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Q & A for a shark skin grater |
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How to grate a fresh wasabi root with a shark skin grater?
If you bite into a frash piece of wasabi root, it doesn't taste strongly.
To bring taste and flavor out from a wasabi root, the cells have to be
destroyed by grating.
Sticky and Creamy paste wasabi has the best taste and flavor.
Gently grating in a circular motion without any power is the best way to
do it.
[Key to caring for the grater and making the tool last long]
If used often, its best to have two on hand and use them interchangeably.
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What kind of shark do we use for our graters?
There are hundreds kinds of sharks all over the world. Angel sharks have
the best skin bumps and they are generally used for graters. Bullhead sharks,
fan ray, guitarfish are used too. Their habitat is the south of Kanto,
Japan to the equator. They are classified into Elasmobranchii. Also skin
original name Honzame.
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Why is a shark skin good for grating fresh wasabi roots?
A shark skin grater helps to break fresh wasabi's cells and brings the
best flavor and spicy taste out. Of course metallic graters can be used
to grate fresh wasabi roots but the metal taste destroys the wasabi's flavour.
Also it can't grate to the preferred paste like consistency which helps
to bring the best flavor and spicy taste out.
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What is a shrk skin made of ?
It's made of enamel like our teeth. Unlike metallic graters, they are natural
materials so they are gentle to your body and environment. For your information,
shark skins are hard enough to scrape a 100 yen coin. For our products
we remove the slimy and brownish-red thin skin on the surface of the skins
before the drying process is completed. These steps make sanitary flesh-colored
skins for our products.
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Materials for shark skins as a traditional craft's material
For our shark skin graters we use the same materials reserved for the decoration
of noblemen's armour and swords. Also in the Nara era shark skins were
used for the swords of the collection of Shosoin.
Shark skin is the generic name for back leathers of certain kinds of sharks
and rays which are covered with hard bumps.
The material can be from a shark or a ray. The shark skins we carefully
select have the best quality for grating a fresh wasabi root with neat
bumps and that won't leave crumbs between them.
You may imagine the movie "JAWS" when you hear of sharks but
we can't get suitable shark skin for a grater from the great white. We
use shark skins from angel sharks, fan ray, bowmouth and guitarfish for
our products. They are all called sharks but their bodies are flat. According
to taxonomy angel sharks belong to Squatiniformes but fan rays belong to
Botoidea. They are both classified as Elasmobranchii. Shark skins have
been highly appreciated to be used on sword handles and armour in Japan
but sharks with bumpy skins which are good for graters do not inhabit the
sea around Japan. They are caught in the sea south of Kyushu, Okinawa and
Southeast Asia and only their skins are imported from there. In other word,
Japanese have believed the sharks or a rays used for a grater are all sharks
without seeing them swimming in the sea. However according to taxonomy
it has become clear that most are in fact classified as rays.
In pursuing the best materials for our graters we don't concern ourselves
with being taxonomically correct in referring to the skins as "shark
skin".
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