Finding the umami in nigiri
Credit to Author: Mia Stainsby| Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2019 19:00:12 +0000
Masayoshi
Where: 4376 Fraser Street
When: Open for dinner, Monday to Saturday
Contact: masayoshi.ca, 604-428-6272
When it comes to toys, for Masayoshi Baba, it’s cooking gear. As owner of Masayoshi, one of Vancouver’s top Japanese restaurants, his one true love is cooking. He might, however, sneak in a tryst or two with his snowboard in winter.
When he is trying new toys, resulting dishes often show up as staff meals. The latest was a ravioli maker and his attempt at taming buckwheat flour into pasta. Sometimes the dishes make the cut and land on the menu. Sometimes they don’t. The buckwheat ravioli didn’t (but an appetizer uniting banana and uni did).
I hadn’t been to the 17-seat restaurant for a few years. Back then, he had an a la carte plus an omakase menu, but the following year, he switched to nigiri omakase only and I hadn’t tried it. I returned recently. There are two options: $100 for 14 nigiri, miso soup, and dessert, or $130 for 16 nigiri, two or three appetizers, miso soup and dessert.
I marvel at how good raw fish can taste when the chef understands it. Baba has deliveries five times a week from fish markets in Japan (Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka), preferring Japanese fishmongers who use the ike jime method of killing them, paralyzing, then draining the blood. It’s said to preserve texture and flavour and add umami (savoury flavour). Anyway, I was hyper aware of the super-clean and delicate flavours with no trace of fishiness. “When I get fish, I remove head and guts, then keep on ice until umami comes out,” Baba says.
Baba’s resume includes 10 years at Tojo’s and before that at sushi restaurants in Japan as well as a fugu (blowfish) restaurant. At the latter, he could distinguish which of 100 kinds of blowfish are poisonous and the 22 that aren’t. Now, chefs use farmed blowfish (non-poisonous, of course), so it’s not quite as fun it used to be. “It tastes a little like kawahagi (file fish),” Baba says. “It’s white, and light and a little crunchy.”
His nigiri changes every evening and just prior to service, he sets out what he needs for guests in a hinoki wood box. Stainless steel keeps it too cold. Wood warms just enough to match the rice temperature. He uses akazu (red vinegar from sake lees) for the sushi rice instead of the more common komezu (rice vinegar), tinting it to look more like brown rice and for a softer, deeper taste.
Masayoshi chef/owner Masayoshi Baba. Photo: Lelia Kwok.
Our 16-nigiri omakase began with a couple of appetizers — honey mussels and pine mushrooms in a mushroom broth in a golden bowl. Beautiful! Then dungeness crab with dashi jelly, local tomatoes and turnips. Another beauty.
As for the parade of nigiri: buttery yellowtail, melt-in-mouth baby snapper, geoduck bundled in nori, herring in nori, bluefin tuna akami (shoulder) and otoro (fatty belly) with a touch of soy and mirin, Japanese shad cured with salt and vinegar (about 15 minutes), grunt, horse mackerel, smoked bonito (a standout!), crab, golden eye, uni (over rice, in a glass bowl), Hokkaido scallops, anago (torched and buttery), black cod (ever so lightly deep-fried, marinated in soy vinegar). Tamagotchi, a finely tuned egg custard cake — in Jiro Dreams of Sushi, a chef breaks down in tears upon getting a long-sought tamagotchi okay (after 200 fails) from master chef Jiro Ono — was nicely made. It took two years for Baba to be satisfied with his. Eggs, sugar, ground shrimp, ground mountain potato make up the cake-like dish. Partway through the nigiri set, the server brought miso soup, which recharged the palate.
Baba adds tweaks as needed to the different fish to add umami — finely zested lemon rind, a light torching, salt and vinegar cure (removes the fishy taste), dipping the skin side in boiling water, smoking, curing in kelp, simmering in a soy-sake based broth, wrapping in nori, or aging (tuna can be aged for two to four weeks). Elements of his omakase include raw, simmered, baked, deep-fried, and steamed.
A light panna cotta dessert with matcha sauce and gold leaf brought the meal to a conclusion.
Sushi Bar Maumi in the West End and Sushi Bar Shu also offer nigiri omakase-only menus, and many others, like Yuwa, Miku, Minamu, Tetsu and Tojo’s offer them along with a la carte menus.
Do not ask for soy sauce or wasabi as he is the arbiter of what’s needed — Baba uses just enough to enhance, so you cannot wing it with your own little stash. The fresh wasabi, incidentally, is from Japan’s Shizuoka region, which produces the best in the country.
Should you have room for more food, you can order more and top yourself up.