Seafood

My day started with an upset stomach. For some reason I just felt sick. I threw up three times before leaving for work, and wondered if I'd be able to make it through the day. I even brought a plastic bag into my classroom, just in case the worst should happen and I couldn't make it out in time. I couldn't eat breakfast and I only had a few mouthfuls of lunch.

My day ended with me eating a wide variety of weird and sometimes disgusting raw seafood.

Now, as I've blogged previously, I've eaten a few strange things in Japan, mostly of the horumon (offal) variety. Chicken heart, intestines, liver, tongue, heart, fish fins (eaten like potato chips), diaphragm, raw horse, sea urchin, and raw octopus in wasabi. (The latter two were by far the worst.)

Tonight I can add substantially to my list.

Pete and I went out to a sashimi* restaurant with one of my favourite students, and his friend. I went for the company, not the food; I still felt a bit seedy and thought I wouldn't be eating much.

*(Sashimi is raw fish. As opposed to sushi, which is raw fish on rice, often with wasabi.)

So what did I eat? I tried whale, for the first time. We had whale sashimi, and deep-fried whale pieces. They were both really good. The deep-fried whale tasted a bit like deep-fried chicken (same type of deep-frying as 'karaage') but the meat was softer. The whale sashimi was pink, it looked much like raw tuna. Dipped in soy sauce, topped with negi and daikon, it was tasty.

I had raw fugu, sliced very thin, white and transparent. Again, dipped in soy sauce. Fugu is pufferfish, and is famous for being that dish which is fatally poisonous if prepared incorrectly. Apparently, fugu is most poisonous in its liver. And naturally, it's the meat closest to the liver which is considered most delicious. So only specially licensed chefs who attained certificiation are allowed to prepare fugu.

Then came the shirako. What to say about shirako??
Just look at this picture.

That's shirako.

When it came out, I thought we were getting fish stomach lining. Our student's friend really recommended this and liked the taste of it. When it came out, it really did look like raw stomach lining. But it wasn't stomach. To quote wikipedia, shirako is "the male genitalia of fish when they contain sperm".

I've never seen Pete quail before any dish, ever, but even he had to psych himself into this. Each piece is quite a big mouthful. The student and his friend watched expectantly. "It's delicious, right?" Pete disagreed, lunging for his beer. He remarked that it tasted exactly like what it was...

I refused to try a whole piece but had a minute amount. Actually, it was small enough that I could mostly only taste the sauce, which tasted nice enough, but the shirako was cold and slimy. I would not be talked into trying more sperm-filled testicles. Incredibly, the student and his friend ordered another dish of it to eat for themselves...

Somewhat nicer was ankimo - the liver of angler fish. This is something of a luxury dish, like foie gras. Pete and I mused that it tasted vaguely of canned salmon or canned tuna. "But much more expensive," pointed out our student somewhat indignantly, at which we hastened to say it was MUCH better than those things. I guess, being from Australia, I don't have much history of eating raw seafood, so I don't have much reference point to explain these tastes. All these raw seafood dishes are very unique-tasting.

I also enjoyed the river shrimp. They're really small shrimp, fried and crispy, and you just eat them whole, heads and antennae and all.

For me, the worst challenge of the night were the raw oysters. These things were huge. 'Milk of the sea' is what Japanese people call them, because they're creamy. And sea-y. The others each slurped theirs down in one huge, disgusting mouthful, but I had to dispose of mine in three bites. I wasn't planning to have one at all and I had to psych myself, for about five minutes each, into each mouthful. They were creamy, and slimy, and tasted like sea water and something indefinable.

After the raw oysters was the marginally better - mostly because it was smaller - frozen raw squid. I mean, small pieces of marinated raw squid, frozen like ice treats. Only once you start eating them, the ice melts away a bit and you just have the chewy, red, raw squid in your mouth.

Japan is weird sometimes.