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I’d heard that chef Nobu Matsuhisa is fun to hang out with but a taskmaster in the kitchen.
I was about to find out. The celebrity chef and restaurateur known for Nobu restaurants worldwide had offered to host a sushi-making class for local food writers while in town overseeing operations at Nobu Lana‘i and the new Nobu Honolulu at Ward Village Shops.
In tradition-bound Japan, sushi mastery requires years of apprenticeship and sequential training that starts with perfecting the rice. This comes before being allowed near a knife to begin learning proper ways to cut green onions, grate ginger and slice fish. It’s a lengthy learning process that confounds the impatient, more interested in shortcuts to success.
It doesn’t help that sushi chefs of Matsuhisa’s caliber make the act of combining raw fish and rice look easy, with all the fluidity of a magician’s sleight of hand. All I see when I look up from stuffing a morsel into my mouth is the final two-finger press of fish to rice. What’s so hard about that?
Well, apparently I missed the eight other steps it took to get there. Classes like this give even the most ardent sushi aficionados newfound respect for the craft.
The class only involved the final steps. The rice had already been prepared, the onions were sliced and all we needed was set before us.
Matsuhisa started with a demonstration of slicing the fish, for which minimal force is key because sushi knives are very sharp, looking like miniaturized versions of medieval swords. “Use gravity, not pressure, to slice the fish,” he said as the knife slid into blocks of ahi and hamachi. “Just trust the knife.”
Matsuhisa uses no sugar in his vinegared rice, relying instead on a small amount of monk fruit juice, the extract of a Southeast Asian gourd that has no calories yet is twice as sweet as sugar.
We followed his instructions through the process of shaping nigiri: Grab a golf ball-size round of rice with the right hand and shape it without compacting it too much, then apply it to a slice of sashimi laid along the length of the base of the fingers and palm of the left hand. From here, start on the Matsuhisa six-step method of shaping sushi.
First, use the thumb and middle finger of the right hand to fit the rice to the width of the fish, while using the thumb of the left hand to press down on the rice. The piece was then turned over, fish side up, and the left hand curled over to shape the nigiri, pressing down with two fingers. We repeated these steps vertically on our palms, then again horizontally.
What took Matsuhisa — with his 50 years of experience — three to four seconds to accomplish was taking me closer to 26 seconds, as we proceeded to create nigiri of ahi, hamachi, salmon and snapper.
Luckily, he wasn’t in a scolding mood as I could not gauge the proper amount of water to use on my hands to prevent the rice from sticking to my fingers as I made my sushi. I was biting off the grains as I worked, which would never do at a sushi bar, but it was OK here because we were going to eat our own creations.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Nobody can do this the first time.”
His advice continued to the eating of sushi: When dipping in shoyu, turn the piece so only the fish is dipped, because the rice absorbs too much sodium.
We later moved on to a more elegant solution for the home partyer, layering the rice and fish donburi style in a teacup-size bowl, before proceeding to making spicy tuna and California-style hand rolls.
In trying to master the mechanical, I was still leaving out one key ingredient. As Matsuhisa explained, “Sushi is very simple, fish and rice. But in every step you have to remember to concentrate, to put in passion, too.”
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