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What do a banker, hairdresser, chef and me have in common? Sushi! We are now all certified Sushi and Sashimi Masters - what ever that may mean!
Friday morning it was a 6 am start at the Billinggate Fish Market down in Canary Wharf (to which I now know was named by all the ships transporting goods from Canary Islands) I was one of two women in a great big icy shed filled with slippery slimy fish wranglers and their latest catch! I was starting to reconsider what it was I was doing there!!
Meeting first with the Chief Inspector, who explained that they were practicing on laws passed in the 1700’s, he took us on a tour of ‘his’ market to learn how to choose a quality fish - to which we needed to pay great attention as it was up to us to find our own to use later in the course!
While dodging the fork lifts that hold no prisoners, to crabs that have escaped their gates and an eel splash, I was able to grasp a basic understanding of what to look for and picked my catch.
Upstairs there was a Japanese
feast waiting for us, cooked fish, rice and egg roll for a 9am breakfast! Not my usual cup of tea, but neither is smelling, squeezing and looking into the eyes of fish, so what difference could it make!
Two hours later with our specimens on ice, it was down to the grit of cutting and cleaning them! Ekk!! Rex hunt would be so proud - and so he should be.. This past year has been full of adventures, but gutting a Sea bass was never on the top of list! And with all my hard work of slipping and sliding the knife about to get as much flesh as possible, while black beady eyes looked back at me, I never found much to show for it! I even learnt techniques to thread the stomachs of crayfish and found that a squid had a fantastic inner shell!
With all that out of the way, it was time to learn how to eat it!
Not much went into a lot of the preparation - once the fish was dead and filleted, a bit of soy sauce and ginger and it was ready to go! Surprisingly, it was the Sashimi
that I would normally let drive straight past me on the Sushi trains that I enjoyed the best - and I was witness to the rawness of them, because I just cut that same piece of flesh of the bone!
My favorite, the inside out sushi roll, with the rice on the outside of the seaweed turned out to be way to easy! Once cooking the rice, and adding vinegar, sugar and salt, it only took a bit of cling film, rice and seaweed - everything else was creativity, flowering cabbages and swirling cucumber around with some Asahi beer to wash it all down, I was pretty proud of my lunch!!
So all in all, I discovered that Wagamama’s (Sushi chain) is probably still the easier option than fishing in Hyde Park for my dinner plate - but not half as fun!
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