Sushi taste is more complex than meets the tongue. The flavours and textures all combined into a raw experience that has popularized the raw fish phenomenon all over the globe. But taking a beginner for advanced sushi can present taste problems.
Most foreigners think sushi is salmon, or yellow tail, and wasabi and shoyu are used like soup-sauce – wrong. Wasabi and shoyu are added by the chef, and I still wonder why chefs provide a sauce dish for shoyu. My guess is, its polite, some clients are salt junkies, and most Japanese chefs are obliged to satisfy their clients.
Many amateurs take for granted the complexity of sushi. Once I was discussing sushi with a three star Michelin chef, he proclaimed, “sushi is not food”. What I determined from his comments were, he could not sense the smallest details in the preparation of sushi. He believed that uncooked food is not food, but he was wrong, sushi begins with the preparation and cooking of thousands of grains of rice.
Selecting rice, washing the rice, and cooking the rice is key to the taste of sushi. Each chef has his own mind to season his sushi rice. Ultimately the preparation of the rice is what forms the basis of taste. But taste doesn’t need to become over complicated, it can still be complex if the composition is based on a sophisticated structure.
The process of cooling the rice departs the final taste, lingering flavours of vinegar and a sweetness in balance. The starches in the rice glue the tastes, wasabi, shoyu and in this case tsume, a glaze used to brighten the flavours.
In reality, all qualities of taste can be elicited from all the regions of the tongue that contain taste buds. One of the most dubious facts about taste and one that is commonly reproduced in textbooks, is the misleading “tongue map” showing large regional differences in sensitivity across the tongue. The maps arose early in the 20th century as a result of a misinterpretation of research reported in the late 1800’s, and they have been almost impossible to purge from the literature.