UMN Cooks 2013: hippie sushi

Being kind of a sucker for both ethnic and healthy (but delicious) foods, I think I'm naturally biased toward a lot of Asian cuisines. They tend to use loads of vegetables and reasonable amounts of protein and fat, but pack tons of flavor from powerful spices and sauces like ginger, garlic, chili peppers and fresh herbs.

That said, it's no surprise that I'm a big fan of sushi. This weekend has been kinda busy so I a) didn't want to go grocery shopping and b) wanted to stick to something I have done before to keep things simple. Bittman's recipe for the rice, as well as instructions for rolling and some ideas for fillings, are on page 199-200 of the soft cover version.

Half of what goes into sushi is pantry items--once you've bought the supplies for it you're good for three or four sushi-making stints. And the great thing about it otherwise is that you can basically put whatever you want in your rolls.

Nori, sugar, rice vinegar, soy sauce, bell pepper, onion, carrot, garlic, ginger, lettuce, rice

Here's where the hippie slant comes in: usually sushi involves white rice and raw fish. I have neither of these in my kitchen. I did, however, have short-grain brown rice and tofu. I've never used brown rice for sushi before, but I had a feeling that buying sushi rice in a special package was unnecessary so I wanted to try it.

As much as I love seafood sushi (no qualms about raw fish here) I didn't want to haul over to Coastal Seafood for it (we know what happened last time anyway). To make the tofu more textural and tasty, I pressed and froze it the day before, then marinated it. If you've never pressed tofu before, here's what that process looks like...

Slice your tofu into 1/2" slabs or so, place on a cutting board between towels, and pile a bunch of stuff on top. Leave it for 30 minutes to 2 hours. That's a cast iron skillet and two cookbooks (including Bittman!).

The day we made the sushi, I thawed the tofu, cut it into strips and made a marinade from soy sauce, a dash of rice vinegar, garlic and ginger. We fried it on the stove to get it brown (still haven't figured out the secret to that chewy texture they get at restaurants, but it was pretty good!).

The flavor of sushi rice comes from tossing cooked rice (thank you rice cooker) with rice vinegar, sugar, and salt. It's really helpful to have another person for this because you're supposed to fan it to cool it off as you toss it.

Luckily my lovely friend Karen was over for dinner so we teamworked the rice.

Once those things were ready, we set up the assembly line.

Ready to rock and/or roll

...along with an extra (but ever-important) addition.

The king of all hot sauces

To roll, you take a sheet of nori and spread a layer of rice on it. I happen to have bamboo rolling mats but you don't actually need them, it can be done by hand. Lay your ingredients near the bottom and roll on up!

Beautiful!

I decided to try making an inside-out roll (with the rice on the outside!) by spreading the rice on, putting a layer of plastic wrap over it and flipping it over to add the fillings. It turned out all right--a little loose, so it may take some more practice to get that one down.