【Reading】ちゅうとろ

【English Name】Chutoro (Medium Fatty Tuna)

A topping that concentrates in one piece both the dense fat of otoro and the strong flavor of red meat (akami) is chutoro. The reason it earns high praise from a wide range of sushi lovers is that it lacks excessive greasiness while possessing a richness that red meat does not.

When dismantling the body of a tuna, the belly-side meat can be broadly divided into a front part and a rear part. The fattiest portion located in the front part is otoro, and the portion in the rear part containing a moderate amount of fat corresponds to chutoro. The fat content tends to be higher in the belly than the back, in the front than the rear, and in the surface layers than the deep layers. The portion that fits neither is dismissed as akami, or simply with the single word "maguro" (tuna).

The word "toro" was born from the melting (torori) mouthfeel at the moment it is placed in the mouth. It is said to be a name given by a regular customer of Yoshino Sushi Honten describing this melt-in-the-mouth quality; before that, the name "abu" was widely used.

Before the Edo period, on the Japanese dining table, what was prized was akami alone; the fatty portions spoiled quickly and, since the method of soaking them in soy sauce to process into zuke did not work either, they almost always met the fate of being discarded. They were so coldly treated that they earned the nickname "neko-matagi," meaning that even a cat would step over and avoid them.

The situation reversed after the technological innovations of freezing and refrigeration. The deep flavor brought by animal fat was widely reappraised, and now the market price has soared to easily more than double that of red meat.