14 DAY TRIAL // An inventive Japanese chef has perfected the art of creating diminutive sushi made using a single grain of rice.
Chef Hironori Ikeno is the owner of a Tokyo restaurant, called Nohachi, where he serves his teeny tiny creations. The establishment is known for the traditional sushi meals that diners can find there and for the fact that it displays no price tags.
Hironori Ikeno has spent 13 years perfecting his method of slicing, wrapping and dicing classic sushi ingredients into miniaturized versions of the Japanese delicacy.
“I actually started the whole thing from a joke with a customer whom I served a miniscule sushi to and I started to wonder how tiny could I make it,” Ikeno said, cited by Solar News.
Ikeno claims each grain-sized sushi takes about 5 minutes to make, compared to a plate of their full-sized counterparts, which takes only one minute to create. Currently, the Japanese chef creates miniaturized versions of seven types of sushi, using mackerel, tuna, and sea urchin.
However, some may wonder if such a small dish actually has any flavor. Well, the answer to this question comes from Nohachi regular costumer Hisako Okamoto, who says that despite their size, these mini-sushi meals still pack a lot of flavor.
“The white-flesh fish had grated Japanese radish and chilli which gave it that spicy kick. Each grain of rice actually had quite a distinct taste,” Okamoto said.
The chef usually makes the tiny meal for children, couples and foreigners to enjoy.
“Customers are quite surprised, especially foreign guests who are really good at expressing their pleasure. They have even been so kind as to call my sushi art,” he said.
The tiny works of gastronomic art weigh less than one gram and are really challenging as the ingredients react differently to weather and compression in such small quantities.
Sushi first appeared towards the end of the Edo period in mid-19th century. Initially, it was a fast-food for the people living in Tokyo, or Edo as it was known back then, and was sold from mobile food carts which were something common on the city's streets.
The popular Japanese food usually consists of cooked vinegared rice combined with other ingredients, such as raw fish or other seafood. Ingredients and forms of sushi presentation on a plate vary widely though, but the ingredient all sushi have in common is the vinegared rice, also known as sumeshi.
At his restaurant, Hironori Ikeno serves sushi in the traditional style, called Edo-mae, which means he uses fish caught mostly in Tokyo bay.