Ask Paul: May 22 (Premium)

Happy Friday! Flush with our post-Build glows, here’s an amazing set of reader questions to kick off the weekend.
Sushi
Shane asks:

Totally not tech... Its about sushi. I know that this is something that you really like and I would say have great experience in choice. Its something that I would like to enjoy but the thought stops me. You have any advice of how to start and what to start with. The pictures you take always look so damn good. Its just where to start, how to take that first step in trying to see if its something I would like. I am normally up for trying new things at least once.

I grew up in the Boston area, and we routinely ate things like raw clams and oysters, and I feel like this would be very uncomfortable for someone from the Midwest or some other place not near the ocean to try for the first time as an adult. But that should have made the transition to sushi an easy one for me.

But the truth is, the first time I tried it---and I remember this very well, it was at Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 4.0 launch event in San Francisco---I hated it. Hated it. And I tried a lot of it, there were people walking around with trays of the stuff.

If you’ve ever seen the Tom Hanks movie Big, which is about a kid in a man’s body, you may remember the scene where he eats caviar and can’t get it out of his mouth fast enough. That was me with sushi.

Several years later I was in downtown Los Angeles for another Microsoft event (probably a PDC, I guess, possibly TechEd) and my Penton team was going to get together for dinner. But they picked a sushi restaurant, so I told them I’d just skip it. But I can credit my boss at the time, Karen Forster, for jumpstarting my love of sushi. She begged me to come and told me that she could help me find sushi that I liked.

Here’s the goofy thing. Aside from eel, which I still don’t like, I liked everything I tried that day: Sashimi, nigiri, rolls, whatever. But I never would have tried it if Karen hadn’t pushed me. I was so burned from that first experience.

To actually answer your question, start with the basics: Rolls, not sashimi (which is just raw fish) or nigiri (which is raw fish on a lump of vinegar-seasoned rice). And not crazy rolls, but simple rolls, like a California roll or similar. Kind of work your way up from there. As you develop a taste for it, you can experiment more. You will find things you don’t like, so don’t be put off by that. Many people don’t like uni (sea urchin) because of the texture, but this is one of my favorites (assuming it hasn’t gone bad; you can tell because it will have a metallic/copper type taste, so send back if so). I really like the fatty fish, like tuna belly (otoro, toro) and salmon belly.

Actually, salmon is kind of an interesting thing: It’s my favorite of the readily available sushi (sashimi/nigiri) that you’ll find anywhere. But I really don’t like cooked salmon at all, in any form. Even just lightly...