Sushi Battle!

Before I ever came to Japan, and as I was just beginning to learn about good food and good cooking, I started watching Iron Chef on Food Network.*

"Iron Chef" is a loose adaptation of the actual name of the show. In Japanese, it's called 虜利の鉄人 (ryori no tetsujin), or "Iron Men of Cooking" ("ryori" is "cooking" or "cuisine," "tetsu" = "iron" and "jin" = "men" or "people"). There's a lot to be learned from watching this show, but now that I've been in Japan, I get even more out of the show. I almost wish, though, that it was only subtitled and not dubbed. I do like that even with the dubbing, you can hear the Japanese sometimes. I haven't ever seen this on DVD, so I'm wondering if there's a sub-only version.

I love sushi. I remember being squeamish about Chinese food and tofu, but after I got to grad school and started exploring food more, I learned to really love sushi. Now that I live in Japan, I can eat it every day if I want to... In fact, I might go have some as soon as I finish this post! I learned to make sushi and I've sampled many kinds and styles, and I've eaten some things (raw and otherwise) that I never thought I'd like.

On YouTube, I found the very first SUSHI BATTLE! on Iron Chef. Here are the links. WOO! Morimoto is a badass, but the challenger is pretty impressive, too, and there's a lot of cool stuff about the history of sushi in the episode.



Part 2
Part 3
Presentation
Judgment

*I think it's important to note, too, that my increase in disposable income and standard of living helped A LOT in this effort. In some ways, now, I look back on the time after grad school as a very "nouveaux riche" time in my life. I don't regret any of it, but it's not cheap to learn to love wine, whiskey, sushi, and other good food. Sometimes it's easy to forget that.