Adventures in Homemade Sushi

My house still smells faintly of rice vinegar – evidence of the adventure my husband and I embarked on the night before. After years of talking about making our own sushi rolls, we finally gave it a try.

“It’s a wonder we never tried this before,” M said. He was in charge of the chef knife to slice the rolls into individual pieces.

We had never tried because of the awe that surrounds sushi. It’s not easy to fathom how all those delicious pieces of fish and veggies wind up so perfectly wrapped in layers of rice and seaweed (nori). And, unless you watch someone actually perform the trick of rolling the layers, the adventure can quickly turn to misshapen disaster.

If you want to make sushi, watch this video.

I started with a recipe by Morimoto, assuming he’d walk me through all the steps I needed. Turns out that it is not so easy to describe the rolling process – it is much easier to watch and learn.

Once you’ve seen the video, you’re set to go. Seriously, you’ll be wrapping nearly perfect rolls in no time. I recommend a sushi making partner, particularly one who is young at heart. My husband was so into the moment that he whipped up his own spicy sauce and took tons of photos. It makes the process a lot of fun.

The bamboo mat only cost me $4 from Bed Bath and Beyond. I found all of my ingredients at the local grocery store’s natural/ethnic food aisle. They had sheets of nori, medium grain rice (short or medium will do fine), rice vinegar, wasabi paste in a tube, soy sauce, Asian hot sauce (with the rooster on the bottle), sugar, salt, sesame seeds, and my yummy center pieces. I decided to do a variation of the California roll and Philadelphia roll.

California:

• Seafood chunk/stick
• avocado

Philadelphia:

• Smoked salmon
• cream cheese

I recommend using a rice cooker, although many chefs say it is possible to achieve good sushi rice in a stove top pot. Rice cookers are not expensive, though. Target has some for as little as $20. Ours was about $40.

But the key to getting the rice just rice isn’t necessarily what you cook it in, it’s what you add to the rice. Morimoto’s recipe calls for sugar and salt dissolved in rice vinegar on the stove top (a quick process), which is folded gently into the cooked rice. It gives it the perfect flavor and makes it sticky.  Just be sure to wet your hands before you start playing with the rice!

And another word of advice…some chefs will suggest using plastic wrap on your bamboo mat to keep it clean. Honestly, it only makes your sushi rolling process difficult (and it isn’t environmentally friendly). I think you’ll be more frustrated trying to unstick your delicate roll from the plastic (particularly if you are aiming for the rice on the outside) than you will be scrubbing the rice out from between the bamboo later.

That said, for starters keep your rice on the inside and your nori on the outside like you see in the video. Once you’ve succeeded with that style, try the flip that Morimoto describes to get your rice on the outside of the roll.

You can pretty much estimate one cup of rice per roll. We had no idea, so we had a party platter of 6 rolls, which equated to about 40 pieces. No worries, though. We saved left overs for lunch and, though sushi is always better at room temperature, it was far better than grocery store sushi. (Don’t try this with raw fish)

For the California roll, my husband added a dab of his spicy sauce (a mixture of Asian hot sauce, mayo, and oil). It was almost identical to the orangy colored “spicy sauce” at the Hibachi grille in town. The only thing that was missing that evening was some Asian beer, like Sapporo or Kirin ichiban. It was a merry feast. Any food that can bring us together at the cutting board is a keeper.

There are so many options for homemade sushi. And if you have some squeamish stomachs to fill, the good news is that homemade sushi can be as simple and normal as you want. Raw fish isn’t required.

Can’t wait to try veggie sushi next time!