Today, I finally received my Sushi knife set! There are four knives, Deba Bocho (to cut the fish), Ajikiri Bocho (a small Deba Bocho to cut smaller fish), Yanagi Bocho (a long knife to cut the sashimi), Saikiri Bocho (to cut vegetables).
What is the biggest difference between the Japanese knives and the foreign knives you asked? Well, the Japanese knives are made of soft and hard steel instead of just stainless steel. So they are subject to stains. What surprised me is that I started to see some rust on the knife, after cutting some pickled fish for less than one hour! My knives are treated in a special way so it will be more difficult to get rusted, but I still have to polish them properly after usage.
Akiko’s name is engraved into the knives (well, they can do this when you consider the price…!)
Today's special was the Ika (squid), but this time, we worked on dead and frozen ones.
These mollusks are not pleasant to touch as they sticky and slimy. Well, still we have to cook them.
The body part has to be cut in pieces of 3 cm or so,
First, we take out the hard shell,
then you put both thumbs into the cut
and separate the head from the body.
CAREFUL – Do not break the blue ball which contains a colored fluid.
Clean the head,
peel the skin off,
separate the intestines from the body. We eat the head part raw but boil the legs. That's all there is to it.
Today, we also had the second trial of Aji Sanmai Oroshi (cutting the jack mackerel in
fillet) . The teacher showed us the Aji's special Sashimi presentation.
We also learned a different way of presenting the Aji Sushi using larger, complete pieces.
Yasuko san with our lunch. Goto san made us a really good Miso soup with the meat left on the bone of the fish. (It is quite difficult to make a clean and thin cut and remove all the fish meat — but at least we didn't waste them.)
At the end of the lesson, we learned how to cut bamboo leaves to decorate the Sushi plates. The teacher showed us a lot of way of cutting these leaves and we got to try ourselves.
The teacher’s work
Akiko’s work
See you tomorrow.
# posted by Famille Hochner @ 4:09 PM
