ChrisLehrer
03-14-2012, 12:27 PM
So as some of you know, I have this awful old usuba that's basically useless. It just hangs there on the rack waiting for me to find some use for it. I just thought of something to try, and I want your advice.
It's now shad roe season in Boston, which will continue for a few weeks. Shad is very cheap -- unless you want someone to take the bones out, since it has about 18 billion little teeny bones. I can get fabulous whole shad, roe included, for not much, but boned-out shad fillets with no roe cost $14/pound.
Now I could learn to bone shad, but even my favorite dude Jacques Pepin, who thinks everyone should be able to do every possible technique in the universe in under 30 seconds, thinks that you should probably have someone deal with shad bones for you. So, what to do?
Then I had a thought. Shad are in many respects like eels, which is part of why they have so many darn bones, have sweet and oily flesh, spend their days swapping between salt and fresh water, etc. So why not treat shad like hamo, i.e. pike conger eel, that Kyoto summertime favorite?
You know what's coming, some of you. There is this special Kyoto knife called a hamogiri. See, hamo have more bones than they have any right to, and there's no way to get them out without shredding the meat beyond recognition. So about 100-200 years back, somebody figured out that if you have a very heavy, sharp knife, and a very steady hand, you can resolve the problem by cutting through all the bones. You fillet the eel to remove the backbone and the main up-and-down frame. Then you shear downwards through the flesh and not quite through the skin, cutting ludicrously thin slices rhythmically, in the process shearing every bone into such tiny fragments that you can just crunch them up. The so-treated fish is usually blanched and then cooked in a number of possible styles (e.g. deep-fried, cooked in a hot-pot, etc.), commonly served with a strong citrusy sauce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHfj30yf_8
So why not do this with shad?
But a hamogiri as such is (1) ludicrously expensive and (2) dead useless for almost anything else. This one below is about $1500!!!!
2798
Though admittedly this one is only about $400...
2799
My thought: why not try to transform my craptacular old usuba into a sort of small-scale hamogiri? What's necessary:
(A) The blade needs to be very gently curved, and the tip should be more steeply curved in case it hits the board hard.
(B) The edge needs to be strongly micro-beveled, because bone-shearing is tough stuff.
(C) The knife needs to be heavy, which currently it's not especially.
So....
(A) How do I go about reshaping a near-straight usuba to be gently curved from about the midpoint toward the tip, in an even arc?
(B) This I can handle.
(C) My idea was to get two weights. One I would screw into the butt of the handle. The other I would want to attach somehow to the end of the knife, up at the spine. This is a kamagata usuba, so I figure I could mount the weight sort of halfway along the arc. Ideally I'd like to be able to take the weights off, so I can put the knife away in its saya. Any thoughts about how to go about this?
Thanks for any advice!
It's now shad roe season in Boston, which will continue for a few weeks. Shad is very cheap -- unless you want someone to take the bones out, since it has about 18 billion little teeny bones. I can get fabulous whole shad, roe included, for not much, but boned-out shad fillets with no roe cost $14/pound.
Now I could learn to bone shad, but even my favorite dude Jacques Pepin, who thinks everyone should be able to do every possible technique in the universe in under 30 seconds, thinks that you should probably have someone deal with shad bones for you. So, what to do?
Then I had a thought. Shad are in many respects like eels, which is part of why they have so many darn bones, have sweet and oily flesh, spend their days swapping between salt and fresh water, etc. So why not treat shad like hamo, i.e. pike conger eel, that Kyoto summertime favorite?
You know what's coming, some of you. There is this special Kyoto knife called a hamogiri. See, hamo have more bones than they have any right to, and there's no way to get them out without shredding the meat beyond recognition. So about 100-200 years back, somebody figured out that if you have a very heavy, sharp knife, and a very steady hand, you can resolve the problem by cutting through all the bones. You fillet the eel to remove the backbone and the main up-and-down frame. Then you shear downwards through the flesh and not quite through the skin, cutting ludicrously thin slices rhythmically, in the process shearing every bone into such tiny fragments that you can just crunch them up. The so-treated fish is usually blanched and then cooked in a number of possible styles (e.g. deep-fried, cooked in a hot-pot, etc.), commonly served with a strong citrusy sauce.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9rHfj30yf_8
So why not do this with shad?
But a hamogiri as such is (1) ludicrously expensive and (2) dead useless for almost anything else. This one below is about $1500!!!!
2798
Though admittedly this one is only about $400...
2799
My thought: why not try to transform my craptacular old usuba into a sort of small-scale hamogiri? What's necessary:
(A) The blade needs to be very gently curved, and the tip should be more steeply curved in case it hits the board hard.
(B) The edge needs to be strongly micro-beveled, because bone-shearing is tough stuff.
(C) The knife needs to be heavy, which currently it's not especially.
So....
(A) How do I go about reshaping a near-straight usuba to be gently curved from about the midpoint toward the tip, in an even arc?
(B) This I can handle.
(C) My idea was to get two weights. One I would screw into the butt of the handle. The other I would want to attach somehow to the end of the knife, up at the spine. This is a kamagata usuba, so I figure I could mount the weight sort of halfway along the arc. Ideally I'd like to be able to take the weights off, so I can put the knife away in its saya. Any thoughts about how to go about this?
Thanks for any advice!