15 Delicious Things You Didn’t Know About Sushi

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asH4jhr8E20&w=584&h=390%5D

1. Eating raw fish without the vinegared rice is called sashimi.

2. Funazushi is the process wherein fish is fermented via being wrapped in soured fermenting rice. This results in a sour taste called umami. This process has been performed by one Japanese family for over 18 generations.

3. One of the first recorded events of Westerners consuming sushi happened in 1953, where Prince Akihito served the delicacy to American officials.

4. Rice vinegar singlehandedly changed the way sushi was prepared. If not for rice vinegar, we’d probably not be eating sushi so often.

5. You can eat sushi with your hands, sushi chefs actually prefer it that way.

6. When you dip nigiri into soy sauce, only the fish part is dipped, not the rice. Otherwise, the rice pellets will come apart and you’ll have soy sauce rice soup.

7. Ginger is to cleanse your palate between sushi.

8. Apparently, going from light to heavy fish is the best way to eat sushi.

9. Norway introduced salmon to Japan in the 1980s.

10. You should be able to eat nigiri in one bite.

11. Wasting soy sauce is bad etiquette. Pour only a little bit and add more when you need it.

12. Miso soup is drunk at the end of the meal to aid digestion.

13. The best sushi chefs “massage” the octopus before preparing it.

14. An American nutritionist said sushi is bad for your health. But probably only looked at American sushi, which is loaded with carbohydrates, fat, and sodium — like a shrimp tempura roll. Also, the Japanese do not eat sushi three times a day.

15. Most sushi chefs in America do not have the required 2 years of training a chef would go through in Japan. American sushi chefs complete training in a few months.