In 30 minutes, the fish is completely exsanguinated. The ice slurry has worked its magic, too, pulling out the rest of the blood that didn't flow easily from the flounder's wounds. The water is a soft copper color; the fish's flesh has turned nearly translucent, with the faintest blue tips around its pearly edges. Fisch begins to carve up the flounder, producing four beautiful filets in quick succession. The entire process is over almost as quickly as it had begun.
"Ike jime in a fish increases the shelf life of that fish by two days without changing the flavor of it," explains Fisch later.
Photos by Groovehouse
3. He then cuts the gills down to the fish's spine.
Photos by Groovehouse
4. Lastly, he cuts the tail almost off — enough to form a handle — then inserts a straight metal wire along the fish's spine. When removed, it creates a runway for the blood to flow quickly out of the fish.
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Although the technique both preserves the fish for longer and encourages a better flavor to develop in it — both directly after being caught and over time, as it's allowed to rest and age — it's virtually unheard of in the United States.
You can certainly judge the quality of a sushi restaurant based upon whether or not the "chef" has heard of the practice. But aside from that, it's barely mentioned in totemic books such as On Food and Cooking, where Harold McGee spends plenty of time describing an almost identical process in slaughtering cows and pigs but never once mentions fish in this regard. Ditto in The Food Lover's Companion, an otherwise highly useful and highly regarded compendium of cooking terminology.
Even on YouTube, a repository where you can find roughly 16,000 completely unique video tutorials on how to draw eyeliner or knit a beer koozie, there is only a scant handful of videos on ike jime. In one, chefs Dave Arnold and Nils Noren perform a haphazard ike jime demonstration in front of a baffled crowd at the French Culinary Institute in New York City. A commenter on the video called it "amateurish," prompting the duo to respond with "You're welcome to come in and show us how it's done."
So it comes as no surprise, really, that the few people in Houston who practice ike jime on their fish — like Stoops and Fisch — had to teach themselves. "It's something I read about, and I wanted to find out further information about it. That's how half the cooking happens in Houston," says Fisch. He admits that his process is perhaps a bit rough and imprecise, but, he says, it's "the only way for us to do it."
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Rough-catching — the typical Gulf fishing method — is useless for sushi, not to mention other raw preparations that have become increasingly popular, such as the ceviches, tiraditos, kinilaws or crudos seen on so many restaurant menus these days.
"Most of the fish that are harvested are commodity fish," says Stoops, who, besides being a fishmonger with Louisiana Foods, is a lifelong Gulf fisherman. "They're not harvested in small amounts — snapper, drum, flounder, what have you — it's always been about volume."
And catching in volume means that the fish are left suffocating and full of blood, lactic acid building up and making the flesh too soft, too fishy-tasting to be used for anything other than cooking: grilling, broiling or frying.
Seafood is a $65 billion-per-year industry in the United States, and the per capita consumption of fish increases every year, according to the National Fisheries Institute. But while seafood sales have declined overall in the last year, the sale and consumption of sushi has not. In fact, the consumption of sushi was up 4 percent over the last year, according to Nation's Restaurant News.
"Today," writes Sasha Issenberg in The Sushi Economy, sushi is "found in nearly every city in the United States, where it's sold out of the deli case at supermarket counters, as a snack at baseball stadiums, and as part of a $350 omakase lunch at New York's Masa."
Sushi is becoming increasingly popular locally, too. Up the road in Austin, Chef Tyson Cole is busy winning James Beard Foundation Awards for his work at world-renowned sushi restaurant Uchi. A second location of Uchi is set to open soon in the old Felix location here at Montrose and Westheimer, and the first Texas location of the ultra-high-end Katsuya by Starck — a Los Angeles-based sushi restaurant from celebrity sushi chef Katsuya Uechi and designer Philippe Starck — is opening early next year.
Even non-Japanese restaurants are branching into sushi. As recently as the last month, Philippe Schmidt was offering pieces of nigirizushi for appetizers, playing off a portion of the menu at his namesake restaurant, Philippe, that offers "au naturel" tartares of salmon and tuna.
And diners are eager to learn about sushi, taking classes from grocery stores like Central Market or restaurants like RA Sushi on how to construct their own hand rolls at home.
"There's a big profit," says Carl Rosa, founder of the Sushi Club of Houston and the Japan-America Initiative. "Sushi makes a lot of money."
Stoops, whose role in the local seafood business is essentially that of a middleman, says that if he could get sushi-grade flounder for Houston restaurants from his fishermen, he could pay, say, $1.25 a pound as opposed to rough-caught flounder that he'd buy for only 25 cents a pound — a potential quintupling of income.
