Cutting fish faces!? The reason it startles me every time at Vietnamese markets

When I buy fish at markets and supermarkets in Ho Chi Minh City, it gives me a bit of a shock. Because the fish's face is different. You might think a fish's face is a fish's face everywhere, but that's not quite right. Fish in Vietnam are cut and prepared differently than in Japan, so their appearance changes completely from the Japanese style, where the shape of the fish's body is left intact. In other words, even the face gets cut off. It's the fact that it's the "face" rather than just the "head" that gives me a little jolt.

When the staff member fillets the fish, they use scissors instead of a knife. And they go at it boldly, cutting away with a crunching sound. The sharp, dangerous parts like the fins and tail get snipped off without hesitation with the scissors! They also cut open the belly and remove the gills with the scissors, crunch crunch! And finally, even the fish's pointed mouth, the beak-like part, gets snipped off with a chop! They take out the innards too and clean everything up nicely, but that means the lower jaw ends up cut into a strange shape. The first time I saw it, I was really surprised at how comically odd it looked.

⚫️Here's how the plum-simmered horse mackerel turned out... When you talk about filleting fish in Japan, using a knife is a given. You fillet it into three pieces, remove the bones, and create clean, neat cuts of flesh. The way the knife glides when slicing sashimi is truly beautiful. But here, it's snip-snip with scissors. There's no aesthetic to it at all. It's pure momentum!! As for the cooking too, frying it, simmering it, putting it into soup — since fish are often cooked whole here, So there's not really much need to fillet a fish into three pieces, is there. That reminds me, when I visited a Vietnamese family's home, there were only one or two knives in the kitchen. One was a wide one like a Chinese cleaver, and the other was something like a bunka knife. That brings back memories of my father when I was a child. My father loved fishing, and he used to clean the fish he'd caught himself in the kitchen. Even with small fish, he would neatly fillet them into three pieces. I sliced it into sashimi and arranged it on a plate. Back at my parents' house, there was a long, slender sashimi knife, and there was also a small blade-like knife for filleting small fish into three pieces. They really had the right tools for beautifully preparing fish, didn't they~ My mother used them too. On the other hand, in Vietnam, there's almost no culture of eating raw fish. Sushi culture has started coming in now, but the mainstream is still frying and grilling. I've been simmering the soup in a pot. Speaking of which, at the supermarket before Tet, I spotted something incredible — it was bluefin tuna! And a pretty huge one at that. In my head it was already toro, toro, toro~~~ I thought "Woohoo~~~!" and rushed over, but of course... this is Vietnam.

⚫️ A splendid bluefin tuna Instead of beautiful pre-cut fillet blocks lined up, what was laid out — thunk — were round-sliced cuts of tuna. "Whoaaa, what a waste!!" I blurted out without thinking. But of course, it's meant to be grilled or simmered. Right next to it, a huge bluefin tuna head had been placed down with a heavy thud. I could almost hear it saying, "This isn't how I imagined things would turn out..." When the country changes, kitchen culture really does change a lot too. Overseas Living Ranking