Saturday, April 14, 2012

For Better Soy Sauce

Dined at a sushi restaurant last night, and thoroughly didn't enjoy the soy sauce. Made my tongue burn. Is it cutting corners on the quality of food; the average customer doesn't know good soy sauce any more; both?

Since we have started to brew our own Kirk Rice Soy Sauce, I have noticed other soy sauces, especially when eating out. Yesterday we ate out at a restaurant that we had been to once before some time ago and thought was average. We were with the in-laws who wanted to try it out.

We walked in to the sushi shop at about 6:40, and it was packed. The waiting area for the shop ws quite large, probably consuming 1/4 of their total square footage. We waited 30 minutes to be seated.

This was a conveyor belt sushi restaurant, so at the center of the establishment was a large belt carrying a variety of sushi so that customers could pick out their favorites. Inside the beltway, several chefs waited for customers to bark orders at them for sushi that did not appear on the belt.

Admittedly, this was not an upscale restaurant, and conveyor belt sushi is thought of as cheap, fast-food style sushi. This restaurant serves a limited variety of sushi, nigiri zushi, and a very few makizushi selections. The sushi is of good quality, and the rice is not too sweet, so it suited our tastes.

Unfortunately, the quality of the soy sauce was inferior. When considering the important ingredients of sushi, three have special sushi words assigned to them. First is the neta, the fish, meat or vegetable that sits on top of the sushi. Next is the shari, or the vinegar rice. Finally there is the murasaki (which means purple in Japanese) or the soy sauce.

My guess is that people focus so much on the first two ingredients that the third has become a condiment rather than an essential ingredient.