Tako Sushi and Orange Hurricane Maki

            Incidentally, but appropriately, I find myself ending this project in much the same way I began it: consuming a strange, aquatic, tentacled beast. This time, I entered a sushi restaurant and chose the two items on the menu with ingredients I had never tried before. One was the so-called Orange Hurricane maki – a roll filled with crawfish (the new food), cream cheese and lobster sauce, and topped with some raw salmon. The other was tako sushi which is just a slice of octopus laid on top of some rice. Now, I love sushi. I hesitate to discriminate against other kinds of food, but sushi is easily one of my favorite cuisines. Despite this near obsession, I have a few types that I tend to eat much more than others and therefore I had never tried either of these sea creatures.

            With my deep love of sushi and my recent good experience with squid boosting my confidence, I was very excited to try my octopus. When the dish arrived, the two types of sushi were really quite beautiful – the pale white octopus with purple fringes next to the bright orange of the salmon and crawfish roll.

Saving the most exciting for last, I tried one of the crawfish pieces first. I have yet to eat a piece of sushi I didn’t enjoy, and this was not to be the first. The crawfish tasted understandably like lobster (reinforced by the lobster sauce) but with a sweeter note to it, to use the “Taste Makers” vocabulary. The salmon helped complete the soft texture of the roll as a whole. It really was delicious. Apparently, the fact that I had never eaten crawfish is remarkable, because the annual US crawfish harvest is over 100,000,000 pounds¹. I suppose my deprivation is merely a result of my location. Since 98% of the US crawfish harvest comes from Louisiana², I guess most crawfish are eaten in the South.

After adequately savoring my first piece of crawfish sushi, I turned to the one I was simultaneously least and most excited to try. Even though I had thoroughly enjoyed the calamari that started this project, I couldn’t shake my prejudice against eating rubbery animals with suction cups. The sushi before me was so elegant, though, that it really was irresistible. So, with a little flourish, I popped the whole piece in my mouth. As expected, it was excessively chewy. Where the squid had been fried and therefore complemented by the crunch of the batter, this octopus presented itself in all its raw, rubbery glory. But with the chewiness came a subtle and pleasant flavor – not overly fishy. The emphasis of the taste was more on a subtle savoriness, and I would happily eat it again.

1.      http://www.cajuncrawfishpie.com/crawfish-farming.html

2.      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crayfish#United_States