Mebachi To Honmaguro No Sashimi

A decade ago, Yuri Nomura, a good friend, took me on an early morning visit to Mr. Nojiri, the proprietor of Ishimiya, a top tuna wholesaler in Tokyo’s Tsukiji Market. Amid the controlled chaos of the market, his stall stood out with its pristine wooden-framed glass display boxes. He sold only two items: bluefin una and swordfish, and each, I would venture to say, were the best of their kind in the world. There is a lot of drama in the tuna business at Tsukiji, from the auctions where whole fish are sold for thousands (and occasionally millions) of dollars, to the enormous swordlike knives that highly skilled fishmongers use to cut whole fish into loins. But Mr. Nojiri himself was quiet and understated. He offered me a little slice, cut from an enormous back loin. Maybe it was the early morning or the disorienting frenzy of the market, but it is a piece of tuna that I still remember to this day; it was a beautiful ruby red with a soft electric texture. Not to be melodramatic, but for a while, when I got back to California, I thought I could never eat tuna again.

For the first year, we didn’t serve tuna at Rintaro. And then, slowly, I started to open my eyes to the huge, beautiful bigeye tuna that were being landed in San Diego. Although leaner than bluefin, big eye can have a similarly deeply flavored, ruby red back loin, called akami or “red meat,” but without the soft, luxurious fat of a bluefin. And in the last couple of years, maybe due to the changing climate, we have also started to see increasing numbers of bluefin tuna in California waters. Most of them are nowhere near the quality of tuna sold by Ishimiya, but some of them, with their dark red loins that brighten to ruby as they oxidize and their buttery belly loins, certainly give me the same butterflies. I buy my tuna from Monterey Fish, who, in turn, buy directly from individual fishermen running their own small boats. That said, tuna is a huge international business. Factory trawlers, which go out for weeks at a time, harvest the fish by the ton, processing them onboard and freezing them with liquid nitrogen for storage and transport. Given the efficiency of these operations and the seemingly endless appetite for tuna worldwide, it’s not surprising that many stocks of tuna–bluefin, in particular–are threatened and top the do-not-eat lists of sustainable fish organizations. But I trust Monterey Fish’s judgment. They pointed me to NOAA Fisheries, the agency responsible for the nation’s fisheries. The Pacific bluefin according to their website, “is a smart seafood choice because it is sustainably managed under rebuilding measures that limit harvest by U.S. fishermen.” This is deeply happy news.

While freshness is no doubt important for delicious sashimi, tuna is a good example of a fish that requires significant aging to bring out its best attributes. Ideally, a tuna should age between four and ten days from the time it is caught before being served as sashimi. During this time, if cared for properly, the enzymes in the fish will start to improve the flavor, the muscles and sinews will relax and become more tender, and the blood and excess water will be leached from the fish.

Unless you are dealing with a wholesaler or the fishermen themselves, it’s hard to know exactly when the fish was landed. That said, if the saku, the Japanese word for “blocks ready to be cut into slices,” are firm and bright, it’s going to be delicious, and you can enhance the flavor and texture by simply salting the fish and drawing out the extra moisture with paper towels. If you’re lucky enough to live near a good Japanese market, you should be able to purchase tuna cut into saku. If you have access to sashimi-grade tuna from a non-Japanese fish market, you will likely need to buy a larger chunk and cut the saku yourself.