With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, I know some of you are planning a homemade sushi dinner. Whether this is your first time or you’re a seasoned pro, making sushi at home can be simple, fun, and rewarding. I’ve written before on how to make sushi rolls and Adrianna recently did a post on temaki, but the question I get asked the most is some version of “how do I know if the fish at my store is safe to eat raw?”. The term “sushi-grade” is often tossed around to imply some level of freshness, but in the US, there’s no regulation around the use of the phrase, so it can be used to describe anything. That said, most stores aren’t in the business of getting their customers sick, so they usually reserve the label for their freshest fish. Unfortunately, just because it’s fresh doesn’t mean it’s safe to eat raw. Some fish, such as salmon, contain parasites that will make you sick unless they’ve been destroyed. Another potential problem is cross-contamination.

This happens when “sushi-grade” fish gets cut on the same cutting board or using the same knife or handled with the same gloves as non-sushi-grade fish. If your fishmonger is storing unwrapped sushi-grade fish in the same refrigerated case as non-sushi-grade fish, this should be a big red flag. For fish that contain parasites, the FDA provides guidance under their Parasite Destruction Guarantee. This states in part that fish intended to be consumed raw must be “frozen and stored at a temperature of -20°C (-4°F) or below for a minimum of 168 hours (7 days)”. Cross contamination is a bigger issue. Because most stores don’t sell a high enough volume of fish intended to be eaten raw, they don’t maintain a separate space for handling their “sushi-grade” fish. What’s worse, because tuna is such a large fish, most stores don’t deal with whole tuna, they buy them pre-filleted, which means you have to take into consideration not only the stores handling of the fish, but their supplier’s handling of the fish as well.

Ultimately, what it comes down to is how much you trust your fishmonger to understand the best practices for handling fish meant to be consumed raw, and how much they trust their suppliers to hold the same standards. Here are a few things to remember when buying fish to ensure you have a safe and delicious sushi-dinner: Observe and see for yourself whether they’re cutting their sushi-grade fish on the same cutting board as their other fish, without changing gloves or disinfecting their knife and board first. Ask whether they fillet the fish you’re looking to buy themselves, or if they’re getting them pre-filleted. If you are buying salmon, ask if they can produce logs that show the times and temperatures that the fish was frozen. If you can’t find a local place you can trust with raw fish, why not try filling your sushi with vegetables, cooked fish, or even meat. California Rolls and Caterpillar Rolls may not be traditional, but that doesn’t make them any less delicious!

For Marc, food is a life long journey of exploration, discovery and experimentation and he shares his escapades through his blog in the hopes that he inspires others to find their own culinary adventures. ninja sushi menu solaMarc’s been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today, and has made multiple appearances on NPR and the Food Network.youda sushi chef online playNothing will top freshness at the greenmarkets in Union Square or Tomkins Square (Pura Vida Fisheries). jiro dreams of sushi available on netflixThe fishmongers both source their fish from Long Island/Montauk the day before - doesn’t get much fresher than that. sushi online bestellen berlin wedding

Unfortunately, you sacrifice variety in exchange for freshness as the haul is highly seasonal.Other great places for more consistent and fresh offerings/variety:Sunrise Mart (St. Mark’s)Roy’s Fish & Sushi (UES)Dorian’s (UES)Sea Breeze (Midtown West)Hope this helps!If you have access to a car and want to go on an adventure, go to the Hunt’s Point Fish Market in the Bronx. This is where all of the restaurants buy their fish and where my Japanese mother and I go to purchase fish for our own sushi.It’s wholesale (although individuals can make purchases) and only open in the wee hours of the morning, but it’s a fantastic look at what the wholesale markets used to be like before they were all priced out of Manhattan. - Yes, the meatpacking, flower and seaport districts really did sell meat, flowers and fish not too long ago.If you do go to the Bronx, be sure to dress warmly. Wear old shoes - or shoes you can hose off and be prepared to smell like fish when you leave.For an easier experience, try Sunrise or Katagiri or Mitsuwa (NJ).

I can’t comment on purchasing fish you intend to eat raw at a western fish market that does not specialize in that unless you are very familiar with fish and comfortable with determining it’s quality on your own. ‘Fresh’ can mean different things to different people.Before he became the proprietor of the popular Williamsburg restaurant Okonomi, the chef Yuji Haraguchi worked for nearly a decade in the Japanese wholesale seafood industry, moving fish from Japan to high-end sushi restaurants, primarily in New York and Boston. It was in that job that he first noticed a paradox in the American market for sushi-grade fish: the freshest seafood was the stuff living in domestic waters, the striped bass and mackerel, fluke and flounder that could be caught in the Atlantic and consumed far more efficiently than anything he imported from Tokyo, which travelled thousands of miles before reaching diners’ plates. But the vast majority of Japanese restaurants relied on imported seafood, in part because they could trust Japanese fishmongers to handle their catch carefully, preventing the kind of bruised or nicked flesh that is a deal breaker for chefs preparing fish raw.

Haraguchi recalls once visiting the commercial fish pier in Boston to see if any of the day’s catch was suitable for his high-end sashimi-restaurant clients. He found fish that was “gorgeous” and as fresh as can be, but, as he put it to me recently, “the fishermen were standing on top of the fish!” Witnessing this gap between the quality and potential of U.S.-caught fish, on the one hand, and the fastidiousness of Japanese handling practices, on the other, gave Haraguchi the seeds of an idea for a new kind of fish market, one that would import only the Japanese methods, while relying on seafood caught domestically. This August, he opened such a shop, Osakana, a tiny establishment located just a few blocks away from Okonomi, where he has long been serving East Coast seafood specialties, from Maine-sourced uni to line-caught ocean bluefish. (Becky Cooper recently wrote about the restaurant, which on weeknights becomes Yuji Ramen, for Tables for Two.) The store, which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign in July, follows in the footsteps of other New York businesses like Mermaid’s Garden, Greenpoint Fish and Lobster Company, and Sea 2 Table as part of a micro movement to celebrate the region’s fish supply.

But Osakana is, as far as I know, the first such New York business to fuse a locavore seafood ethos with the techniques and philosophy of Japanese cooking. The store, which also offers classes in sushi making, knife skills, and fish-handling practices, defines itself as a “Japanese fish market and education center,” with a mission to “revive the city’s connection with its neighboring ocean.” Stepping into Haraguchi’s white-tiled shop, one can immediately see the difference between Osakana’s approach and that of a conventional American seafood store. Instead of a big, sloppy ice counter displaying several dozen varieties of fish, one is greeted by a single humidity-controlled display case lined with patterned tenugui cloth, with a small selection of whole and filleted species laid out neatly on mismatched ceramic plates. (Wet ice, Haraguchi believes, is a vector for the bacteria that can contaminate raw fish.) Haraguchi sources fish from the Japanese-owned Nishimaru fish company, in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, working with the mongers there to insure that fish are well handled.

He favors buying whole fish over pre-portioned fillets. To insure that scales and flesh never touch, the shop uses two sets of cutting boards–one for breaking down the incoming whole animals, a second for fine slicing. The offerings change daily, in accordance with whatever is freshest. The sashimi-grade selections at Osakana, regardless of species, are priced at a flat—and steep—thirty dollars a pound. Sourcing whatever is available locally, and at peak freshness, means departing from the bread-and-butter selection of salmon, shrimp, and tuna that dominates both American seafood shops and sushi restaurants. Osakana does procure small amounts of wild-caught tuna and Alaskan sockeye salmon, but on my first visit to the shop I was surprised to see, front and center, a humble porgy—a silvery, plate-sized fish that lives in the waters of New York and New Jersey. The American porgy’s Japanese cousin, madai, is considered “the congratulations” fish, served at weddings and graduations and often priced at more than fifty dollars a pound.

But in the United States it typically sells for less than five dollars a pound, and is more likely to appear at Chinatown holes-in-the-wall than at fine-dining establishments. At Osakana, I watched Haraguchi’s manager and fish cutter, Luke Davin, gingerly slice a skin-on fillet that had been treated with the yubiki method—a spritz of scalding saltwater to tighten and sterilize the skin. Also available that day was engawa, a cut of summer flounder taken from the fringes of the fillet, and presented in Osakana’s display case in clean, tight coils. Engawa, too, is a delicacy in Japan, sometimes more esteemed than bluefin toro. In America, the only time I’ve come across it was out fishing on New York sport-fishing boats, where it’s typically sliced off and used for bait. On those same boats, I have seen many a dogfish shark bludgeoned and tossed into the sea, dead. Osakana offers that same dogfish, marinated in one of Haraguchi’s sauces, for twenty dollars a pound. At Osakana, like at Okonomi, Haraguchi is guided by the Japanese virtue of mottainai, or aversion to waste.

By buying less than thirty pounds of fish a day, he is able to get around the U.S.D.A.’s “First In First Out” rule, which mandates that all food stores sell their oldest products first. His goal is to move the entirety of each morning’s purchases the same day. (Fish bones are boiled down into ramen stock, which customers can purchase in the store, or learn how to make in the shop’s ramen classes.) This is a kind of thrift and transparency that the average American seafood consumer has mostly learned to live without. As I have written in my book “American Catch,” even outside of the sushi-restaurant supply chain, the vast majority of fish eaten in the U.S. is imported, often from farms in Asia. The organization Oceana has found that around a third of seafood sold in the U.S. is mislabelled, an alarming figure that indicates just how detached Americans have become from the seafood on their plates. With Osakana, Haraguchi has carved out a small space for himself outside the system.