November 19, 2012
Amuse-Bouche
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sushi de bœuf
(beef sushi)
I don’t like teaching sushi classes. It’s not that I can’t, I just don’t like to teach them. Students come with the expectation of being able to quickly duplicate the efforts of their local sushi provider. If their provider is their nearby supermarket, they can often come close, but if they want to produce a result similar to a high-end purveyor, it’s not going to happen. A single two-hour class cannot replace years of practice. To make things worse, the students with the highest expectations also seem to possess the shortest attention spans.
I’m not a huge fan of sushi. I eat it. I even enjoy it at times. I’ve sat at a four-stool sushi bar in Matsuyama and ate piece after piece of delicious fish that I could not identify as an 80-year-old sushi chef practiced the art that kept him young.
I fondly remember the first California roll I ate. It was the late 1980s. I was in Kyoto with my wife. The two rolls were purchased through a shop window and eaten while standing in an alley next door to the shop. I was only supposed to have eaten one, but my wife was too embarrassed to eat hers standing on the street. Aside from these, most of my sushi memories are wholly forgettable.
I think my aversion to sushi stems not from the fish or other flavor ingredients but from the rice. I’m not a big fan of cold rice. Because of the rice, the flavor, even when each piece of fish is different, is too much the same from piece to piece. I am also not a fan of the ritual of ordering. If I’m sitting at a sushi bar, it’s hard to interact with my fellow diners. At a table it’s easier. I prefer to interact with the people I’m dining with and to keep the involvement (and interruption) of servers to a minimum.
In the last three years there has been two separate occasions where sushi has become more interesting for me again. The first was when I was at a reception at the Denver Art Museum during a convention of the International Association of Cooking Professionals. As seems to be the norm for the Association’s conventions, there’s a reception the night before the formal start of the meeting where the guests wandered from table to table to sample small dishes provided by different local restaurants. This particular night, the local beer was the best attraction, but there was one restaurant that had prepared nigirizushi that was topped with a slice of raw beef instead of the usual seafood. The rice appeared to have been pressed into a large, thick sheet. The meat appeared to have been coated with a sauce similar to that used for unagi, but with a hint of commercial, American-style barbecue sauce. The meat “cake” was cut into squares and a sheet of nori was wrapped around each to hide the rice and round the square corners. It was one of the few items I ate more than one piece of that night.
My second encounter with beef sushi came a couple years later at the World of Flavors Conference sponsored by the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, California. This year the subject was Flavors from Japan, and there was a wide variety of dishes presented, including many sushi dishes. One chef took thin slices of wagyu beef and cured them overnight by wrapping individual slices between layers of rehydrated kombu. The beef slices were then used as any fish slice would have been used for nigirizushi. I didn’t get a chance to taste the finished sushi, but this example and my earlier experience kept the idea alive in the back of my mind.
Another preparation that influenced my eventual stab at beef sushi is onigiri, or rice balls. These are sometimes called omusubi, and in Hawaii there is a popular version called Spam musubi. There are as many variations of Spam musubi as there are people preparing them. Most have two things in common: the rice and the Spam. Generally, the rice is simply cold rice and the flavor comes with the Spam. I tried a variation one day when I had some very rare lamb leftover from another preparation. My Hawaii-born relatives appreciated the lamb musubi, but I wasn’t impressed. The lamb flavor wasn’t strong enough to dominate the rice.
In the spring of 2012, I started work on a paper I presented at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking relating to the Symposium’s subject of “wrapped and stuffed foods.” One of the dishes I created for the paper was nigirizushi prepared with beef rather than fish. The preparation turned out to be very simple.
I started by cooking some medium-grain white rice the same as I would for any sushi. When the rice was finished cooking, I started the traditional process of cooling and seasoning the rice, except instead of flavored vinegar, I used a commercially prepared katsu sauce. I don’t have a sushi-oke, the flat-bottom, wooden bowl traditionally used for the process, so I used a metal bowl. I dribbled on the sauce at the same time as I cut the rice with a shamoji, a bamboo rice paddle. I’ve never been big of the fanning process, so I simply opened the window in my kitchen and got a nice breeze going. The goal in the whole process was to produce an end product that is sticky, but not gummy. As the rice cooled, the katsu sauce formed a coating on the outside of the rice grains.
When the rice was cool, I used a cheap mold to form the rice into the proper shape. (My hand-molding skills are non-existent.) Each was coated with a little dab of prepared, fake wasabi. I had previously trimmed a standard store-bought rib-eye steak to extract just the eye—the longissimus dorsi muscle—and then cut thin slices from it. Each slice was trimmed in width to match the length of the molded rice forms, and then wrapped around the rice. As an amuse-bouche, the finished beef sushi was a bit big, so each piece was cut in half for service.

© 2012 Peter Hertzmann. All rights reserved.