The Curly Cook: Sushi Lesson, as promised

So I promised a sushi post, and here it is. It was actually a lot easier than I thought it would be, but that is probably because I had a good teacher (Thanks Clarence!). I made a night out of it, and invited some people from work too. It ended up being A LOT of fun and great way to spend a Sunday afternoon in the middle of winter. I should probably mention that we only made California Rolls, using veggies and cooked fish since I didn’t want to be blamed for a half a dozen cases of possible food poisoning. It was still yummy, especially since we all made it, and besides it’s better than what you can buy here, which is no sushi at all.

So onto the sushi lesson…Clarence, being the organized person he is, gave me a list of equipment and food I would need to make my inaugural sushi night a success. Here’s what you should have before you start:

Equipment:

- rice cooker

-bamboo mats (to roll the sushi)

- sharp knives

- cutting board

- big bowl

- wooden spoon and/or spatula

Food Stuff:

- short grain calarose rice

- nori (dried and roasted seeweed paper)

- rice vinegar

- sugar

- avocado

- large carrot

- English cucumber

- cooked jumbo shrimp (tails removed)

- crab meat (or imitation crap meat)

- other cooked fish (i.e. smoked salmon, canned salmon…be creative!)

- pickled ginger

- tube of wasabi

- block of cream cheese (goes really well with the smoked salmon)

Optional: sesame seeds, sesame oil, mayo.

Instructions:

First things first, rinse your rice a few times and get it in your rice cooker. You’ll need about 2 cups of rice to make about 4 sushi rolls, which, depending on how thick you cut, will work out to approximately 6 pieces of sushi per roll (~ 24 pieces of sushi in total)

In the meantime, you can start julienning all the vegtables. For the cucumbers that means, cut them in half (long wise), then cut them longwise again (into quarters) and then cut longwise a third time (into eighths). It’s the same idea with the advocado; cut it longwise and carefully remove the stone and skin. Then cut it longwise into eighths or sixteenths if you can. The carrots are the most work since you want to end up with carrot pieces the thickness of matchsticks. Just make sure you have a very sharp knife and no where to go in a hurry! Here’s a link with an animated tutorial http://makemysushi.com/carrot.html

Next, in a large bowl mix a tbsp. of rice vinegar, a few splashes of sesame oil and a few pinches of sugar. Once the sugar is dissolved, add abuot 1/3 of the cooked rice and mix well. You want to coat the rice with the mixture and then spread the rice onto the sides of bowl (using your wooden spoon) so that it cools.

Next take once bamboo roll and place one sheet of nori in the middle of it. Now take a heaping spoonful of the rice and place it in the middle of the nori and spread it evenly.

Now you add whatever you want in the roll on top of your rice. In this case, it looks like cucumber, advocado, carrots, strips of cream cheese and smoked salmon.

Now for the rolling. Take the bamboo roll, while holding the stuff on top of the rice, roll the whole thing into a long tube, being sure to tuck one end of the roll under the other. Once you have a roll, start compressing the roll so that the ‘insides’ stay inside. The trick is to be as uniform as possible when applying pressure. Be patient, it does take practice!