>Subarashi desu apprentice-kun, you have spendo 10 years only washed and cook rice...You are now finally qualified to put fish on rice!
Is there any other food or culinary discipline that is as glorified, overrated and pretentious as sushi?
A 16 year old baker learns how to make croissants after a couple of months, pizza can be mastered after a year and tricks like tossing the dough are considered a fun and humorous way of showing off your prowess.
Meanwhile sushi, a food category that is significantly less complex than both pizza and confectionery is regarded as this insurmountable and overtly prestigious dish that no one but absolute masters who have studied and folded rice 10 billion times are able to grasp.
Are the Japanese just too full of themselves for their own good?

there are things like that which aren't sushi too, some might say.

some things in school only accept like 1-2% of applicants because of how desirable it is, where 50 years ago it might have taken a slightly above average applicant because they were the best option, where today the person who gets in does so because while they are also the best option, it's such that the pool of applicants are so much higher in numbers that something that would be normally accessible to be learned by a larger potential of abilities is able to be approached only by the best of the best because of how competitive a field is.

in some marginally relatable sense this aspect of sushi is ensuring the best product in allowing only someone with sufficient dedication access to be a sushi chef.

It's nice to perfect a certain style of food but usually not very lucrative

I often wonder about this as well.

I've noticed this trend of Japanese chefs taking their time with things, but I always wondered about this shit of taking 10 years of making omelettes before ever making sushi.

Would love to hear somebody weigh in on this.

Sushi is trendy. Yes, some skill is required and I'm sure that with less than a month of training you could make decent sushi. Even home sushi is good. My feeling is that it comes down to how... particular you want to be. When I make noodles I adjust the amount of water I add based on the humidity in the air. The difference at the end is negligible. When I serve my food to family and friends it must be perfect. Not ok, good, good enough.
I also suspect that part of it has to do with "putting in the time". A culture of passing on the suffering so that they prove they are worthy.

>>21461359
Japan puts huge important on acting according to certain customs and a rigid honour system. Many things don't need a logic or to make sense if they're just things that they've been doing since the samurai era. This is why they have 10 years of literally just cleaning and cooking rice before you make sushi or the horrible work standards where you can't leave until your boss does.

>>21461308 (OP)
Sushi is not cooking. It's the food equivalent of ikebana. The closest Western equivalent is cake decorating.

>>21461308 (OP)
i think it's the same obsessed weeb making these threads because they employ proper japanese whenever they make fun of them

>>21461359
How dumb do you have to be to think they spend 10 years studying the tamago before they're allowed to prepare sushi? They're allowed to prepare it right away. The difference between a European chef and a Japanese chef folded 1000x is the European will learn the technique then make it that way for the rest of his life. The Japanese will learn the technique then strive to improve his skills for the rest of his life. After 1 year he keeps trying to improve, after 10 years he keeps trying to improve, after 50 years he keeps trying to improve. That's it.

90% of jobs can be learned in 2 weeks with no prior qualifications.
Qualifications are required for 2 main reasons; 1 - gatekeeping people out of the profession to demand higher wages; 2 - selling qualifications as a newage bonded slavery, ensuring workers are motivated and have no alternatives.
Once upon a time I thought of becoming a masseur but it's a fucking 3 year course costing tens of thousands of dollars, to compete with human traffickers who don't have to pay taxes.

>>21461308 (OP)
its a shit-test to make sure you're actually dedicated to learning it and mastering the craft so you do it correctly and with passion.
remember the apprenticeship for being a Piano Tuner is also 10 years and requires having a Bachelor's Degree in Music before you can start. All they do is turn a wrench with a machine plugged in and stop when it beeps.
Same shit.

Apprenticeships are all about exploitation, never a genuine desire to transfer one's skills
I wish we got rid of them in my country, even being a chef is something you apprentice for here

None of that shit is even real outside of extreme niche apprenticeships. The undertrained cooks that used to work at the lowest tier restaurants even got replaced by machines to improve consistency/quality.

I am very surprised that there are so many people who believe the stories of an old man who talks about a time when there was no cell phone, let alone the Internet.

>>21463483
https://youtu.be/7PSYi7bokNo?t=61

>>21461308 (OP)
Did that Jiro Sushi movie get rediscovered by zoomers? This thread takes me back 15 years. (Before all of you were born)

>>21463544
Do you think you can learn how to cook octopus, squid, shellfish, etc. in addition to this in one year?
I think you need at least five years.
Or you could run it as a cheap restaurant that only cooks tuna and salmon, which are popular among customers.

>>21463626
Except you won't be learning how to do that either. You are literally just stuck cooking rice, that's the entire point.
Also it's absurd to imply that you need to learn how to cook and cut every single fish, there's like a dozen of important ones and several others which are just novelties.

>>21463483
>zoom zoom can't comprehend the times phones and internet were not commonplace
Yup yup.

>>21463703
Only sushi chefs who are paid more than other sushi chefs would undertake such training.
And the Japanese customers who come to expensive sushi restaurants want all the fish they can get.

>>21463703
In addition to cooking rice, there are many specific training exercises.
The most common of these is simple cooking, which involves removing scales and entrails from fish.
If it were just cooking rice or making omelets, as you guys say, the newcomers would have a pretty easy job.

One of the most common trainings at high-end restaurants is this

>>21462247
You weebs are bullshiting fucking hard. Europeans chefs aren't improving on their techniques? Seriously dude are you hearing yourself?

I made sushi today and it was actually pretty hard to roll them up and make them nice
it took me like 2 hours to make all my rolls

also it's annoying how hosomaki is too thin but futomaki are too big I think. my Philadelphia roll was disappointing. too much fillings and too big for one bite

>>21462247
It's the opposite. Where most other chefs will learn a wider variety of techniques and methods of preparation for different dishes and cuisines, a japanese chef will take his one single way of preparing it and do it over and over and over again to make sure that he does it an incredibly specific way and only that way because it is muh tradition. After 1 year 10 years 50 years he's getting drastically diminishing returns until he could prepare sushi in the honorable way in his sleep, but will dedicate his life to only that and be comparatively clueless compared to other chefs who prepare things less rigidly on tradition when it comes to things outside his orthodoxy.

>>21465018
Are you unaware that sushi chefs make dishes other than sushi?

>>21463748
Went to a 1 star omekase and we got to witness the head shefs mount fuji baran however it wasn't served
Between that and his rapid speed katsuramuki i was humbled with his knife skills. very fun

>>21465049
Are you unaware that I never said otherwise, and that that does nothing to detract from my point, mouthbreather?