Meet the guys who will change how you put soy sauce in sushi forever
Yesterday, an incredible video came across my timeline of some joker stabbing those soy sauce fish bottles – which you’ve all been using to take drugs – into his sushi, describing it as the “correct method.” What a wanker, I thought. Gravity does the job just fine. Obviously the right way to do it is the way we’ve all been doing it: sticking the fish bottle into one end of the roll, squeezing, and letting the soy sauce drip its way through the rice and seaweed. But Oscar Dawson of Brisbane band HOLY HOLY reckons that’s dumb.
Here, he offers to change the way you think about soy sauce and sushi forever.
A video posted by Holy Holy (@holyholymusic) on Apr 12, 2015 at 9:29pm PDT
Where’d you get the idea to puncture the sushi with the soy sauce bottle rather than pouring from one end?
It just seems obvious. Buying sushi rolls in those plastic packets, you tend to pour a bit of soy in the one corner and mix some wasabi in. Seems like a half-decent idea, but if you have a few rolls to get through, it starts getting messy. What if you are on the move? What if you take a long time to eat? Then, gradually, the rice and other contents of the roll start falling out of the roll as you dip it in the soy, and you end up with a rice-infused soy and wasabi mess in the corner of the packet. Also, it is hard to equally disperse the soy throughout the roll; you tend to pick a lot of it up in the first dip, and then have to deal with a busted, disintegrating rice ball by the end.
When did you first realise you were doing it wrong?
Sub-consciously, the first time we found ourselves picking up little bits of rice from the rancid soy puddle at the tail end of a sushi roll session. Consciously, however, it took years to realise how frustrating this was. Especially to our ambitions towards cleanliness. We knew something had to change.
What do you say to the truthers out there who believe gravity should dictate how far into the roll the soy sauce goes?
I guess you are referring to the technique of pouring it directly into one end of the roll-cylinder? Well… the flaw of that technique is that the roll itself is quite absorbent, and gravity is a relatively weak force in comparison to the ability of the roll to take in all that sauce on the way down. Our method also lets gravity do its work, but the sauce has only an inch to travel, rather that four. We even believe that our method is the only fail-safe orbital soy-application method. That is to say, it works both with and without gravity. All other methods would result in some stray, messy globules of soy; ours keeps it trapped within the seaweed.
Now that you’ve kicked off this trend, what’re your culinary ambitions for the future?
We have simple ambitions; not to get bowel cancer. It is hard to eat well on the road and our stomachs start to go resemble Chernobyl by the end of a run. So fingers crossed we can eat well enough in down time to stave off the inevitable.
Are you surprised it’s blown up?
Honestly, yes. We thought this was an obvious thing to do and everyone would do it. Just like piercing a sausage roll to get the ketchup in.
And finally, what’s your ultimate sushi roll? No rules, no limits.
Orca, avo.
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Words by Jake Cleland
Weird. HOLY HOLY play Splendour in the Grass in July. You can find them on facebook here: www.facebook.com/holyholymusic. You can hear their latest banger, ‘You Cannot Fall For Love Like A Dog’, below.