On Saturday, Tam, Al and I went to Mitsuwa for the annual tuna demo where they break down four ~700lb bluefin tunas throughout the weekend.
(Update: One commenter mentioned that bluefin is becoming increasingly endangered, which is very true. The Monterey Bay Aqaurium has some excellent guides on how to eat sushi and fish in a sustainable manner. Bluefin is unfortunately on the “avoid” list. Here’s a follow up post with some alive tuna.)
Here's the tuna. It's a 700lb bluefin tuna caught off the coast of Malta in the Mediterranean. After being cleaned, the carcass weighed about 500 lbs. The performance was very crowded...4 to 5 people deep around the demonstration pit.
No trip to Mitsuwa is complete without having a meal or two at the food court. This trip was especially arduous: a 35 minute trek from the East Village to Port Authority, 20 minutes waiting for the Mitsuwa shuttle in bus exhaust and 35 minutes on a crowded shuttle ride to Jersey. One hour and forty minutes.
Uber sushi chef Nobuyoshi-san positions himself for the first cut.
With the "loin" removed.
The remaining meat on the ribs was scraped off with a spoon and packaged for sale. Very little of the fish went to waste. The quality of the scrapings isn't sashimi grade, but we speculated that it might be good broiled, in a soup or as burger patties.
This is chu-toro, or loin. We ended up getting a combination of chu-toro and o-toro. O-toro is belly or fatty meat. It was the most decadent, oily toro I've ever had. It was awesome...and at $62/lb (event sale price), you better believe it was awesome.
Removing the back bone.
We made friends with one of the nice fellows who was packaging up trays of toro. First, he hooked us up with increasingly better pieces of o-toro, swapping our inferior pieces out with nicer ones as he saw them go by. Then he asks, "hey, you want the bone?" "Uhhhh....sure..." "Five dollars," he says. Wait five dollars a pound? That thing is probably pretty heavy--no thanks. "Two dollars!" he says...for the whole thing! Sold! We'll take it!
We ended up buying the vertebrae of the 700lb fish for $2. They hacked it apart with a cleaver and mallet into one foot sections and triple bagged it in black garbage bags. We picked up other accoutrement like fresh wasabi root, soy sauce and tsukemono.
On the way out, the sky was an eerie purplish-pink hue--like the light of a really great sunset defused through a layer of storm clouds.
Back at the apartment, we took pictures with our bounty and Tam did some Nate Hill poses.
Al broiled a section of the vertebrae then broke it down and made a simple soup from it. In between each vertebrae there was a golf ball sized amount of synovial or spinal fluid ripe for the takin' (the white stuff in the middle). The fluid wasn't very tasty.
We gorged ourselves on o-toro, rice, picked stuff and soup. Mmmmm! I love food adventures…this kinda reminds me of ‘eating a still-beating cobra heart.’
what’s the spinal fluid taste like? similar to bone marrow?
it would be awesome to find out what else you concoct from the spine… what was the total weight of the spine? do you know?
Dude, that is so awesome. I need to get in on that somehow – I bet broth made from that would be off the HOOK.
I actually have video of parts of the cutting from last year’s demo. Hotness. I’ll remember that tip for making friends…
I wanted to buy the bone on Sunday, when they said 5 I thought per/pound. I didn’t want it, but 2 dollars is a steal. I missed the neck bone, which went for 30 per side.
[...] On Sunday, in front of a big audience, the market had an annual “giant bluefin tuna cut performance,” in which a 700-pound fish was cut into pieces for sushi. The blogger who bought and cooked the vertebrae for $2 documents the whole process here. [...]
whaaaaaa? u no save me sum? how cum?
::cries::
Hi fellow tuna spine consumer, I bought the spine too! I got the one from noon for a dollar more than what you paid for, but still a great deal.
As soon as we got home, I spooned all the remaining flesh from the bone (well, not all, not the really deep colored parts) and made a LOAD of spicy tuna tartare. LOTS of tartare. Then we hacked up the remaining bones so it would fit into a pot and made a tuna miso soup with kelp and onion. That was really tasty too.
The tartare we had over rice with avocado and seaweed, that was pretty awesome too.
The only thing is that my home still smells like fish and so does my hands. But it was really fun and will definitely do that again!!
Enjoy, while you can. Blue fin tuna will disappear from the Mediterranean within 1-2 decades forever. This is one of the most endangered species on earth yet we treat it as a delicacy being abundant in the seas. It is not. No one should encourage the consumption of this poor animal any longer.
@Geza: Thanks for your comment. I definitely agree with you. In the past 2 years, I avoid bluefin and yellowfin tuna almost all costs, mainly due to their endangerment, but also because the quality of fish found in the US is often not worth the price (in $$ or to nature). This was, however, a special occasion, and the bones would have likely gone to waste, so it’s better that we made some use of them.
When I do eat tuna, I eat kindai, which, at this point is too rare to be a practical replacement but may someday help to solve the bluefin’s potential endangerment/extinction. A few restaurants in the the Bay Area and New York carry it.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/05/21/FDI910LR9P.DTL
FISHHHH STOCKKKK! that sounds amazing.
also, how perfect that you went to Jersey, and came back with a 7ft. bloody spine in a garbage bag. fitting.
[...] is the opposite of the Tuna in the tuna backbone post. Here are some fish that are [...]
[...] Greg Takayama: Giant Bluefin Tuna “Cut Performance” at Mitsuwa [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:40 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:46 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:46 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:47 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:47 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:48 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:48 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
[...] How to get yourself the spine of a 700 lb. tuna for just $2. [Greg Takayama] Published Wednesday, November 12, 2008 12:49 PM by BuzzEditor Filed under: Dining News [...]
Bluefin Tuna are one of the most impressive fish in the Atlantic Ocean, but theirs numbers are crashing due to overfishing. Abundance of bluefin in US waters is roughly 5 percent of what it was in 1970. What’s needed now is an Atlantic-wide ban on catching bluefin. Otherwise, we’ll lose them. For sushi lovers, instead of bluefin try poll- and troll-caught yellowfin or bigeye tuna.
Alan Duckworth, PhD
Blue Ocean Institute
http://www.blueocean.org
Wow! That’s mental. Fantastic images. The toro looks so good. I’m salivating looking at the images and only 20 minutes ago i had my dinner. =o(
Errr. Did you really eat the synovial fluid?
@MikeyV: The entire length of the spine felt like something close to 40-pounds.
@Alan Duckworth: Thanks for weighing in, Alan! Your work at the Blue Ocean Institute is respected, and it’s great hearing from someone on the front.
As Greg mentioned earlier and as I’ve written here (http://newyork.seriouseats.com/2008/11/spine-from-a-700pound-blue-fin-tuna-mitsuwa-japanese-market-new-jersey.html#comments), we don’t often indulge in tuna, bluefin or otherwise. The Mitsuwa performance was an exceptional celebration of community and these posts, along with your thoughtful comments, have helped inspire awe and awareness of this fish.
For those interested in learning more about endangered fish and sustainable alternatives, resources can be found at http://www.seriouseats.com/2008/10/new-sustainable-sushi-seafood-wallet-guides-available-online-blue-ocean-institute.html.
[...] image above is from Greg Takayama’s fine blog and taken from a tuna cutting he wrote about last [...]
This years New Jersey Mitsuwa Tuna cutting is November 14, 2009.
Simply disgusting. The smell, the blood..