Posted on 04/02/2009 3:38:07 PM PDT by nickcarraway
Reporting from Tokyo -- Veteran chef Yutaka Sasaki has a plan to remove the fear of eating one of the most poisonous fish on the planet: He wants to feed it to the emperor.
The blowfish, known here as fugu, carries a deadly neurotoxin with no known antidote. An average-sized fugu is chock-full of the poison tetrodotoxin -- in its blood, liver and even its sex organs, Sasaki says.
But he scoffs at the centuries-old ban on the Japanese monarch eating the delicacy, sought after by many Japanese as daring cuisine.
"The prince and other royalty have eaten fugu, so why not the emperor?" he says. "It would set a good example."
After all, he argues, it's only deadly in the wrong hands.
"Someone who tries to prepare meals they know nothing about is stupid," says Sasaki, 61. "If you're a chef and you don't know this fish, you shouldn't even touch it."
Chefs such as Sasaki are campaigning to change fugu's notorious image as Russian roulette on a plate. When prepared by a licensed chef, they say, the meal is as safe as biting into a Big Mac.
In 30 years, Sasaki says, no one has become sick eating his fugu. He has taught countless other chefs, including his son, who works alongside him in the family's Tokyo restaurant, Tairyo, or "good catch."
Japanese are the largest consumers of fugu, eating 10,000 tons a year. An elegant multicourse meal of it can cost a diner $450.
Sasaki shakes his head over connoisseurs being attracted to fugu not for its flavor (described as "a taste given by heaven") but for its off-the-chart concentration of lethal toxins.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
FUGU Me! - Homer Simpson
My buddy had a small puffer fish in his salt water aquarium once.
He was the coolest little fish i’ve ever seen.
It seemed like he would recognize me, get all excited and let me pat him and play with my fingers.
I dunno, maybe he was just hungry.
The blowfish, known here as fugu...well, fugu too!
I will stick with a Big Mac... or Filet-O-Fish. There is no way it can be that tasty.
...or it's on the house!
It's FUGU-FANTASTIC!
"Grilled Blowfish Testicles" ... Heck of a name for a band.
Yeh. I mean, I really can’t see sitting down to the table, taking a great big swig of an Asahi Dry, and announcing, “I’ll have a big steaming plate of grilled blowfish testicles, please!” Even in Japanese. My luck, it would appear in big capital letters on my death certificate when they collected my body from the coroner. In red crayon. “Stupid Gaijin die of eating grilled blowfish testicles. Hah hah!” They’re still laughing at getting us to eat raw fish...
Wade Davis talks about fugu in "The Serpent and the Rainbow." He discovered that a controlled dose of fugu toxin will paralyze you, leaving you fully conscious but to all appearances dead. There's a law in Japan, actually, that anyone dying of fugu poisoning has to be held in storage for a certain number of days, just to see if they wake up. Anyway, that's how Haitian voodoo practitioners make zombies. Paralyze them and bury them alive, which will totally freak out anyone, then dig them up and keep them drugged on datura. The key is making the zombie BELIEVE that he's a walking dead man under the power of the voodoo priest.
Anyway, Davis says that done right, fugu will give you a bit of a buzz. It's one of those rare items, he says, that straddles the line between a food and a drug.
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