In order to pursue the "extreme" freshness, a few years ago, the Japanese Food Culture Association showed a new cuisine "Bone Swimming Cuisine" in a food program.
The video caused an uproar overseas, and there was a crusade on the Internet. In the end, Japan can only delete uploaded videos.
"Bone swimming", also known as "swimming bones", refers to swimming bones, which means that fish can keep their vital signs and swim in the water with only bones left.
This sounds a little scary and cruel in actual production technology. The chef will slice the most fish in the live fish for customers to eat, and put the remaining sliced fish into the fish tank to realize the visual and taste stimulation of "eating fish and watching fish swim".
This kind of cooking is beyond anyone's ability. It is necessary to thoroughly understand the distribution of blood vessels and nerves in fish and thoroughly study the most suitable knife method. Only a skilled chef can make the ingredients symmetrical and beautiful without destroying the life-sustaining tissues of fish.
In the eyes of the Japanese, this kind of behavior represents the spirit of artisans, so it is welcomed by high-end people in the upper class. These diners will watch the chef's knife work, sigh the delicious fish, and let the "live fish" with good bones swim around in the water.
This cooking method is easily associated with one of the top ten tortures in ancient China. Take raw meat from a living body to ensure that the object still has vital signs after being cut across the board.
I have to say that the Japanese inner world is quite cruel in the research and taste choice of such a seemingly "great knife worker".
Japanese people are persistent in their dietary requirements, and "freshness" is a goal they will never give up pursuing, so that up to now, this pursuit has reached the point of paranoia.
For sashimi cuisine, the freshness of ingredients will have a great impact on the taste of food. Fish used for sashimi must have high water content and fine muscle fiber tissue, but such fish is easy to deteriorate and rot. Therefore, from salvage to transportation, this kind of raw materials can not be frozen in a way that will destroy muscle fiber tissue, but can only be stored in ice cubes at low temperature to ensure fresh and tender meat and the best taste.
Take sashimi for example, there is no extra cooking method. In order to get the best eating experience, in addition to the choice of ingredients, knife work has become the most important way to present this dish. Chefs need to remove the bad taste parts of the ingredients and make the best part thin and thick with a knife, with a symmetrical size and shape.
Therefore, Japanese chefs are very demanding in the choice of knives. In addition to the most basic sharpness, they also need to subdivide the use of knives and the division of ingredients. In Japan, there are dozens of chef's knives comparable to surgeons' scalpels, and the technology is very elegant.
With the perfect knife work, the shape of the ingredients makes Japanese chefs pay attention to setting the plate. No matter in which country, for high-end food, setting dishes is an important link to improve the food style, and it can even rise to art. In the pursuit of aesthetics, the Japanese have never been unwilling to lag behind and have brought their own style to the extreme.
The appearance of "bone swimming" is also an extreme embodiment of Japan's pursuit of fresh raw materials, knife work and innovation in dish setting.
As we all know, Japan is a country where "raw food" culture runs through life. In addition to "bone swimming", there are many other dishes of the same type, which are also well received by the Japanese public.
Common live fish, bullfrog sashimi and "bone swimming" are similar, and their meat is cut while the ingredients are still alive. Most bullfrog sashimi is to cut off the lower half of the bullfrog and keep it fresh with ice cubes. At this time, the upper body of the bullfrog is still intact and has vital signs. Usually diners poke it with chopsticks, and bullfrogs blink or struggle. The more they struggle, the more skilled the chef's knife work is.
Like bullfrog sashimi, the chef will keep the live lobster in a low temperature environment for a period of time, then separate the lobster head from the body, cut the shrimp meat into pieces and serve it on the table with the shrimp head. If the lobster's tentacles and feet are still moving after the diners finish eating shrimp meat, it proves that this dish is perfect.
Raw squid is probably the most common and unusual dish in Japan. The characteristics of geographical location make Japan mainly focus on aquatic food. Among many seafood dishes, squid rice is very famous. The cook quickly dismembered the squid's body, leaving the head and feet on the rice and drenching it with sauce. Squid will squirm wildly under the action of salt, and then diners can eat it.
There are also some dishes that are difficult to understand, such as grilled octopus. This cooking method requires no skill, just put the octopus on the barbecue. However, such food is not delicious at all, even because it has not been treated, it is not delicious and it is not easy to cook.
Some Japanese dishes are really wonderful, and some cooking methods are purely for eye-catching, and their popularity also shows the abnormal needs of some people in Japan to the fullest.
The biggest hidden danger of raw food is parasites. In Japan, the incidence of parasitic diseases is quite high, and the main reason for the prevalence of norovirus is raw food.
Perhaps because of cultural differences, I think raw food is not terrible to some extent, but the way of eating raw food like "bone swimming" always makes people afraid to think deeply.
I have heard from friends who can't cook before that making the ingredients well is the greatest respect for it.
In the era of Homo sapiens, it is also a common phenomenon for human beings to eat raw food. The appearance and use of fire made people try cooked food, which is a great progress of human civilization.
Before early China entered civilized society, "eating raw meat" was also a common way to eat. The invention of cookware led to the second nutrition revolution. In the Western Zhou Dynasty, the popularity of Ding Tao and Taogui made food cooked in soup before eating. After the Han Dynasty, the appearance of ironware made cooking cooked food a common phenomenon.
The appearance of cookware and the popularity of cooked food gradually distinguish human beings from animals. In modern society, the eating habits of raw food that Japan has always maintained cannot be completely regarded as the backwardness of civilization, but the cultural inheritance and development paths it has chosen are different.
"Bone swimming" ends here. I wonder what readers think of similar cooking?