Steak - Mark Schatzker [77]
By five that morning, I was standing in a large room surrounded by the frozen carcasses of many dead, extremely expensive tuna, a can of hot coffee in my hand. There had never been, until that moment, a hot can of anything in my hand. After less than four hours of sleep, coffee was what I needed, and a guide I had hired to show me around took me into a convenience store where, next to the cash register, I found a hot display case filled with hot cans of coffee.
The problem with hot canned Japanese coffee isn’t the taste—the stuff is genuinely good—but that you need oven mitts to drink it. As we walked toward the fish market, I juggled it like a baked potato, and it wasn’t until several blocks later that it was cool enough to grasp, open, and gingerly sip. Later that day, I bought another.
The frozen tuna were so cold, they appeared harder than the concrete floor on which they were lying. They were laid out in long rows, and their eyes were covered with yellow or red stickers indicating their weight. In a few minutes’ time, each one would be carted off by its new owner in the course of the famous tuna auction at Tokyo’s Tsukiji fish market, the largest wholesale fish and seafood market in the world. But what was being sold to the highest bidder was not so much tuna itself as the fat that happens to come wrapped in the skin, tail, and fins of a tuna. All around the room, Japanese fish buyers in tall rubber boots were taking tiny pickaxes and hacking into the tails of the frozen fish. They looked like geologists prospecting for indicator minerals, but the riches they were after were fat. The fattier the tail, the more fat would be present in the tuna’s precious belly.
At precisely 5:30 a.m., the Japanese fat prospectors turned away from the frozen tuna and faced an auctioneer wearing a red hat. The auction commenced. Fish buyers began raising their arms in a throwing motion. There was grunting and shouting. Somewhere, a bell would not stop ringing, and men kept yelling the same word in unison, holding it like a long note, so that it was impossible to hear the auctioneer. The din of commerce would rise and fall and rise again, like the roar of a crowd at a soccer game. Another man holding a black crayon scurried from fish to fish, marking each one with the name of its new owner.
“How do they know which fish is being sold?” I asked my guide.
“I have no idea,” he said. “I can’t understand what they are saying. Sometimes, he says some numbers.”
The largest fish on the auction floor was 122 kilograms, but large fish do not necessarily get the highest bids. Fresh tuna, a buyer told us, sell for ten times more than frozen tuna. And flesh that is a deep red is more desirable than pale flesh. But more than anything, the fish buyers are looking for fat. The more fat, the higher the price the tuna will fetch.
The most expensive fish to sell that morning went for 2 million yen, which is about as much as a brand-new four-door Volkswagen. Like all the fish that had been auctioned, over the next few days it would be diced into thin rectangles by sushi chefs wielding extraordinarily sharp knives and transferred by chopsticks to the open mouths of thousands of sushi and sashimi aficionados, where, apparently, the mere heat of their tongues would make it melt.
Like the dead frozen tuna on the floor next to me, fat was the reason I had come to Japan. The country may be the most technologically advanced in the world, the spiritual heartland of futuristic consumer electronics, but when it comes to fat, the Japanese remain hunter-gatherers at heart. They revere it.
I was here to sample a different kind of fat, one that is also said to melt in the mouth. It is found in Kobe beef, from cattle that are fed beer and massaged