Sushi

This week I made sushi. This feels a little bit like cheating, since my friends and I have made sushi before, but we spiced things up significantly this time. Bittman offers a handful of recommendations for sushi contents and I explored as many of them as possible.

Unfortunately, Coastal Seafoods was out of everything but salmon in terms of sushi-grade fish on Saturday (and reviews seem to recommend them to the exclusion of all others). I'm no expert on what makes fish sushi-grade, but I think it has something to do with how the fish is killed. It can also only apply to species of fish which are not prone to getting parasites.

Knowing that all of the fish would be salmon I was particularly diligent in finding other ingredients for the rolls. I ended up with avocado, cucumber, sesame seeds, green onion, carrots, grated radish, sautéed asparagus, mango slices, and cream cheese. These were combined per the proclivities of each person as they took their turn rolling. In total we made twenty different rolls, plus a fair amount of nigiri -- just fish on a pad of rice. My favorite ended up being salmon rolls with avocado and mango.

Sushi requires a lot of slicing
I unfortunately got no good pictures of the rolling process, and it's hard to describe without seeing it. But in essence you take rice, mix it with rice vinegar, salt, and sugar. Spread that flat on a square of nori (roasted seaweed) then lay a strip of filling on top of the rice. Roll everything around the filling then, once it's tight, carefully cut it into inch-thick slices.

Rice preparation
To eat sushi, you put some soy sauce in a small dish or saucer and add a little bit of wasabi (in the USA, it's usually actually horseradish). Then, using chopsticks, you pick up a roll, dip it in the sauce, and eat it in one bite! Pickled ginger, if you have it, is the traditional palette cleanser.

We were rate-limited by the capacity of the rice cooker so we would work in batches, eating the sushi we just made while the next round of rice cooked. Here are some pictures of our finishes products.

Round one


Round two


Round three