Ikura at Ten

Travis showed up in the cafeteria before class this morning, looking sheepish. Yesterday, he said, he'd missed his stop on BART, sleeping through it until he'd reached the end of the line in Daly City, then waking again at the other end of the line in Fremont, two stops past where he'd left his car two hours earlier. "By then, I figured it was a sign." I told him that he was on the team with Silvia and Andrea and me, and he visibly brightened. "Man, I lucked out."

Chef Duffy made sushi today, first orchestrating the assembly of his mis en place like a conductor, with big sweeping hand gestures and making a valiant effort to call everyone by name. Tashana put 8 cups of medium grain rice and 12 cups of water into the rice cooker, and it was done in 20 minutes. While it was cooling in a couple of hotel pans, we discussed the various other ingredients we had at hand. The rice seasoning had been prepared yesterday: 4 parts unseasoned rice vinegar, 2 parts sugar, 1 part salt, cooked together until the salt and sugar is dissolved, then cooled. We had sheets of nori; daikon, both roots (julienned) and little sprouts; enoki mushrooms, unagi (freshwater eel, which comes cooked and seasoned, in plastic pouches), cucumber and carrots (both julienned); sesame seeds (don't make the mistake that some previous students did, and use quinoa instead of sesame); tobiko (flying fish roe); ikura (salmon roe). Chef also requested a bowl of water, to which he added about three tablespoons of rice vinegar: "handwater". When the rice was cooler but still warm, he broke it up with a big spoon (a different action than stirring, more like cracking up slabs of concrete), then turned the spoon so the bowl faced up, and poured the seasoning mixture over the spoon, so that the liquid sprinkled down onto the rice. He mixed it, had us taste and approve, then began.

He used two rolling mats: one had previously been covered in plastic wrap: "Use either: one is easier to roll, one is easier to clean." He demonstrated seven different styles of sushi: futo maki (thick roll); hoso maki (thin roll); temaki (hand roll); gunkan (also known as "battleship", the strip of nori around rice which holds fragile ingredients, like ikura or uni); ura maki (with the rice on the outside); nigiri (the "couch" of rice, topped today with unagi). He also made ohsi, or pressed, sushi: he took the (sort of raggedy) end of a maki roll, diced it coarsely, and pressed it into a mold (in this case, a quarter-cup plastic food container), then unmolded it onto the platter. Which by this time was brimming full of rolls. He used a knife dipped in hot water to cut the rolls into individual pieces, and then it was time to taste. Nothing like ikura at ten in the morning.

Today was mostly spent getting prepared for more substantive work later in the week: we made brine for duck breasts (to arrive tomorrow), and mayonnaise, and started chick peas soaking for a vegetable salad. I showed Travis how to use (and clean) the slicer, and the morning flew by. The Veg team made hummus; Seafood brined some trout and began some gravlax. Looks like things are going to start getting a bit crazier, as we receive our ingredients, learn the kitchen, and get the hang of Chef Duffy's style. He's hilarious. At one point during the sushi demo, he described the wrong way of doing something, shook his head, said, "Wouldn't be prudent" in the exact GHWB accent.

In other (surprising) news, I got an A in Butchery. Maybe the temperature inside the turkey trucks is not that crucial, after all.