Chilean Japanese Sushi?

Or how Chile learned to stop worrying about flavours and embraced cheese

Welcome back! I guess that’s more to me, and apologies for a break over the New Year period. An opportunity to visit Chile arose and I felt obliged to visit. While there, I saw some incredible vistas, across thousands of miles of otherworldly landscapes. However, one of the most memorable recommendations that was posed to me was that Chilean-Japanese food was “very high quality and cheap”. As someone who appreciates both of those aspects, this led me to trial this hybridised cuisine.

Today’s post will explore how Japanese food, specifically sushi, has been adapted to fit the Chilean diet.

Avocado Attack or No Mas Palta

We know all that avocado holds as much place in traditional sushi as pineapple does on a pizza. So I’ll try to spare to most gruesome details of the avocado invasion story (California rolls are an entire different discussion—we’re here to discuss Chilean sushi).

I am no fan of avocado. Even the Aussie expat can hold anti-avocado sentiment. Despite our apparent collective invention of simply placing it upon toast and charging $20 for breakfast, it was never my fruit. This is not to discount the various health and other social benefits of the crop. Just not for me.

Upon arrival to Chile, it felt as though avocados took that personally. Chile, being a country with abundant fertile land (due to its often volcanic soil), has housed the avocado since about the 17th century. While it was not actually native to the nation, the crop has absolutely taken over the land starting in the late 1980s. What happened in the 1980s to cause such a dramatic uptick?

Source: Avocados from Chile Org

Unfortunately, we do need to look back to California. It all comes back to Big Avocado. The California Avocado Commission began marketing the big green fruit. They found the best way at first was to downplay the association with Mexico and Latin America, rather promoting it as an exotic Mediterranean-like food. Fortunately for the Commish, people seemed to enjoy this and took it on face value, despite the plant originating and being grown in American climates, like California and Mexico.

The boom came when American households began eating guacamole thanks to a clever ad in Sunset Magazine. Even more clever was the California Avocado Commission lobbying to block all Mexican avocados into the country, just as palates started appreciating the fruit. As demand for these unholy fruit suddenly outstripped the limited supply from only California, people turned their eyes to Chile. Chilean farmers realised this was a crop people wanted to pay luxury amounts for, and Chile Hass became the world’s third biggest exporter of avocados.

With so many avocados, Chileans started sticking them in everything. Their national food, a hot dog Completo, has (essentially a whole) avocado, their pasta has avocado, and of course their sushi all has avocado. To give Chile their due, sticking their fresh produce into different cuisines has a tendency to work well. For example, salmon in Chile, as the world’s second biggest producer, is also found in everything.

Fry another day

The flavour and style of avocado in the sushi has now passed into somewhat normalcy. Moving on to the topic of temperature, I and many others associate sushi as a cold platter dish. While true that many perfectly tasty nigiri are cooked, as is the rice, the sushi is never served piping hot.

That is not always the case in Chile. Through sheer innovation, they have merged two well known Japanese cooking methods. The sushi is prepared like a California roll with fillings inside, rice on the outside, panko on the outside of that, then deep fried. This is a standardised option for every sushi flavour imaginable from your standard teriyaki chicken, to otherwise raw fish.

Thus, a bright orange concoction was born. Ostensibly still in the round cut up cylinder that other sushi rolls come in, they share the middle ricey bit and otherwise little other semblance to the Japanese dish known globally. Often it isn’t even sashimi that is the raw fish placed amongst the panko crumbs, but ceviche.

So far, avocado in sushi, while untraditional, can be blamed on the Americans, and technically panko sushi still incorporates even more Japanese ingredients. The final alteration to the sushi form forced me to utter a phrase I never knew I would use.

No Queso, Por Favor

For all my Spanish speaking readers, you read correctly. For the first time, there was too much cheese. Note that I have not eaten sushi in other parts of the American continent, so I may be in for a unwelcome surprise. I digress; there are probably two camps of people reading this right now.

Those who think any cheese is too much in sushi, and those who think “hey, you’re being a little unfair on the adaptive flavours of Chile”. Or maybe you think that there is an acceptable amount of cheese in sushi.

To be fair, it is not the cheese’s fault. Chile even decided to use the most salmon-appropriate cheese, (another phrase I didn’t think I’d use), cream cheese. And I did try to keep my mind open for this one. However, the oozy creamy (unsurprising) nature of cream cheese, especially when slightly deep fried, just never worked for me combined with high quality salmon.

To my readers, I do suggest you try at least one classically made Chilean sushi roll. If it doesn’t suit you, don’t do what I did and order one or two more times from different restaurants. Instead, the two phrases “no mas palta y no queso por favor”, can ensure that you can enjoy freshly made sushi that is at least comparable to Japan

Perhaps the most faithful thing that Chileans were able to achieve with their interpretation of sushi was by broadly renaming it. Many restaurants and customers know it as Nikkei, possibly after the stock market, more likely referring to the dish as “descended from Japanese”. That may be the most accurate way to see all of this. An interpretation of food that once was Japanese. Now many generations along of something once Japanese but now truly Chilean.