- [Yia Vang] How are you doing, brother?

- [John Sugimura] Good.

- [Sugimura] Do you like salmon?

- [Vang] I love salmon.

- [Sugimura] I'm looking to do an old school salmon dish with home-brewed soy.

We're gonna put it on crispy rice.

We're gonna serve it with some dumplings.

- [Vang] I'm really, really excited.

(bell dings) - Look at this.

This is beautiful.

- [Vang] When you're looking for a piece of fish, what are you looking for?

- So for salmon, I'm looking for the biggest loin because when I clean it up and break it down I wanna have a nice big 3 1/2-inch slice 'cause we're gonna be doing sashimi.

And you know the truth is, I don't even like salmon.

- Oh, really?

- But I love fish.

When you take a good piece of fish and you make it better with doing lots of interesting things.

So we're gonna cure it.

So it's gonna take away as a greasiness.

It's gonna firm up the loin.

It's gonna pop the color.

And then when we hit it with a torch, we're gonna give it texture.

And you're gonna have that aroma of the salmon.

Now I'm down with it.

I like that one right there.

See how thick that loin is right there 'cause that's what we're gonna be eating on.

Perfect, we'll take the whole thing.

When you touch fish, you're doing old traditions.

You're doing things like your grandparents did.

You're doing things like their grandparents did.

That's why fish is so special to me because it represents my Japanese heritage.

Thank you very much.

- [Vendor] Thanks to you too.

- This is beautiful.

Have a good day.

(upbeat music) Can I open it?

- Yeah.

- It's like Christmas.

We have this salmon, whole filet of salmon.

So we're probably looking at just under three pounds of Ora King.

Ora King being number one grade, being what you wanna do when you go into your fishmonger saying what's sushi grade or what's number one grade.

Here's the head.

Here's the loin, tail.

Here's the belly for what we're doing today.

We're gonna concentrate just on the loin.

It has skin on.

I have them leave it on 'cause I like to trim it down myself.

You can ask a fish monger to trim it down.

- And you can also ask them to take out the pin bones.

- Yep, and we had them take out the pin bones just so we didn't have to work that hard.

So this is easy to break this down.

I'm gonna break it down into a saku, which is about the width of my hand.

I'm gonna cut right through the loin and the belly.

- So your knife here looks a little different than most chef knives at home.

- So this is a Japanese knife exclusively used for cutting fish.

It's a unagi knife.

A Japanese knife is sharp on one side.

A Western knife is sharp on both sides.

- Double bevel, single bevel, yep.

- I love to start with this one.

So again, skin, bloodline, loin, belly.

A little bit of extra fiber right in the middle.

So I'm gonna scoop the loin out, scoop the belly out.

And then I'm gonna flip it before I get to the end so I can trim off and I don't get that extra fiber right there.

So there's the loin.

I'm gonna turn it around.

I may go on the other side of the fiber.

- [Vang] Where did you learn how to do this?

- So I did everything I could on my own.

I watched all the YouTube videos.

I bought the sushi kits.

I took cooking classes and then I hit the wall.

And then I realized that it was really important to me to identify with my Japanese-American heritage.

And I thought what better way than to take a really interesting tool like cooking to kinda tell my story.

I literally make cured salmon so that people can learn about the Japanese-American experience.

Just like having a restaurant or cooking for a group of 10 people.

That's 10 people that are on the same page with you, that accept you for who you are, accept you for being a marginalized group.

We all have that one private story where a kid in eighth grade made sure he was gonna make me feel marginalized and call me a Jap and make me know the pain and the sting of, "You're different and you're not the majority."

And I knew from that point on that the world would see me as different.

I knew that I looked different.

I knew that I had a different story.

My story is that I'm half Japanese, half German.

My grandmother was a chef when she came over from Japan to California in 1917, and she ran a restaurant as a single parent with five kids all the way up until the war.

Women didn't do that in the '20s and '30s.

Women didn't do that and women weren't successful, but she was.

- Let alone like in America as an immigrant.

- Exactly.

Exactly.

So I literally do this so I can tell you and talk about my grandmother.

- [Vang] That's amazing.

- And I told you this before, I don't love salmon, but I love good fish.

So take salmon, we're gonna cure it.

Curing means that we're going to lightly put salt covering the whole thing 2 hours and 45 minutes.

Not 2 hours and 50 minutes and not 2 hours and 40 minutes.

- Where did you learn that timing?

- It comes from my master teacher, Katsuya.

You follow the recipe.

He's been doing it for decades.

You don't tinker.

- Don't question master.

- He taught me everything I needed to do so that I would celebrate old techniques and methods.

So watch.

The higher I hold this up, the more it shatters over the loin.

And 'cause you don't want it to be too heavy, because it will actually burn the fish.

You want your protein to be pristine.

So I feel that's good.

And it's just...

It's the easiest thing ever.

And bam, you're done.

So then fast forward, 2 hours 45 minutes, I'm gonna rinse these off a good couple of times.

Rinsing is critical.

Do a quick dry.

Loin, loin, belly.

- So we cured it, rinsed it off.

- Yep.

- Dry it out.

- Yep.

- Yep, and now we're ready to go.

- Yep.

Literally, it's that easy to cure fish.

We're ready to roll.

- Is there a special way you want to slice this?

- I'm gonna start on the bias and I'm just gonna go real thin.

Everything that people criticize salmon about, curing takes care of it.

It's greasy, it gets rid of it.

It's not firm enough, it firms it up.

Yeah, you can totally tell just the texture of the fish is different.

In my opinion, nobody should eat raw, uncured salmon.

It's just too rich for most people.

So we have all that sliced up salmon.

What we want to do is build it.

We're gonna put crispy rice.

We're gonna put a slice of salmon on it.

We're gonna brush it with the home brewed soy.

We're gonna serve it with some dumplings.

So let's move some of these over here.

- You seared those off.

- Yup.

- Yup.

- So it has regular Sushi rice, it has vinegar, sugar, salt in it.

We dip it in soy sauce to give it a little bit of salt.

What you're gonna notice is the salmon's almost like a bedspread on it.

- [Vang] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Yeah.

So that you see more salmon than you see anything else.

That's exactly what we're going for.

Isn't that beautiful?

- Yeah, it looks great.

So here's the deal, I would just eat it like that.

- Yep.

You think that's good, how about if we put a little bit of homemade soy sauce on it?

It's really gonna enhance everything in the fish without overwhelming it.

And then the most fun... - Yup, this is what everyone lives for.

(flame sizzling) - So what I'm not gonna do is move it all around because we're not cooking the fish, we're giving it a light sear to bring out all the oil and give it a little char to add another level of texture to it.

So I'll do this one.

- [Vang] And that helps caramelize that soy, also.

- Yeah, exactly.

It's just awesome.

I'll finish these three and then we'll dress it up.

All I do is put a smudge of wasabi on top and a pinch of scallions.

- So here we are.

Everything's finished.

It's simple.

This is so simple because there's not a lot ingredients in it.

- [Sugimura] It's pristine, it's pure.

- [Vang] Yup, and just really good technique.

Just using great technique.

And it looks delicious.

- It's all about the technique.

Let's plate it up.

I don't have many prize possessions but this is one of them.

So this is my grandmother's plate from the restaurant.

circa 1920-ish.

- Wow!

Tell us a little bit more about it.

- So it's...

I don't know if it's a great plate.

I just know that this is the plate that she would make plates of food and share it with the neighbors.

And so to know that my grandmother in her restaurant in Sacramento, California in the '20s and '30s was making food and plating it up literally as we're doing it today, really as it's almost an emotional thing.

And that's why I like to share it.

So let me go ahead and build it up with some seared salmon.

Do you know why I use purple cabbage?

- [Vang] No.

- All of my elders are gone, but they all said grandma put something crunchy as a garnish under the dumplings.

They're all gone.

I'll never know what that was.

My dad could never remember it.

There are no written recipes.

But I really do use purple cabbage under it for the crunch.

But it's also that pop of color.

Every day, every dish, I get that gentle reminder of grandma.

Every single aspect of everything on this plate, including the plate, is telling part of the story.

The part of the story that my grandmother, my aunts and uncles, my dad, were in war camps in Northern California.

Lost everything, lost a business, lost a house, everything, to come out 4 1/2 years and start all over.

There's a Japanese term called gaman which means, "Okay, you're out of the camp, get over it.

Don't be a victim.

Smile and move on."

Well, you know what?

They did.

- [Vang] Yeah.

- Everybody moved on.

They didn't talk about the war camp in my family until I was like 16 years old when I'm like, "No, no, no, I need to know more.

Help me understand."

I mean, they really just moved on.

And so this is my way, again, to talk about and bring all those things forward.

And that's kind of what I live and standby, actually, to break the gaman history, tell the story, tell as much information.

Tell it through food, tell it on a great platter, and everything like that and keep it simple but keep it real.

- [Vang] John, this look so delicious.

I'm so excited to try this.

(Sugimura laughs) - Enjoy that salmon.

Cured, seared, crispy rice cake.

- I love that salmon.

One of my favorite things about it is that quick sear at the end.

Every step has the flavor.

There's a reason for putting the crispy rice in the soy.

Every step has a little flavor.

Even just that little wasabi.

There's that little spice, that little kick to it.

- Something like that.

Just a little bit.

Great food that can tell a great story really is interesting.

- How did you get so captivated by this whole idea of telling stories through food?

- I've been doing food for like 10 years.

Prior to going to school, it was in 1996, that my mom called me home from work.

I cooked for her.

I cooked for her a pork chop.

But she called me home to spend time together, doing something normal like eating.

That's also she wanted.

She didn't eat the pork chop either.

And she died a few hours later.

- [Vang] Oh, man.

- But that's when I understood what food could do.

What a great thing that she had the courage to ask for a pork chop that day and I could spend that moment with her.

Food.

There's no other, I can't think of one other tool like this that can do that kind of powerful healing, that kind of powerful relationship interaction with your mom in her last day.

And I'm forever grateful for that.

There you go.

So then on these, I would just butterfly these and you'd get one portion but everything would be used.

- In the cooking world, we just call that our snacky snacks.

- Yeah?

- Yeah.

- Yeah, no snacky snacks.

We want a 100% yield.

(Vang laughing) There's a couple of bucks there, so no snacky snacks.