13 ms·

A candy man revolutionized the sushi industry

172 points by pshaw 9y ago

veb 9y ago
I don't really know much about sushi, but this was a fascinating read. The entire time I kept wondering what the difference would be between the machine made sushi and the stuff made by the guys in the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi[1] Would I be able to tell the difference? [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772925/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772925/
- whipoodle 9y ago
  I can't say I've been to Jiro's restaurant (and though I admire his dedication, the whole thing honestly seems a bit much), but I've been to plenty of good sushi places and eaten plenty of conveyor-belt sushi. As it says in the article, they are just different. When you get a burger at McDonald's, you don't expect it to be the same as one from a good restaurant.
- twblalock 9y ago
  The flavor changes pretty quickly. Non-fresh sushi can become very bland.
  - kowdermeister 9y ago
    If that's the case, might a machine produce a more predictable outcome?
    - selectodude 9y ago
      The unpredictability is due to the fish itself. Unless the machine can lab grow bluefin tuna it's going to have the same issues.
      - CalChris 9y ago
        This. My favorite sushi restaurant was a buffet on University in Berkeley, Edoko. If you got there early everything was fresh, especially the saba; I've never had anything close. Not so good at 9pm.
      - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
        That's what freezing is for. And don't respond with "good sushi fish is never frozen" The fish is literally frozen when caught.
        askvictor 9y ago
        Also, some states legally require sushi fish to be frozen and thawed.
        Radim 9y ago
        And for good reasons! Fish meat -- especially large fish like salmon -- are notoriously riddled with worms [0]. Freezing helps kill (most of) them. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/14/sushi-parasite-worm-fish https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/...
        wahnfrieden 9y ago
        There’s a difference between that and longer term deep freezing. In Japan you can buy fish that’s never been through the latter at some restaurants.
- uptownJimmy 9y ago
  I've had a few dinners at really good sushi restaurants, small spots with the traditional 2-3 chefs working behind the sushi bar. Those were some of the best meals I ever had. You would definitely be able to discern the difference. It's a pretty big margin. Having said that, I have eaten plenty of robot sushi, and it's sometimes pretty good.
- allenz 9y ago
  You can distinguish artisan sushi from mass produced sushi if you pay attention, since they're made in very different ways. Artisan sushi is airier with softer rice. You might be interested in these analyses: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/17/mri-scans-of-sushi.html http://boingboing.net/2009/07/17/mri-scans-of-sushi.html https://youtu.be/h3Oz-Tdf_4s https://youtu.be/h3Oz-Tdf_4s
  - uptownJimmy 9y ago
    That MRI sushi scan trick is great.
    - k_sh 9y ago
      What, you don't bring your MRI to dinner?
      - gattilorenz 9y ago
        I stopped doing this when, in addition to everybody's attention, I started attracting also everybody's cutlery (less of a problem in a sushi restaurant, tho)
- khedoros1 9y ago
  Machine sushi rice tends to be packed together, and I think it's usually cooked a little firmer so that it survives machine handling. There's a finesse that good sushi chefs have that hasn't been replicated by a robot yet. Good sushi rice is somehow lighter, but still cohesive. The flavor balance with the fish is better and more consistent. The fish doesn't tend to fall off as easily. If you eat a fair amount of sushi, you'll notice the difference. If you don't often? Maybe not.
- mikekchar 9y ago
  First: Yes, if you are the kind of person who pays attention to your food, you will be able to easily notice the difference. Sushi is vinegared rice. There are 2 main types of sushi you will eat in a sushi restaurant: nigiri sushi (formed with the hand) and maki sushi (rolled in a sheet of seaweed). There are other sushi dishes, but you won't get them in a sushi restaurant. Sushi is made by cooking the rice, simultaneously cooling the cooked rice and reducing the moisture content, cutting in the vinegar/sugar/salt mixture and then finally forming the rice into a shape. Some of these things can be done well in an automated process, some of them can not. To make very good sushi, you need to understand the rice. Rice is all slightly different and it will contain more or less starch, have more or less bran still attached to the kernel, etc, etc. When you start you need to inspect the rice, wash it appropriately and choose the correct amount of water to cook it with. How well you do this step makes a surprisingly large difference in the end product. If you don't wash off the starch well enough, it will end up gluey. If you don't polish off the bran, you will get rancid flavours. If you don't choose the correct amount of water, you will get mushy rice. The list goes on and on (I'm by no means an expert, but I've failed to make great sushi on enough occasions to at least enumerate some of my failures ;-) ). Generally speaking, if you buy sushi at a kaiten sushi place -- or even just a place that just isn't very good, they aren't going to get this step right because it takes experience and attention to detail. Big kaiten sushi chains are going to select a forgiving rice. They are going to wash it exactly the same way each time. And they will get a relatively consistent, but not very good result. The next bit is cooking. This one is perfectly suited to automation. If you get the rice to water ratio correct, modern rice cookers cook rice virtually perfectly. From Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I know they use their jury rigged pressure cooker setup, but TBH, I'm a bit skeptical that it makes all that much difference. He says that he has to do it under pressure because of the rice variety, but I'm not sure why he can't use a normal pressure cooker -- probably because that's just not the way he does things. Anyway, once the rice is cooked, you need to cool it to a precise temperature while at the same time reducing the humidity. This is really hard to do well. If you get it wrong, you will either get too hard a texture, or more likely mush. However, it's the kind of thing that machines are really good at. The next step is really hard to do well with a machine, I think. While maintaining the correct temperature, you need to mix in the vinegar mixture. The technique you use to mix the vinegar, the speed that you mix it, the amount that you use -- all depends on what the rice is doing that day. It depends on the ambient temperature and humidity. It depends on how well you've washed the rice. It depends on how perfectly you got the water/rice ratio when you were cooking. If you get it wrong, you will range from crumbly, falling apart sushi to glue. Machines do this very poorly, it seems. They uniformly under-vinegar the rice. I think it's because when they are extruding the rice (in the next step), they need the rice to be firmer than you would if you were doing it by hand. First you need to keep the sushi rice around before use. You can't really have a continuous cooking process, so you need to cook in batches. However, as the rice cools, the starch forms crystals. This causes the rice to taste dry and to have a rough texture. You need to maintain a consistent temperature -- not too high because it will continue cooking, not too low because it will crystalise. You also have to maintain the proper humidity. There is nothing that makes this harder or easier for automation, but it depends on how you are moving the rice from one place to another. Finally, you have to form the rice. As I said, there are two main kinds of sushi that you will have at a sushi restaurant. The one that many North Americans are most familiar with is maki sushi. This one is dramatically easier to make. You spread the rice on a piece of nori seaweed and roll it up. To understand how to do this well, you have to understand that rice has a flavour. It is a very subtle flavour, but a flavour nonetheless. Japanese meals are not like western meals. You don't have "main dishes" with fillers like potatoes and bread. Instead, the main dish is rice. Everything else is a "side dish" and is meant to accentuate the flavour of the rice. This is why Japanese food is so delicately flavoured, without strong herbs or spices. It's also why you eat the rice without salt or some kind of sauce. With maki sushi, you have a piece of roasted nori that adds some crispness and earthiness. Then you have a filling that should accent the rice. The problem is that if the rice is mushed up together, it tastes like glue (umm... well, it literally is glue at that point). To get the flavour of the rice to come out, the most important point is air! Each kernel of rice needs to have air around it. At the same time, you need moisture, so that it has a good texture, sticks together, and creates a kind of sauce in your mouth (mixing the nori, rice and filling together). It's that balance of rice, air, water, filling and nori that is important to getting something that has nice flavour and then dissolves in your mouth, with a satisfying, mouth feeling texture and flavour. Like I said, maki sushi is dramatically easier to do than nigiri sushi. That's because you spread the rice on the nori. This automatically creates both places for air and water to exist. Then you add the filling and roll up the nori. The nori then protects the sushi from drying out. Machines are extremely good at making maki sushi, IMHO. Nigiri sushi is much more difficult. With nigiri sushi, you wet you hands (just enough), take a small handful of rice, form the rice into a rectangle, add wasabi (if you are going to do it) and then apply the topping (usually sashimi -- raw, sliced fish). Getting a machine to produce nigiri sushi at all is a triumph of engineering. However, it is uniformly awful. Instead of making a 2 dimensional object and then rolling it (to trap both air and water), you need to make a 3 dimensional object, with water surrounding the rice kernels and air in between. It has to be compressed just right so that it sticks together, while at the same time retaining the air pockets and water pockets. Then you have to apply the topping so that it sticks to the rice, so that when you bite it, it seems like one thing as opposed to falling apart in pieces in your mouth. Good nigiri sushi seems to melt in your mouth. The flavour of the fish mixes with the flavour of the rice and washes down your throat. There are many different ways nigiri sushi can be bad, but the main ones are "piece of fish sitting on a pile of glue" and "a bunch of random junk that falls apart in your mouth in a sticky, mealy way". Machine made nigiri sushi tends to be the latter. Having said all that, there are some caveats. The convenience stores sell "onigiri", which are triangular shapes rice balls wrapped in nori, with some kind of filling. They are universally awesome, even though they are made by machine. There are onigiri restaurants where they make everything by hand and they are admittedly better, but not nearly as much as hand made nigiri sushi vs machine made nigiri sushi. And finally, I've taken some friends to very, very good sushi restaurants in Japan before (I live in a fishing village and we're lucky to have a couple of good sushi restaurants). Usually they are blown away. Occasionally they are, "Meh. Fish on rice. I don't really see the difference other than the price tag". So without knowing you, I can't tell for certain that you would care about the difference.
- patio11 9y ago
  When you're in the Jiro levels you're presumably evaluating something other than just the food quality. Here's a fairer comparison: can you tell the difference between sushi which uses machine-packed rice and sushi prepared by the lowest rung of traditional sushi establishment? It is possible that a hypothetical person would be unable to tell the difference, but if that is true of a hypothetical person, they'd likely also be unable to tell the difference between a Chicken McNugget and a more traditional chicken preparation. I'm not being a food snob about this, I promise -- they're just two very, very different industrial processes which produces output that shares a portion of the flavor profile / color palette / etc but also has trivially distinguishing characteristics. You don't have to get into any of the semi-mystical claims about artistry or tradition to be able to bucket effectively just based on rice consistency.
kurosawa 9y ago
somebody had to say his name thrice
sg0 9y ago
They have a nice clean website, if the product descriptions were absent, then I definitely would not have been able to guess what the machines were used for (http://www.suzumokikou.com/product_type/for-factory/ http://www.suzumokikou.com/product_type/for-factory/).
dmix 9y ago
> Why had the Japanese government embarked on a policy to limit rice production, effectively paying some farmers to keep their paddy fields idle? Ah, the classic question asked of every overbearing economically-intervening government.
- EGreg 9y ago
  Perhaps because overuse of the soil leads to desertification and a downward spiral where each individual tries to produce more and more leading to faster desertification? See: The Dust Bowl.
  - dmix 9y ago
    Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios? Reading the Wikipedia on the "Dust Bowl" seems to indicate it was solved by financing soil conservation techniques such as tree planting combined with researching and educating business owners on better practices called "Dryland farming" - which the early farmers seem to have been unfamiliar with in <1930s America. Basically farming evolved to take into consideration the unique environment they were operating in which every business and property owner would naturally be incentivized to follow (something that is not always the case for environment related externalities)... I don't see how farm centralization played any role in solving this problem.
    - EGreg 9y ago
      "Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios?" Yes. And how is farm centralization the same as paying farmers to not plant? As prices for a good fall, the producers try to make up for it on volume. This is a feature of capitalism. Everyone acting in their own interest leads to a downward spiral. As a result, there is an exacerbation of harm to an ecosystem. If you don't believe me, model it on a computer. It's the tragedy of the unmanaged commons. And Capitalism also has this effect under normal circumstances. Look at how much deforestation and desertificaton and extinction of species has happened in the last 50 years. Half of all deforestation in the last 10,000 years happened during the last 50 years. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/27692-defor... A quarter of all farmland has now been affected by desertification. https://desertification.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/desertification-and-farmland-google-ecpulse/ https://desertification.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/desertifica... It's not just the bees - the rate of extinction of species has increased massively in the last 100 years and biodiversity is plummeting around the world. We are turning our ecosystems into farms. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/ http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversi... The largest concentrations of CO2 in millions of years are in the last 50 years, and increasing. This is not scary to many ideological conservatives in love with Capitalism. They wave it off and believe in human ingenuity of the future. Navel gazing at the nice things Capitalism produces doesn't mean that there are no negative externalities. Everyone is incetivized to sell more and more stuff at the expense of natural ecosystems, third world countries and future generations. Look at lake Baikal as a random but serious example.
smilekzs 9y ago
Can't help but admire Japanese people who automate everything that can be automated since 1970s! Working with soft and loose material such as rice is a huge PITA for machines, but I'm not totally surprised they eventually found a way to make it work reasonably well. Perhaps this in turn imposed limitations on the water/rice ratio and cooking time, which might compromise the taste.
- stephengillie 9y ago
  What is the argument against automation? We have had people putting cans on shelves for thousands of years. Where is the shelf-stocking robot?
  - degenerate 9y ago
    Humans are easy to find, fully assembled, break less, and are more easily replaced. We are amazing machines.
    - stephengillie 9y ago
      And extremely versatile. When the store is slow, self-check and self-stock robots can't sweep the floor.
    - etplayer 9y ago
      Those are reasons not to automate, but they're not arguments against automation. If there is too much automation in an economy (across industries) then there are fewer people available to buy products that are being made. From a Marxian point of view, purchase of automation machinery is part of the cycle of capital crises, and contributes to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall for the employer of automation, because he extracts less surplus value, as machinery embodies dead labour and only has the running cost of 'replenishing' this labour by replacement of its parts or general maintenace of it, these costs coming out of the surplus value extracted anyway. There's a wonderful little essay by Ernest Mandel on the effects of automation on the amount of wage labour employed in his own time (the 80s), why this occurs, and how capitalism deals with automation versus how a Socialist mode of production might do so: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html Edit: a relevant little quote follows. "Japanese socialists [7] have tried to study the effects of new technologies especially on the automobile industry. Also stressing qualitative aspects of the changes (loss of skills, increase in accidents, emergence of new layers of workers and of skills etc.), the authors find a reduction of shop floor workers of around 10% at the most highly ‘robotised’ automobile plant in Japan, Nissan’s Myrayama Plant, between September 1974 and January 1982, accompanied however, by small increases in white-collar personnel. Even the Japanese ‘company unions’ seem worried by these developments, ‘life-long employment’ still the rule in Japan notwithstanding (Japan Economic Journal, February 21, 1984)."
TulliusCicero 9y ago
Looks like one of the sushi making robots costs somewhere around ~$15,000. Would be great if there was one available for the prosumer market at a lower price.
- pcurve 9y ago
  I'm not sure prosumer market exists for sushi making robot. Tough part about sushi isn't forming rice and wrapping, but rather, cooking and seasoning rice, sourcing and preparing ingredients.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
jpao79 9y ago
Here's a fun one: Japanese fully automated restaurant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yICVmyySHmE&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yICVmyySHmE&feature=youtu.be As a side note, it's funny in that there are many parallels to this fully automated restaurant and this short thought essay that was mentioned on HN a few months ago about the slow and steady future progression of AI: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
- aqme28 9y ago
  Not _fully_ automated. They may not be "chefs" according to the video, but there are clearly people assembling food.
  - jpao79 9y ago
    True - its definitely got a manual component to it. It's interesting to see the sushi rice machine in use in the first half of the video. What's interesting about restaurant automation is that it could go either way in terms of making existing franchises more of a monopoly or enabling the little guy compete against them. I tend to actually lean toward the later because the biggest issue with restaurants is managing/coordinating a team of people (interviewing, payroll, scheduling, healthcare, HR, diversity). But if automation can enable the independent restaurant owner to work with a skeleton crew and focus on delivering value and a differentiated product the consumer will win in the long run. I feel that we as entrepreneurial engineers need to make robots that will help make the independent proprietor capable of competing with the larger franchisors like McDonald. Something like an artisanal grass fed beef hamburger restaurant robot to help the food truck compete against McDonalds.
    - wavefunction 9y ago
      Here in Austin we have a local chain serving grass-fed beef hamburger that's cheaper than McDonald's by $1.19. The 'combo meal' is $0.50 cheaper at McDonald's, however P. Terry's also makes their fries and everything else from scratch, without any robots. I think they try to take good care of their employees as well. http://pterrys.com/menu/ http://pterrys.com/menu/
pcurve 9y ago
Video of how one works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=-ocpbJ0aZTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=-ocpbJ0aZTk
darepublic 9y ago
As a UI developer I feel like I am one of those artisan chefs and I dread the day automated UI will come a knocking
eps 9y ago
> he could bring the previously elite Japanese dish to the masses I distinctly remember reading elsewhere that sushi was poor's people street food, basically. That is, it was cheap and certainly no elite.
- gkanai 9y ago
  That's sort of correct. Sushi today is very different than what Japanese people ate hundreds of years ago. Before refrigeration, fish was largely salted or vinegared unless it was eaten fresh. Japanese never ate salmon sushi because Japanese salmon often had worms. It wasn't until Norway began importing salmon that Japanese began eating raw salmon. That was a long/difficult road as I heard from Norwegians who know that story. But now Japan imports a lot of salmon from Norway. Also before the modern era, tuna/maguro was not the revered fish it is today. White meat fish were, and to many sushi chefs, still is the top fish for sushi.
ordbajsare 9y ago
"government embarked on a policy to limit rice production," GOVERNMENT FUCK YEA!
basseq 9y ago
"Conveyor-belt sushi" has such a terrible connotation. The worst of fast food, cardboard cuisine, mindless automation, and glassy-eyed consumers. That said, the concept of what is effectively an automatic rice-forming machine seems pretty tame and reasonable. Compare dicing an onion by hand vs. using a robot-coupe. I was particularly struck by the dedication here: it took 5 years to get the machine to "work". Keep that in mind the next time you are building your MVP.
- whipoodle 9y ago
  Conveyor-belt sushi might sound bad but it's likely better than you'd expect. It also isn't completely made by machine, at least in the ones I've eaten at in America. It's a nice way to have lunch especially, I like that you can get the exact amount of food that you want, and the immediacy of sitting down and taking right from the conveyor is great. It usually feels like a good value for the cost too.

172 points by pshaw 9y ago

veb 9y ago

I don't really know much about sushi, but this was a fascinating read. The entire time I kept wondering what the difference would be between the machine made sushi and the stuff made by the guys in the documentary, Jiro Dreams of Sushi[1] Would I be able to tell the difference? [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772925/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1772925/

whipoodle 9y ago
I can't say I've been to Jiro's restaurant (and though I admire his dedication, the whole thing honestly seems a bit much), but I've been to plenty of good sushi places and eaten plenty of conveyor-belt sushi. As it says in the article, they are just different. When you get a burger at McDonald's, you don't expect it to be the same as one from a good restaurant.
twblalock 9y ago
The flavor changes pretty quickly. Non-fresh sushi can become very bland.
- kowdermeister 9y ago
  If that's the case, might a machine produce a more predictable outcome?
  - selectodude 9y ago
    The unpredictability is due to the fish itself. Unless the machine can lab grow bluefin tuna it's going to have the same issues.
    - CalChris 9y ago
      This. My favorite sushi restaurant was a buffet on University in Berkeley, Edoko. If you got there early everything was fresh, especially the saba; I've never had anything close. Not so good at 9pm.
    - NikolaeVarius 9y ago
      That's what freezing is for. And don't respond with "good sushi fish is never frozen" The fish is literally frozen when caught.
      - askvictor 9y ago
        Also, some states legally require sushi fish to be frozen and thawed.
        Radim 9y ago
        And for good reasons! Fish meat -- especially large fish like salmon -- are notoriously riddled with worms [0]. Freezing helps kill (most of) them. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/14/sushi-parasite-worm-fish https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2017/may/...
      - wahnfrieden 9y ago
        There’s a difference between that and longer term deep freezing. In Japan you can buy fish that’s never been through the latter at some restaurants.
uptownJimmy 9y ago
I've had a few dinners at really good sushi restaurants, small spots with the traditional 2-3 chefs working behind the sushi bar. Those were some of the best meals I ever had. You would definitely be able to discern the difference. It's a pretty big margin. Having said that, I have eaten plenty of robot sushi, and it's sometimes pretty good.
allenz 9y ago
You can distinguish artisan sushi from mass produced sushi if you pay attention, since they're made in very different ways. Artisan sushi is airier with softer rice. You might be interested in these analyses: http://boingboing.net/2009/07/17/mri-scans-of-sushi.html http://boingboing.net/2009/07/17/mri-scans-of-sushi.html https://youtu.be/h3Oz-Tdf_4s https://youtu.be/h3Oz-Tdf_4s
- uptownJimmy 9y ago
  That MRI sushi scan trick is great.
  - k_sh 9y ago
    What, you don't bring your MRI to dinner?
    - gattilorenz 9y ago
      I stopped doing this when, in addition to everybody's attention, I started attracting also everybody's cutlery (less of a problem in a sushi restaurant, tho)
khedoros1 9y ago
Machine sushi rice tends to be packed together, and I think it's usually cooked a little firmer so that it survives machine handling. There's a finesse that good sushi chefs have that hasn't been replicated by a robot yet. Good sushi rice is somehow lighter, but still cohesive. The flavor balance with the fish is better and more consistent. The fish doesn't tend to fall off as easily. If you eat a fair amount of sushi, you'll notice the difference. If you don't often? Maybe not.
mikekchar 9y ago
First: Yes, if you are the kind of person who pays attention to your food, you will be able to easily notice the difference. Sushi is vinegared rice. There are 2 main types of sushi you will eat in a sushi restaurant: nigiri sushi (formed with the hand) and maki sushi (rolled in a sheet of seaweed). There are other sushi dishes, but you won't get them in a sushi restaurant. Sushi is made by cooking the rice, simultaneously cooling the cooked rice and reducing the moisture content, cutting in the vinegar/sugar/salt mixture and then finally forming the rice into a shape. Some of these things can be done well in an automated process, some of them can not. To make very good sushi, you need to understand the rice. Rice is all slightly different and it will contain more or less starch, have more or less bran still attached to the kernel, etc, etc. When you start you need to inspect the rice, wash it appropriately and choose the correct amount of water to cook it with. How well you do this step makes a surprisingly large difference in the end product. If you don't wash off the starch well enough, it will end up gluey. If you don't polish off the bran, you will get rancid flavours. If you don't choose the correct amount of water, you will get mushy rice. The list goes on and on (I'm by no means an expert, but I've failed to make great sushi on enough occasions to at least enumerate some of my failures ;-) ). Generally speaking, if you buy sushi at a kaiten sushi place -- or even just a place that just isn't very good, they aren't going to get this step right because it takes experience and attention to detail. Big kaiten sushi chains are going to select a forgiving rice. They are going to wash it exactly the same way each time. And they will get a relatively consistent, but not very good result. The next bit is cooking. This one is perfectly suited to automation. If you get the rice to water ratio correct, modern rice cookers cook rice virtually perfectly. From Jiro Dreams of Sushi, I know they use their jury rigged pressure cooker setup, but TBH, I'm a bit skeptical that it makes all that much difference. He says that he has to do it under pressure because of the rice variety, but I'm not sure why he can't use a normal pressure cooker -- probably because that's just not the way he does things. Anyway, once the rice is cooked, you need to cool it to a precise temperature while at the same time reducing the humidity. This is really hard to do well. If you get it wrong, you will either get too hard a texture, or more likely mush. However, it's the kind of thing that machines are really good at. The next step is really hard to do well with a machine, I think. While maintaining the correct temperature, you need to mix in the vinegar mixture. The technique you use to mix the vinegar, the speed that you mix it, the amount that you use -- all depends on what the rice is doing that day. It depends on the ambient temperature and humidity. It depends on how well you've washed the rice. It depends on how perfectly you got the water/rice ratio when you were cooking. If you get it wrong, you will range from crumbly, falling apart sushi to glue. Machines do this very poorly, it seems. They uniformly under-vinegar the rice. I think it's because when they are extruding the rice (in the next step), they need the rice to be firmer than you would if you were doing it by hand. First you need to keep the sushi rice around before use. You can't really have a continuous cooking process, so you need to cook in batches. However, as the rice cools, the starch forms crystals. This causes the rice to taste dry and to have a rough texture. You need to maintain a consistent temperature -- not too high because it will continue cooking, not too low because it will crystalise. You also have to maintain the proper humidity. There is nothing that makes this harder or easier for automation, but it depends on how you are moving the rice from one place to another. Finally, you have to form the rice. As I said, there are two main kinds of sushi that you will have at a sushi restaurant. The one that many North Americans are most familiar with is maki sushi. This one is dramatically easier to make. You spread the rice on a piece of nori seaweed and roll it up. To understand how to do this well, you have to understand that rice has a flavour. It is a very subtle flavour, but a flavour nonetheless. Japanese meals are not like western meals. You don't have "main dishes" with fillers like potatoes and bread. Instead, the main dish is rice. Everything else is a "side dish" and is meant to accentuate the flavour of the rice. This is why Japanese food is so delicately flavoured, without strong herbs or spices. It's also why you eat the rice without salt or some kind of sauce. With maki sushi, you have a piece of roasted nori that adds some crispness and earthiness. Then you have a filling that should accent the rice. The problem is that if the rice is mushed up together, it tastes like glue (umm... well, it literally is glue at that point). To get the flavour of the rice to come out, the most important point is air! Each kernel of rice needs to have air around it. At the same time, you need moisture, so that it has a good texture, sticks together, and creates a kind of sauce in your mouth (mixing the nori, rice and filling together). It's that balance of rice, air, water, filling and nori that is important to getting something that has nice flavour and then dissolves in your mouth, with a satisfying, mouth feeling texture and flavour. Like I said, maki sushi is dramatically easier to do than nigiri sushi. That's because you spread the rice on the nori. This automatically creates both places for air and water to exist. Then you add the filling and roll up the nori. The nori then protects the sushi from drying out. Machines are extremely good at making maki sushi, IMHO. Nigiri sushi is much more difficult. With nigiri sushi, you wet you hands (just enough), take a small handful of rice, form the rice into a rectangle, add wasabi (if you are going to do it) and then apply the topping (usually sashimi -- raw, sliced fish). Getting a machine to produce nigiri sushi at all is a triumph of engineering. However, it is uniformly awful. Instead of making a 2 dimensional object and then rolling it (to trap both air and water), you need to make a 3 dimensional object, with water surrounding the rice kernels and air in between. It has to be compressed just right so that it sticks together, while at the same time retaining the air pockets and water pockets. Then you have to apply the topping so that it sticks to the rice, so that when you bite it, it seems like one thing as opposed to falling apart in pieces in your mouth. Good nigiri sushi seems to melt in your mouth. The flavour of the fish mixes with the flavour of the rice and washes down your throat. There are many different ways nigiri sushi can be bad, but the main ones are "piece of fish sitting on a pile of glue" and "a bunch of random junk that falls apart in your mouth in a sticky, mealy way". Machine made nigiri sushi tends to be the latter. Having said all that, there are some caveats. The convenience stores sell "onigiri", which are triangular shapes rice balls wrapped in nori, with some kind of filling. They are universally awesome, even though they are made by machine. There are onigiri restaurants where they make everything by hand and they are admittedly better, but not nearly as much as hand made nigiri sushi vs machine made nigiri sushi. And finally, I've taken some friends to very, very good sushi restaurants in Japan before (I live in a fishing village and we're lucky to have a couple of good sushi restaurants). Usually they are blown away. Occasionally they are, "Meh. Fish on rice. I don't really see the difference other than the price tag". So without knowing you, I can't tell for certain that you would care about the difference.
patio11 9y ago
When you're in the Jiro levels you're presumably evaluating something other than just the food quality. Here's a fairer comparison: can you tell the difference between sushi which uses machine-packed rice and sushi prepared by the lowest rung of traditional sushi establishment? It is possible that a hypothetical person would be unable to tell the difference, but if that is true of a hypothetical person, they'd likely also be unable to tell the difference between a Chicken McNugget and a more traditional chicken preparation. I'm not being a food snob about this, I promise -- they're just two very, very different industrial processes which produces output that shares a portion of the flavor profile / color palette / etc but also has trivially distinguishing characteristics. You don't have to get into any of the semi-mystical claims about artistry or tradition to be able to bucket effectively just based on rice consistency.

kurosawa 9y ago

somebody had to say his name thrice

sg0 9y ago

They have a nice clean website, if the product descriptions were absent, then I definitely would not have been able to guess what the machines were used for (http://www.suzumokikou.com/product_type/for-factory/ http://www.suzumokikou.com/product_type/for-factory/).

dmix 9y ago

> Why had the Japanese government embarked on a policy to limit rice production, effectively paying some farmers to keep their paddy fields idle? Ah, the classic question asked of every overbearing economically-intervening government.

EGreg 9y ago
Perhaps because overuse of the soil leads to desertification and a downward spiral where each individual tries to produce more and more leading to faster desertification? See: The Dust Bowl.
- dmix 9y ago
  Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios? Reading the Wikipedia on the "Dust Bowl" seems to indicate it was solved by financing soil conservation techniques such as tree planting combined with researching and educating business owners on better practices called "Dryland farming" - which the early farmers seem to have been unfamiliar with in <1930s America. Basically farming evolved to take into consideration the unique environment they were operating in which every business and property owner would naturally be incentivized to follow (something that is not always the case for environment related externalities)... I don't see how farm centralization played any role in solving this problem.
  - EGreg 9y ago
    "Are you saying paying companies to remain idle is an ideal resource management solution for certain scenarios?" Yes. And how is farm centralization the same as paying farmers to not plant? As prices for a good fall, the producers try to make up for it on volume. This is a feature of capitalism. Everyone acting in their own interest leads to a downward spiral. As a result, there is an exacerbation of harm to an ecosystem. If you don't believe me, model it on a computer. It's the tragedy of the unmanaged commons. And Capitalism also has this effect under normal circumstances. Look at how much deforestation and desertificaton and extinction of species has happened in the last 50 years. Half of all deforestation in the last 10,000 years happened during the last 50 years. https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/27692-defor... A quarter of all farmland has now been affected by desertification. https://desertification.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/desertification-and-farmland-google-ecpulse/ https://desertification.wordpress.com/2010/08/30/desertifica... It's not just the bees - the rate of extinction of species has increased massively in the last 100 years and biodiversity is plummeting around the world. We are turning our ecosystems into farms. http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversity/ http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/biodiversity/biodiversi... The largest concentrations of CO2 in millions of years are in the last 50 years, and increasing. This is not scary to many ideological conservatives in love with Capitalism. They wave it off and believe in human ingenuity of the future. Navel gazing at the nice things Capitalism produces doesn't mean that there are no negative externalities. Everyone is incetivized to sell more and more stuff at the expense of natural ecosystems, third world countries and future generations. Look at lake Baikal as a random but serious example.

smilekzs 9y ago

Can't help but admire Japanese people who automate everything that can be automated since 1970s! Working with soft and loose material such as rice is a huge PITA for machines, but I'm not totally surprised they eventually found a way to make it work reasonably well. Perhaps this in turn imposed limitations on the water/rice ratio and cooking time, which might compromise the taste.

stephengillie 9y ago
What is the argument against automation? We have had people putting cans on shelves for thousands of years. Where is the shelf-stocking robot?
- degenerate 9y ago
  Humans are easy to find, fully assembled, break less, and are more easily replaced. We are amazing machines.
  - stephengillie 9y ago
    And extremely versatile. When the store is slow, self-check and self-stock robots can't sweep the floor.
  - etplayer 9y ago
    Those are reasons not to automate, but they're not arguments against automation. If there is too much automation in an economy (across industries) then there are fewer people available to buy products that are being made. From a Marxian point of view, purchase of automation machinery is part of the cycle of capital crises, and contributes to the tendency for the rate of profit to fall for the employer of automation, because he extracts less surplus value, as machinery embodies dead labour and only has the running cost of 'replenishing' this labour by replacement of its parts or general maintenace of it, these costs coming out of the surplus value extracted anyway. There's a wonderful little essay by Ernest Mandel on the effects of automation on the amount of wage labour employed in his own time (the 80s), why this occurs, and how capitalism deals with automation versus how a Socialist mode of production might do so: https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1985/xx/future.html Edit: a relevant little quote follows. "Japanese socialists [7] have tried to study the effects of new technologies especially on the automobile industry. Also stressing qualitative aspects of the changes (loss of skills, increase in accidents, emergence of new layers of workers and of skills etc.), the authors find a reduction of shop floor workers of around 10% at the most highly ‘robotised’ automobile plant in Japan, Nissan’s Myrayama Plant, between September 1974 and January 1982, accompanied however, by small increases in white-collar personnel. Even the Japanese ‘company unions’ seem worried by these developments, ‘life-long employment’ still the rule in Japan notwithstanding (Japan Economic Journal, February 21, 1984)."

TulliusCicero 9y ago

Looks like one of the sushi making robots costs somewhere around ~$15,000. Would be great if there was one available for the prosumer market at a lower price.

pcurve 9y ago
I'm not sure prosumer market exists for sushi making robot. Tough part about sushi isn't forming rice and wrapping, but rather, cooking and seasoning rice, sourcing and preparing ingredients.
- deleted 9y ago
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jpao79 9y ago

Here's a fun one: Japanese fully automated restaurant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yICVmyySHmE&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yICVmyySHmE&feature=youtu.be As a side note, it's funny in that there are many parallels to this fully automated restaurant and this short thought essay that was mentioned on HN a few months ago about the slow and steady future progression of AI: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

aqme28 9y ago
Not _fully_ automated. They may not be "chefs" according to the video, but there are clearly people assembling food.
- jpao79 9y ago
  True - its definitely got a manual component to it. It's interesting to see the sushi rice machine in use in the first half of the video. What's interesting about restaurant automation is that it could go either way in terms of making existing franchises more of a monopoly or enabling the little guy compete against them. I tend to actually lean toward the later because the biggest issue with restaurants is managing/coordinating a team of people (interviewing, payroll, scheduling, healthcare, HR, diversity). But if automation can enable the independent restaurant owner to work with a skeleton crew and focus on delivering value and a differentiated product the consumer will win in the long run. I feel that we as entrepreneurial engineers need to make robots that will help make the independent proprietor capable of competing with the larger franchisors like McDonald. Something like an artisanal grass fed beef hamburger restaurant robot to help the food truck compete against McDonalds.
  - wavefunction 9y ago
    Here in Austin we have a local chain serving grass-fed beef hamburger that's cheaper than McDonald's by $1.19. The 'combo meal' is $0.50 cheaper at McDonald's, however P. Terry's also makes their fries and everything else from scratch, without any robots. I think they try to take good care of their employees as well. http://pterrys.com/menu/ http://pterrys.com/menu/

pcurve 9y ago

Video of how one works. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=-ocpbJ0aZTk https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=95&v=-ocpbJ0aZTk

darepublic 9y ago

As a UI developer I feel like I am one of those artisan chefs and I dread the day automated UI will come a knocking

eps 9y ago

> he could bring the previously elite Japanese dish to the masses I distinctly remember reading elsewhere that sushi was poor's people street food, basically. That is, it was cheap and certainly no elite.

gkanai 9y ago
That's sort of correct. Sushi today is very different than what Japanese people ate hundreds of years ago. Before refrigeration, fish was largely salted or vinegared unless it was eaten fresh. Japanese never ate salmon sushi because Japanese salmon often had worms. It wasn't until Norway began importing salmon that Japanese began eating raw salmon. That was a long/difficult road as I heard from Norwegians who know that story. But now Japan imports a lot of salmon from Norway. Also before the modern era, tuna/maguro was not the revered fish it is today. White meat fish were, and to many sushi chefs, still is the top fish for sushi.

ordbajsare 9y ago

"government embarked on a policy to limit rice production," GOVERNMENT FUCK YEA!

basseq 9y ago

"Conveyor-belt sushi" has such a terrible connotation. The worst of fast food, cardboard cuisine, mindless automation, and glassy-eyed consumers. That said, the concept of what is effectively an automatic rice-forming machine seems pretty tame and reasonable. Compare dicing an onion by hand vs. using a robot-coupe. I was particularly struck by the dedication here: it took 5 years to get the machine to "work". Keep that in mind the next time you are building your MVP.

whipoodle 9y ago
Conveyor-belt sushi might sound bad but it's likely better than you'd expect. It also isn't completely made by machine, at least in the ones I've eaten at in America. It's a nice way to have lunch especially, I like that you can get the exact amount of food that you want, and the immediacy of sitting down and taking right from the conveyor is great. It usually feels like a good value for the cost too.