One of the great guilty pleasures of recent foodiedom was reading the legendary blog the Haphazard Gourmet Girls. High-placed L.A. illuminati took cues on matters gourmet from the “Hap Girls,” and to be featured on the blog, and subjected to the Girls’ searing intelligence and acerbic wit, was either an honor or a severe embarrassment, depending on whether or not they liked you.
Fortunately, they liked me. One of the great high points of my career to date has been the rollicking interview they posted with me about my books.
Sadly, Haphazard Gourmet Girls no longer exists—it’s since ceded ground to its reincarnation, the more focussed but masterful Obama Foodorama, where you’ll find the inside scoop on what’s happening in the White House in relation to all things edible, often before you’ll hear about it in the mainstream press.
But for posterity’s sake, I’ve reproduced the Hap Girls’ rather long interview with me in its entirety below.
[The dateline of my blog entry here is retroactively set to match the date of original publication.]
INTERVIEW WITH SUSHI SUPERMAN, TREVOR CORSON
Trevor Corson is a daring adventurer. He can discuss religion in three languages. He’s a sexpert who eats gonads for fun. He will make you question everything you’ve ever believed—at least about food.
Mr. Corson, who is possibly the world’s foremost expert on both lobsters and sushi, has a bio that reads like a document from another century: Boyhood summers on a small island, a first novel at age nine, educated at Princeton, a long stint in Asia living among Buddhist monks and searching for enlightenment (and getting plastered with said monks, and witnessing Tiananmen Square … ), then tossing it all to go to sea as a fisherman. And tossing it all yet again to become a writer. This was a terrific move, because Mr. Corson has written two of the best foodie books around, which have each won numerous awards: The Secret Life of Lobsters, and The Story of Sushi.
Both books are page-turners that skillfully meld Mr. Corson’s wild adventures and biting humor with an amazing understanding of science and the intricacies of foodie history. Mr. Corson reads like a hyper-contempo hipster hybrid of Emerson and Melville, with his seafaring tales and elegant musings on nature; throughout his work there’s a numinous insistence that our relationship to the creatures we hunt and eat informs our relationship to the wider world and to divinity.
In our Q&A, Mr. Corson chats about Why Sushi Is Like Dating, The Hurl Factor, Truth In Sushi, Toro As Garbagefish, Sustainability and Overfishing, Lobster Ethics, his own Secret Sushi Sauce, and whether or not looking at all those cold, wriggly little bits of fish for years now makes him prefer something big, flamin’ hot and hard…on his dinner plate.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Our blog is heavily into the whole idea of Slow Food, and “authentic” traditional cuisines, made “historically.” Sushi training in Japan is a years-long process. In the book, you don’t really editorialize on what you think of the rapid-fire training programs. Care to give an opinion?
Trevor Corson: Before I wrote this book I was a sushi fascist. I’d eat sushi only in Japan. Not only that, I’d only visit high-end sushi bars, and I’d only go with a Japanese friend who knew the chef, and could vouch for the chef’s skill and training. Is that the best way to get the very best sushi? Yes! But the thing is, as I researched the history of sushi for the book, I realized that there’s nothing historical about that approach at all. In fact, if we’re going to talk authenticity and history, sushi was traditionally a low-brow fast food served on the street—it was essentially the McDonald’s drive-thru of old Tokyo. Dudes would wander around the city with boxes of seafood and rice slung over their backs, and drunk samurai on their way home from the bathhouses would stop for a quick—and rather messy—bite to eat. Today, the high-end style of sushi is “nigiri” sushi—those little packs of rice with a topping, which the chef squeezes together with his fingers. Well, that style originated only because those sushi dudes on the street got too lazy to make proper sushi before they headed off to work. I don’t know if they were hungover themselves or what, but they got into the bad habit of just squeezing the sushi together on the spot with their hands. They were supposed to be preparing it in big wooden presses beforehand, and slicing it into pieces like a cake, but people loved the new version. So what’s authentic? And originally, sushi didn’t even start out possessing the caché of an urban fast food. In a sense, yes, it was slow food—very slow. It was a sort of emergency ration that peasants on the verge of starvation would make themselves and bury in the ground up to a year in advance in case they ran out of fresh food—unpleasant to eat, but necessary. In the book I get the entire history of sushi down, and it’s just one surprising, unexpected turn after another.
Now, in regard to your question about authenticity as it relates to the training of a chef, I decided just to let the story of the chefs’ training in the book speak for itself, and let readers draw their own conclusions. Indeed, I’ve received the whole range of reactions. I have had purists attack me for disrespecting the sushi tradition by writing about young American kids in L.A. who, as you say, undergo a rapid-fire schooling that’s not the least bit traditional. I have had others tell me they were impressed with how grueling and intense the training was. But I will say this: I made a very deliberate decision not to focus the book on the sort of old-school Japanese chef who would ooze authenticity but who would, in my opinion, simply reinforce our silly stereotypes about Japan as a land full of Yoda-like Zen masters. Instead, the primary Japanese chef character in the book, Toshi, is a self-taught maverick who started out as a hippy artist selling bananas, but who became a stickler for Japanese sushi authenticity in his own way. He also happens to be one of the key historical characters who introduced sushi to Americans, which is why he made such a great story. At one point in the book, Toshi encourages one of his Japanese apprentices in L.A., who is nearly 40 years old, to start working behind the sushi bar after only a few months of training—back in Tokyo this would have been sacrilege. “If you were in Japan,” Toshi tells his apprentice, shaking his head, “your life would be over before you got the chance to stand behind the sushi bar.”
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: You’ve eaten a ton of sushi. Tired of it? Worried that you have super powers from all the heavy metals? How about lobsters? Still eating them? Any opinions on the current FDA warning about tomalley?
Trevor Corson: Everyone assumes that while I was researching the book I ate fabulous amounts of fabulous sushi, day in day out. It’s true that for several months I spent 10 to 12 hours a day in direct contact with people making sushi, but the fact is, I hardly ate any of it. For one thing, I was too busy. During the times that people were making sushi and eating it, I was so damn busy scribbling down what has happening into my notebook, gathering material to use in the book, that I never had time to stop and eat. Usually sometime after midnight, after the chefs had already put the sushi away and started washing up, I’d stumble off into the night, my hand frozen into a cramped claw from scribbling all day, and stagger into a pizza place on the corner for a couple of slices and a beer to fill my belly. Another thing: sushi is expensive. For the sake of journalistic ethics I’d made a pact with myself that I wasn’t going to accept any free food from anyone I was writing about. Of course, I did need to taste the sushi from time to time to know what I was writing about, but I paid for all of it, and I couldn’t afford to do that a lot! Lastly—and this gets directly to your question—I became like the people I was observing. Surrounded by sushi 24/7, it’s really the last thing you want to eat. At the end of the day, the sushi chefs themselves would eat anything as long as it contained red meat seared with lots of heat—hamburgers, pork chops, Korean BBQ, never sushi. It was so funny to watch the young sushi apprentices I was writing about lose their innocence—the first couple of weeks they were so excited every time they made practice sushi, they’d wrap it all up to take to their friends. By the the fourth or fifth week, they were just dumping it all in the trash. So no, I wasn’t eating anywhere near enough sushi to fill my body with mercury. But I’m now running a “Sushi Concierge” service, so I may yet develop superpowers.
As for lobsters, yeah, a lot of people ask me if after writing my first bookThe Secret Life of Lobsters, I now know too much about them to eat them. On the contrary. As utterly fascinating as lobster life on the ocean floor is, by learning so much about them I developed a healthy respect for the limitations of their intelligence and the relatively low level of their sentience in comparison to, say, mammals. But of course, people get really worked up about the fact that cooks typically boil lobsters alive. Well, that’s actually a very straightforward issue to resolve. I’ve looked into this extensively, and I’ve come to the conclusion that when it comes to pain, and what lobsters feel or don’t feel, we have no freakin’ idea what they feel. So as a default, I just assume that sure, perhaps they do feel pain, and that yeah, maybe getting boiled alive does suck. That’s why I kill them with a large kitchen knife before I put them in the pot, it’s quick. (I got into a spat over this with David Foster Wallace, which resulted in my posting detailed lobster-killing instructions on my blog, and then I got into another fight about it with Whole Foods Market.) The bottom line is that if you ever order a hamburger, the last thing you should be losing sleep over is the lobster.
Regarding tomalley, look, the stuff is an organ, technically referred to as a hepatopancreas—it’s a combined liver and pancreas. It’s a filtering system to remove toxins from the lobster’s flesh. That’s great news—lobster meat is pretty clean and isn’t affected by nasty stuff like paralytic shellfish poisoning. But think about what filters generally do, by definition. They clean by collecting. After preparing a big meal at home, do you save the stuff that has accumulated in the screen in the drain of your kitchen sink and eat that for dessert? I don’t.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: What do you think of the teenage science project in which the girls discovered that 25% of the fish they tested was “mislabeled?”
Trevor Corson: Awesome! Go girls. That was genius. It highlights how much false labeling there is out there in the seafood distribution system, which is already well-known to insiders. We really have to fix this problem, not only so we can actually get what we pay for, but also so we can have half a hope of certifying and supporting sustainable fisheries so we don’t indiscriminately wipe out all life in the seas, which we’re well on our way to doing.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: As a sushi expert, have you ever sent back something you were served because you knew it was not the fish it was supposed to be?
Trevor Corson: No. I always try to sit at the sushi bar and interact personally with the chef, and under those circumstances it seems churlish to do something like that. But as I eat, I’m taking mental notes, and I’ll either come back again or I won’t, depending on what I think of the ingredients and the chef’s attitude. Once you find a good chef who’s friendly, interactive, and honest about his ingredients—and who wants to educate you about sushi and learn about your personal preferences—that’s golden. It can take some effort to find a chef who’s the right match. It can also take patience, and a non-confrontational attitude at first. The same chef might serve you a cheaper substitute fish if he doesn’t know you, but if you’re a regular, he’ll be pulling out the genuine ingredients that he keeps for his most serious clients. With sushi chefs, my experience is that you get out what you put into it. It’s a bit like dating.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Any sushi you won’t eat? Any other kind of food you find repulsive?
Trevor Corson: Yes, there is definitely sushi that I avoid—bluefin tuna, for starters. Thanks to lobbying by the Japanese tuna industry, we all think that bluefin tuna and toro are the heart and soul of sushi. But I was surprised to discover that actually, that’s not the case at all. Traditionally the Japanese considered tuna a garbage fish! The cult of the fatty, melt-in-your-mouth cuts of tuna is a pretty recent development, coming after the Japanese started to eat a more Western diet, post-World War II. In fact, I learned that many hardcore sushi aficionados in Japan still consider toro to be an overly simplistic pleasure, not very sophisticated in terms of taste. What’s sad is that bluefin are these incredibly majestic beasts that swim free across vast distances, and yet now that they’ve become big money-makers, they are getting wiped out. At this rate, eating bluefin-tuna sushi will soon be something like eating a hamburger made with the meat of an endangered snow leopard.
Back to the question of authenticity, you will actually get a more old-school, traditional sushi meal if you skip the tuna altogether and go for smaller fish such as mackerel, skipjack, and shad, and shellfish toppings like clams, which were the most popular sushi toppings in the old days in Japan. Personally, I don’t consider this a sacrifice at all. I’ve come to realize that these toppings are actually a lot more flavorful and interesting to eat than most of the tuna you get anyway.
As for repulsiveness, I’ve always been pretty adventurous. At the sushi bar I’ve eaten everything from fermented fish guts to squid tentacles that were still moving—when you try to chew those tentacles they fight back, sticking their suckers onto the inside of your mouth. Squid and some types of shellfish are delicious freshly killed. But another thing I generally avoid is freshly killed fish. The flesh of most fish actually needs a little time to age in order to develop flavor—the how and why of it is totally fascinating, and I get into the science of it in the book. But the take home message is that a chef that pulls a live fish from a tank and serves it to you still twitching isn’t doing you any favors, it’s just a gimmick. One of the things that makes a great sushi chef is simply that they know the right amount of time to age each type and size of fish; it’s a very delicate balance to get right.
On repulsiveness, let’s see, I guess the one thing I’m not a huge fan of isnatto, those fermented soy beans that are all gooey and smell like vomit. Sometimes sushi chefs make those into rolls. It’s a taste I have yet to acquire. I have Japanese friends who eat natto like it’s candy. They’ll probably live to be 150.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Best sushi ever? Where? What?
Trevor Corson: I’ve had sushi meals at tiny, hole-in-the-wall sushi bars in Tokyo that were amazing, but the best sushi meal by far was the one I ate off Scarlett Johansson’s naked body. No, seriously, the whole naked-body sushi thing is another silly gimmick—you see it now being done in L.A., New York, Chicago, promoted as though it were some sort of ancient Japanese tradition. I can think of things I’d much rather do with a beautiful woman than treat her like a plate. I mean for starters, I would ask her out to dinner, and eat with her, not off her. Then if it goes well, maybe later we can do something with strawberries and cream, but it would have to be mutual.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Best L.A. sushi restaurant? You can name more than one, and specific dishes, or chefs. Best old-school, best new-school?
Trevor Corson: This sort of answers the previous question: One of the most delightful and delicious sushi meals I’ve had recently was at Sushi Go 55, a weirdly named hole-in-the-wall tucked upstairs in a non-descript shopping mall in L.A.’s Little Tokyo. You’d never know it, but it is owned by the same family—the Morishitas—who opened the second-oldest sushi bar in America back in the 1960s, called Eigiku. They’re delightful people. I went there with John Rabe, host of KPCC’s radio show “Off Ramp.” The two of us walked in, both these tall gangly white guys, and sat at the sushi bar. John switched on the tape-recorder and challenged me to solicit an authentic, old-school sushi meal from the chef. So there I am on the spot, and all these NPR listeners would be hearing this. And what happened? The chef would not give us the time of day. Speaking English, I kept trying to ask the chef what special fish he had, what was in season, etc., but the chef would just grunt and point to the usual stuff on the menu, and act real busy. John was like, “He is totally blowing us off.” So I told the chef we’d try a few of the more traditional ingredients on the menu. As an afterthought, I asked the chef, “Could you please pack the nigiri loosely for us, like you would for a Japanese customer?” At this point the chef stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me.
Now, here’s a secret: sushi chefs in the U.S. pack the sushi way too tightly, because Americans think we’re supposed to use chopsticks and we’re supposed to dunk the sushi in lots of soy sauce. Well, if you use chopsticks and add lots of soy sauce, sushi will fall apart unless the chef packs it real tight. Serious sushi eaters pick the sushi up with their fingers, and avoid adding a lot of extra soy sauce. That way the chef can pack the sushi softly so it will disintegrate easily on the tongue, and the flavors of the fish and rice will mingle effortless. These chewy, dense blocks of sushi that we get in the U.S. are a travesty. Moreover, the best sushi chefs season each piece of sushi themselves, before they give it to you, with a variety of special sauces and garnishes, so in that case you’re really not supposed to add any extra soy sauce anyway.
So this chef was staring at me. He goes, “Loose?” And I said, “Yeah, loose.” He frowned, again just staring at me. Without thinking, I repeated the request, this time blurting it out in Japanese: “Could you please squeeze the nigiri loosely?”
Suddenly he busted out in a huge grin, dropped everything, and yelled, “O-Kay! I make you sushi! Today’s best!” He started pulling out all his secret fish and ingredients from a cooler by his knees and, totally ignoring what I’d ordered, served us a progression of wonderfully delicious and varied sushi with special little sauces and garnishes, reminding us as he handed us each piece, “No soy sauce!” It was great. John had never seen anything like it.
So that was old-school. You asked about new-school, too. Well, another place in L.A. that’s a totally different story from something like Sushi Go 55 is a place called Hokusai in Beverly Hills. Now, full disclosure, the reason I know about Hokusai is that one of the sushi-industry folks I wrote about in the book is involved with it. Like I said, it’s a utterly different sort of place—upscale, trendy, French-Japanese fusion, and all that. But what impressed me about the place was that unlike many restaurants that serve sushi mainly to Americans, the folks at Hokusai seem keen on actually educating customers about sushi traditions, and about the fact that a customer can have a really interesting experience if they forget the menu and ask the chef to improvise. And as you can see from my experience at Sushi Go 55, to my mind, that’s really what makes sushi in any form unique and special—handing control to the chef.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Any opinions on kids and sushi? Westsiders in L.A. start their kids on it at 2.
Trevor Corson: It makes perfect sense that American kids would like sushi, because sushi in America is full of sugar. The word “sushi” actually has nothing to do with fish, it simply refers to any dish that’s based on rice that’s been seasoned with vinegar, salt, and sugar. In the U.S. the proportion of sugar in the rice tends to be high. Sushi chefs I’ve talked to in the U.S. say they notice that when they add more sugar to the sushi their customers compliment them more. In Tokyo, chefs pride themselves on the more subtle calibration of their sushi rice, which tends to be less sweet. People assume sushi is basically healthy, but it’s loaded with carbs. As for kids, unfortunately there is that nasty mercury question, which holds for tuna sandwiches just as much as does for sushi.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Priuses that aren’t hybrids are just ugly cars (and no offense if you have a P). What do you think of Fugu bred without the poison? You’ve fugued, haven’t you? Were you at all worried?
Trevor Corson: For the record, I drive a Honda Insight hybrid, which is arguably even uglier than a Prius, in a spectacular 1970s Japanese sci-fi B-movie sort of way. In fact, now that I think about it, it looks a bit like a fugu.
I lived in Japan for three years, and fugu was the one piece of Japanese cuisine I had sworn that I would never eat. It just didn’t seem worth it, the whole dying thing.
One night in Tokyo I met up for dinner with a Japanese ex-girlfriend. We’d broken up recently. She looked great. She said she knew this little place. I followed her down a stairway from street level into a warren of basement corridors, to an unmarked door. We stepped inside to find a small room with a wood counter and a couple of chefs behind it, but there was nothing—no menus, no signs, no pictures—to suggest what they might be serving, and the counter had a high rim, so I couldn’t really see what they were making. The ex started pouring sake and in no time I was feeling pretty light-headed. The chef handed us an incredibly fragrant bowl of stew, and the ex, she started feeding me pieces of something out of it with her chopsticks, all smiley, like maybe we’re going to hook up again later tonight. “What is this?” I said. “It’s delicious.” She put down her chopsticks and got this really evil, self-satisfied smile on her face. “Fugu.” I think she was actually hoping I might die.
She had gotten the chef in on it, too. He came over, looking all serious, bowed, and said to me, “The poison usually starts to take affect after about ten or fifteen minutes, so if anything is wrong, you’ll feel it soon.” He started at me for a second, totally deadpan, and then started laughing.
Now, I don’t want to admit this, but I will. Knowing I could die eating it somehow made it taste amazing.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Anyone growing wasabi in the U.S. now? Organically?
Trevor Corson: As I describe in the book, most of the wasabi we get at sushi bars isn’t wasabi at all, it’s horseradish with green food coloring. Real wasabi tastes different and is very expensive and difficult to grow. In the book I describe an attempt by Americans to grow real wasabi commercially in the Pacific Northwest, an ill-fated affair that involved some dramatic industrial espionage. There are a few outfits currently growing real wasabi on a very small scale in the U.S., including in the Pacific Northwest and North Carolina. To the extent that real wasabi is available for sale in the U.S. at all, much of it is imported from farming operations in China. If you get to be friends with a good sushi chef, you’ll probably discover that he maintains a small stash of real wasabi for his best customers.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Did you see the Sex & the City movie? Kim Catrall and sushi—yes or no? Any other movie sushi scene you’re particularly fond of? Any take on erotica and sushi—why does this seem to be a whole side fetish?
Trevor Corson: Yes! Best line in the movie: “There are places where wasabi should never go.” There are lots of movies with famous lobster scenes, perhaps not as many with famous sushi scenes. But there does seem to be a correlation of sushi with eroticism, and I can see why—some of those clams on rice look exactly like labia. And I’ve got a whole chapter in my book playing off the geoduck clam’s unavoidable similarity to an erect cock. I am of course far too young to remember this (cough), but older friends of mine have told me that in 1980s, “Do you like sushi?” was a way of asking someone if they were interested in oral sex. At one point on my book tour, I actually stopped by the Erotica L.A. convention and discovered that the guy hanging out with the hottest porn stars on the main dais was a sushi chef, whose restaurant had started serving naked-body sushi. You don’t run across restaurants serving tacos or sweet and sour pork off naked people. So I guess there’s just something particularly sensual about sushi. It is raw flesh, after all.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Do you eat sushi inland? Is this a bad idea, despite the prevalence of food traveling by air?
Trevor Corson: These days, if you eat bluefin tuna at a sushi bar in Manhattan, it’s entirely possible the fish was caught somewhere off Boston, flow to Tokyo for grading and pricing, and the flown back to New York. I describe the incredible Tokyo central fish market in the book. I’ve been there several times at 5:00 a.m. and it is without doubt the most extraordinary place I’ve seen in the entire world. Of course, the carbon footprint for that piece of bluefin is absurdly, disproportionately huge.
So in one sense, it makes absolutely no difference where you eat sushi, as long as there is a major international airport nearby—and that applies whether you are in Denver or Manhattan or Vancouver. That said, it’s interesting to note that in Japan, where everyone is close to the sea, sushi bars often have less of a selection of different seafood ingredients at any given time than the fancier sushi bars in the U.S. That’s because traditional chefs in Japan tend to focus more on what’s in season—they’re doing their customers a favor by only stocking what fish they know are going to be especially tasty at that time of year. Here, we immediately think it’s a negative if a sushi bar doesn’t have a certain ingredient in stock, but then again, we expect to find tomatoes in our supermarkets year-round. The Japanese are much more into the seasonality of foods. I’m all for this focus on seasonality in sushi, and if I’m near the ocean, I’d prefer to have a sushi chef who does his best to make sushi with what he can get nearby. To me that keeps things more interesting. A typical American customer walks into a sushi bar says to him or herself, “I love X, Y, and Z types of sushi, so that’s what I’m going to order again.” A typical Japanese customer walks in and says, “I wonder what surprises and unusual flavors the chef will try on me this month.”
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Ever get sick from bad sushi?
Trevor Corson: The only time I’ve ever puked after eating raw fish wasn’t sushi, it was after eating salmon tartar at a famous Manhattan restaurant that shall remain nameless. It shall remain nameless because although salmon often carry parasites (a topic I delve into in glorious, gripping detail in the book), I have no idea if the fish was what made me puke. It happened on one of the most stressful days of my book tour—I had back-to-back interviews on NPR, a meeting with conservation experts, a big presentation at Barnes & Noble, and an early morning appearance on Martha Stewart radio the next day, and I just went into my hotel bathroom after lunch and puked. I’d like to think I was just following in the illustrious footsteps of the legendary Celtics’ center Bill Russell, who couldn’t play a game until he’d gone into the men’s room and puked out his anxiety. I guess if that was the cause, you could say it was sushi related after all.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Overfishing and sushi—are you at all an activist on this?
Trevor Corson: By now that’s probably obvious: yes. I became convinced that sustainable fishing is possible—if there is a system that works and there is the will to do it—while writing my first book, The Secret Life of Lobsters, which turned out be a very surprising and rather heartwarming tale of a fishery that had actually done some things right. (It also helps that lobsters are incredibly horny and have all these soap operatic romances down there, but that’s for another interview.) Unfortunately, sushi chefs are behind the curve on questions related to the environment and sustainability. This has to change, or pretty soon we won’t have any sushi left to eat—they’re going to put themselves out of business. What I like is getting people to realize that they can actually have a more interesting and more authentic meal by paying attention to sustainability—skipping bluefin tuna is a perfect example of how these things go hand in hand, as I’ve already explained.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Any opinion on the whole transformation of sushi into fast food, a la supermarket availability?
Trevor Corson: This gets back to the history of sushi as a cheap fast food—it’s finally returning to its democratic roots. That said, even the fast-food version of sushi in the late 1800s and early 1900s was made to order, with slightly warm rice and room-temperature fish and shellfish, most of which had been pickled or boiled slightly so it would keep without refrigeration. At sushi bars, chefs always try to keep their sushi rice slightly warm, at around body temperature. So at a supermarket, I’m the first person to grab a California roll from the cooler if I want a quick snack, but folks, at least let it warm up to room temperature before you eat it. Cold sushi is just wrong, and gross.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Do you engage in bad habits, like soy dipping, on the sly?
Trevor Corson: For a while I had the same bad American sushi habits that most of us do. Like everyone else I would douse my sushi with lots of extra wasabi. Then I started talking to sushi chefs, and realized how sad this made them. They’d get up at 4 a.m. and go to the fish market to buy us the best fish, and then we would just obliterate all the subtle flavors of the fish with horseradish. No wonder they’re serving us cheap imitation fish. If you get a chef who really takes the time to prepare and season each piece for you, you won’t miss the soy sauce and wasabi at all. I always hit a sushi bar as early in the evening as possible, so the chef won’t be too busy and can do these things for me.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Do you cook? Are you at all into organic, local, or Slow Food, or a practitioner of other foodie movements?
Trevor Corson: Oh, hell yes. I mean, as a cook, I’m a complete amateur—I know how to prepare, like, maybe three dishes. But having been raised on industrial chicken breasts and frozen peas, I’m all for the foodie revolution.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: Do you make sushi yourself? If so, any top-secret hyper creative roll you’ve come up with?
Trevor Corson: I do dabble in sushi-making myself. Rather than any particular creative roll, what really gets me excited are all the cool artisanal ingredients you can get, like two-year aged unpasteurized soy sauce, which I then use to make a special sauce that most people don’t know about, called nikiri. I keep a list of some of my favorite stuff on my website here. I recently introduced nikiri sauce to a food writer in Washington D.C. and he was blown away.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: What’s your favorite food that doesn’t come from the sea?
Trevor Corson: Miso! What a miraculous thing it is. As I mention in the book: How ironic is it that 7th-century Japanese Buddhist vegetarians developed the miso process in order to make beans taste more like meat, and now a similar process is used by industrial meat manufacturers to add “hydrolized vegetable protein” to meat to restore the savoriness that’s been lost due to modern industrial meat processing.
Haphazard Gourmet Girls: What are you working on now? Is it food related?
Trevor Corson: I am thinking it would be wise for me to break out of seafood for my next project, before I end up writing The Private Life of Clams. Stay tuned.
