetite for the oceans, but one of the most important piece of legislation was the introduction of Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) in the 1970s. This law gives countries the rights to regulate fishing for 200 miles outside their coast. Even though EEZs cover only 35 percent of the oceans, most seafood lives close to the coast, and 90 percent of all marine resources came to be controlled by governments.

And here comes the catch — there’s a few migratory species that do not respect our imaginary boundaries for the oceans, and, surprise surprise, they tend to be the species that are quite threatened. Tunas, whales and turtles, for example, make a mockery of our system and move freely from one EEZ to the next, and also swim in areas where no state has control over the waters. Regulating the catch for these animals is a logistical nightmare, and there are plenty of opportunities for unscrupulous fishers to catch more than they should.

As I posed for a picture by the tuna’s head, 90 percent of my thoughts were images of sashimi and succulent toro. But a small part of me feels guilty about fueling an industry that so far shows no intention of slowing down their tuna catches.

I’m waiting for the industry to start certifying a sustainable catch so I can freely enjoy my sashimi. Other parts of the seafood industry have already started regulating themselves and bringing external agencies to make sure that they are being responsible (the main initiative is the Marine Stewardship Council, which is a colaboration that started with the WWF and Unilever), I have nothing against eating tuna; in fact, I’ll be the first to pick up my chopsticks, but it would be nice to see an effort to manage the catch before we get to the point of the whaling industry.

Wicked shrimp

My brother and I went to tsukiji (Tokyo’s fish market) one early morning to watch the action and have a sushi breakfast. I ate this unfortunate shrimp at Daiwa sushi, one of Tsukiji’s most famous restaurants. I wrote a review here.

Too much butter

My boss called me a few days ago while I was on my way to work to let me know that his father had fallen sick and that no one would be in the office. All of a sudden I found myself in trendy omotesando with a few unexpected hours to kill. Omotesando is one of Tokyo’s answers to 5th avenue in New York. Every brand that is worth anything has a store there, together with swanky cafes, bars and restaurants. Pierre Herme has his flagship store there, and so does Jean Paul Hevin (among a few more).

After wondering around for a while, I ended up inside the Bulgari building looking at the MOMA design shop on the third floor. As I was riding the escalators down, I saw the signs for the basement shops that included an organic grocery store and a bakery. My stomach got the best of me and I headed down to peak a look.

Those who’ve known me for a while know that I used to eat an unusually large amount of mayonnaise; I could easily go through a one liter jar in a month. I’d slather it on anything…bread, rice, salad, chicken, etc, etc. Few things were off-limit to my craving. Until, one day, I started making my own mayonnaise and realized that I better stop indulging before I kill myself and clog every artery in my body. I realized that mayonnaise is not an egg-based sauce; it is almost pure oil with a few seasonings that make it look different and give it an edgier taste…no wonder it tastes so good.

Long story short, I stopped buying mayonnaise. I sometimes make it at home or indulge at restaurants, but on the whole it has become an occasional treat. But, I still eat unusually large amounts of butter. I am a bread eater, and it is a sin in my books to eat bread without slathering a healthy dose of butter on it. I have no plans on stopping this addiction anytime soon, but I’m trying to eat less of it.

Big was my surprise as I perused the offerings of the bakery.

“120% butter,” said the sign featuring their signature cream puff.

“How can that be possible?”

“Of course it’s not 120% butter,” said the store attendant clearly irritated. “But I can tell you that this will be the richest piece of pastry you’ll ever have.”

Curiosity got the best of me and I found myself indulging on the puff a few minutes later. Having made croissants and puff pastry before, I know the large amounts of butter that go into them, but this was just over the top. It was so much butter that I immediately ended up with a layer of fat coating the insides of my mouth. I was desperate for water, tea, or anything that would help cleanse the fat away.

I guess there is such a thing as too much butter. I better start cutting down.

The secrets behind the stock market

“I want to be rich,” said one of our regulars at the restaurant while sipping his margarita. No arguments there…can’t think of too many people who would object to that.

“I’ve been thinking of a method to become rich.”

“And…?”

“First I thought about playing the market. But the problem is that you need too much money to get something out of it.”

“The stock market only works if you have enough capital to begin with,” I said echoing his comments.

“Then I thought about setting up an import-export trading company…bring something unique to Japan.”

“That sounds like a lot of work, and no promise of becoming rich.” “How about moving drugs?” I added half-jokingly.

“That wouldn’t be so bad…but the risk.”

I finish making the mojitos for table nine and run out to deliver them. When I come back, I hear a new idea for amassing vast amounts of money.

“I’ve been thinking of opening a bar that caters to stock traders. Something swanky where they come unwind at the end of the day. Then, I’d wire the place with hidden microphones, record their conversations and pick up some insider knowledge. Even if I have little capital, armed with their tips, I could still make the market work my way.”

Setting aside the questionable ethics behind the scheme, I can’t help but smile inside my head.

At the restaurant we get a fair amount of customers who work in finance and who come unwind at the end of their day. And, having spent months catching bits and pieces of their conversations in between making drinks, I think he’d be thoroughly disappointed at the recordings he would make.

Take for instance this exchange that recently happened between P, one of the other waiters, and a group of traders when I was behind the bar listening to the conversation.

“Do you have any dishes you recommend?”

“Absolutely, the cochinita pibil is amazing. Slowly baked pork inside a banana leaf, served with pickled red onions, tortillas, beans and a spicy habanero sauce.”

The group orders the dish, gets hammered on margaritas and mostly talk about TV shows, movies and the nightclub where they’ll head after the meal.

Towards the end P starts clearing up the table.

“That pork dish you recommended was amazi…”

One of the girls in the group interrupts.

“Pork? I thought we were eating pig!”

Both Paul and I consume all the energy left in our bodies at the end of a double shift not to burst into laughter.

I look at our regular finishing his margarita and entertaining the thoughts of eavesdropping on traders. If he only knew that they are like most people — they talk office gossip, relationships, family, sports and sometimes they bring their dates and look as nervous as any of us.

I have yet to hear discussions of a secret deal in the making over margaritas.

But, just in case, I’ll keep my ears open.

Tokyo warmth

Want to warm up with Oden?