Chapter 11 The Busiest Fish in the Ocean (The book, “ & Beyond”, by Michael Booth)

There is no way of finessing this: having made your way through a chapter about glutamates, you are now about to read a chapter all about . I’m sorry, but I was becoming more and more curious about and in particular. I wanted to find out more about the two key, umami-rich ingredients used to make dashi: konbu and katsuobushi. Konbu would have to wait until we headed north to Hokkaido the following week(this was now late September), but I asked Emi if she knew whether it would be possible for me to see how katuobushi was made while we were still in Tokyo. Katsuobushi are dried and fermented filets of the bonito fish, as hard as wood and dusty brown in colour. They look like a straight, fossilised banana. They are usually sold already shaved in airtight bags and crop up either as shavings, dancing bewitchingly in the heat atop various dishes, or steeped in dashi to add a deeply satisfying savouriness to soups and sauces. The shavings are fantastically moreish just eaten on their own from the bag too, with an addictive smoky-citric and a mildly fishy aftertaste. Fishiness aside, the closest comparison I can think of is the salty, meantiness of a really good, paper-thin slice of pata negra ham. It really is that delicious. ‘No problem’, said Emi. ‘My brother works for one of the best katsuobushi fisheries. I’ll give him a call.’ Emi filled me in the next day as we rode on the Shinkannsen, the fullet train, heading south from Tokyo to Yaizu, a fishing port midway between Tokyo and Nagoya(to my eternal gratitude, Lissen again agreed to entertain the children – this time with a trip to the Mori Tower art museum and aquarium). ‘This is great,’ Emi said. ‘Yaizu is Katsuo Town, it was built on the money from processing bonito. And Yaizu Katsuobushi is famous throughout Japan, it’s a brand in its own right. I have even heard that there is a company there that makes it the traditional way by drying the fish in the sun.’ Yaizu is among the top three katsuo ports in Japan and the town was clearly more prosperous than other rural communities I would see Japan. The price they’d had to pay for that prosperity was apparent as soon we got out of the taxi. The air was heavy with the smell of smoking fish. To me it was deliciously tangy, but I could imagine you might grow immune to its charms if you lived with it on your cloth and in your hair all the time. The smell was accompanied by a cacophony of machinery and diesel engines, forklift trucks and conveyor belts. There was an almighty rubbery clattering noise behind us as a lorry tipped a load of silver-black, glistening torpedoes, together with a large quantity of bloody sea water, into a tank. My first sight of a real, whole bonito. The Yaizu Fish Manufacturing Park is a town within a town made up of corrugated warehouses housing twenty-four factories. Each is in some way involved with processing every scrap of this dense, oily, red-fleshed fish, making everything from super-fresh to canned bonito. One company takes the guts and salts, pickles and ferments them to be eaten as a delicacy; another makes calcium supplements for school meals from the dried, powdered bones. Even the essence from the liquid used to cook the bonito is recuperated and used to flavor instant ; and of course several make the katsuobushi itself. It is an incredible fish. ‘Nothing is wasted here,’ a spokesman for Yaizu explained as he showed us into the boardroom. ‘’Even the guts and hearts are processed for fertilizer. Quantities of bonito are declining and the number of ships catching them are decreasing too. Even though the government [which controls prices] says the number of fish in the ocean is stable, we don’t agree. There are fewer fish to go after, oil costs mean it is more expensive to go after them, yet demand is rising, so we have to maximize the yield from every one we catch.’ Yaizu processes around twelve thousand tons of katsuo each year, that’s about sixty thousand fish per day, but as recently as 2004 that figure was as high as seventeen thousand tons. I learned all this from what was about the tenth corporate video I had endured since arriving in Japan, all of them opening with the same shaky, synthesized strings, and a portentous voice-over. As well as informing me that they ‘make the most of our blessings from the sea’, it did explain the bonito’s migration pattern: modori is the name given to katsuo returning from the north(specially the south-east coast of Hokkaido) in the autumn, which are fatter and richer and mostly eaten raw or lightly grilled(bonito is considered a lower grade fish to eat than ); while in spring the fish comes from the south on the so-called Black Current, mostly from the Philippines, and is leaner and better for making katsuobushi. The migration is changing, however, with fish travelling further north to spawn while the Black Current itself is changing too. I asked if they had tried ranching or farming bonito. ‘ It has not yet become economically viable to farm bonito like tuna; they are too small and are even more active than tuna,’ explained the spokesman. Apparently bonito even swim in their sleep: especially industrious Japanese are said to ‘work like a katsuo’. I was curious to see the process that takes the fish we had seen being tipped out of their tanker as e arrived to the dried filets, like glockenspiel keys, that I had seen on sale in the shops in the outer part of Tsukiji. We headed outside to take a look. The spokesman explained that the fish are defrosted and their heads and internal organs removed. After boiling, an army of local ladies debones every one of those sixty thousand fish by hand – after cooking the fish are fragile and this is the only way of removing the spine and bones while retaining the perfectly shaped filets the aesthetically conscious Japanese demand. We visited one of the processing halls, a dark, strip-lit factory, smelly and steamy, its every surface coated in brown fish grease. Around fifty women in blue hygiene hats, wearing rubber gloves with their sleeves rolled up, stood as the cooked fish passed by on conveyor belts. I watched one as she swiftly picked a fish up, turned it over in her hands a couple of times, dividing the four filets from the skeleton, perfectly, in seconds. The bones disappeared down a hole to be taken off and ground up, while the filets were placed carefully on a wire tray beside her. It was dirty, stinking, spirit crushing work. Smoking and fermenting comes next. Obviously, different types of wood will affect the final flavor. Some companies use konara oak, others cherry wood, but as well as this the flavour of the finished katsuobushi can also change according to how many times it is smoked: between ten and twenty is norm to dry the flesh thoroughly until only about twenty per cent of the water remains. We saw the vast smoking kilns, again caked in old fish goo, treacly and brown. The finest bonito of all, however, are cured in the sun for two days. There are records of bonito being mould cured in this way dating back to the Middle Ages and, as Emi said, one company in Yaizu still prepares its bonito this way – weather permitting. The filets are then placed in a hot, humid storage area, like a huge oven, that has been impregnated with the aspergillus glaucus mould. Some of the storage chambers are decades old and imbue the filets with a unique flavour, each identifiable to a true katsuo connoisseur. It is a kind of fermentation that, as with , soy and , contributes greatly to the complex flavour and umami power of katsuobushi. The mould creates flavoursome enzymes that turn the fish protein into amino acids, in particular a compound called inosine monophosphate(IMP). The process takes up to six weeks during which the filets will be taken back out into the sun to kill off the mould perhaps several times, each time being returned to the chamber to grow a new layer, which deepens the flavour further. By the end the fish filets are hard as wood, ready for the final stage, shaving. This is done using a katsuobushi kezuriki, an upside-down carpenter’s plane with a container underneath to catch the savings. The best chefs will shave the katsuobushi filets literally moments before they go into the dashi as it starts to lose flavour and aroma the moment it is shaved. Although many use airtight bags of pre-shaved filet. Most home cooks, however, eill use some kind of powered form, most likely with an Ajinomoto label on it. We ended up in a small shop selling some of the produce made nearby. The Yaizu spokesman showed me how to pick good katsuobushi filets, by gently tapping two together –the more dense the filets, the better their quality and flavour, and the sound they make should be almost metallic.(Also, should you find yourself out shopping for katsuobushi, Shizuo Tsuji, writing in A Simple Art, says that if there is a green tint to the mould, the filet is too watery, and if yellow, too acid.) He broke one in half to show me the rings, again, just like wood, the colour ranging through its centre from dark purple to brown. Apparently, I was the first Westerner to ever visit Yaizu and, overcome by the honour, I rashly bought two whole filets for a few thousands yen, not really thinking ahead far enough to realize that I didn’t thave anything to shave them with and later finding out that a proper katsuobushi plane costs a fortune. I still have the filets in the back of my fridge. They remain, as yet, unshaved, but from time to time I take them out, sniff them fondly, and imagine how great they will .

Notes: Emi is a guide, Japanese. Lissen is his wife. Shizuo Tsuji is the writer of a book, Simple Art.