Today's post is the most recipe-oriented post I have ever done. This recipe sheet was part of the Menu for Hope sushi kit. I've hosted a number of sushi parties over the years, and it's a lot of fun. It can get messy, but who doesn't love audience-participation these days? Supplement the party with beauty competitions for the best looking work, best tasting or most original combination of ingredients, fastest rolling times, and you've got an active bunch of dinner guests for sure!
INGREDIENTS:
Sushi vinegar for 3 cups of rice
1/3 cups vinegar (preferably rice vinegar, but anything not sweet will do)
2 tsp salt
1 tsp sugar
3 cups of rice per 3 ~ 4 people
2 lbs total various fish per 3 ~ 4 people
Anything else that you might want to roll - cheese, vegetables, etc, etc
Seaweed sheets
Wasabi
Soy sauce
Sesame seeds (optional & not-traditional)
RICE PREP:
1. Cook rice according to package (I'm no help here, since I just use my rice cooker!).
2. Per 3 cups of rice, make sushi by heating 1/3 cup vinegar, 2 tsp sugar, 1 tsp salt until all crystals dissolve.
3. When rice is done, dump rice out onto a deep and large casserole dish/brownie pan (or anything that you can spread the rice out on - bowls will not do).
4. With a wet shamoji or spatula, spread the rice with a cutting motion so that it's not one big mound, using care not to mash the rice. The key here is to use a cutting motion with the shamoji.
5. Pour sushi vinegar all over the rice and mix with a cutting motion. While mixing, FAN vigorously. Fanning makes the rice shiny and less wet as the vinegar coats the grains. Continue motion, approximately 5 min.
6. Clump rice into one side and cover with a wet paper towel.
MAKI SUSHI ROLLING:
Maki sushi refers to the rolled sushi pieces. The standard Japanese sushi roll has the seaweed on the outside. These are the easiest ones to make! Keep a bowl of water hand to dip your hands or your shamoji.
1. Use a piece of seaweed about 8 inches by 3.5 inches.
2. Dip your shamoji or hands in water and place approximately a 1/4 cup of cooked rice.
3. Spread rice over the seaweed using your hands or the shamoji. Sprinkle sesame seeds if desired all over the rice.
4. Put goodies to be rolled inside, 1/3 of the way on the seaweed closer to you.
5. Fold the seaweed away from you slightly, cover the seaweed piece not touching the rice, and press the mat by closing your hands into a light fist around the mat to adjust the shape.
6. Open the mat and repeat process after rolling the seaweed a little bit further. The edge of the mat will always be at the rolling edge of the seaweed sheet, right next to where the rice makes contact with the rolling edge.
7. Remove the mat when you have rolled all the way.
8. Slice if needed and enjoy!
*To make an inside-out roll, wrap the sushi mat with saran wrap first and follow steps 1 - 3. Flip the seaweed sheet over on the sushi mat so that the rice is touching the saran wrap. Follow steps 4-8.
NIGIRI SUSHI:
Nigiri sushi is the poster child of sushi. With pieces of fish (or other goodies) on top and elliptical balls on rice on the bottom, these are easy to make if you remember to keep your hands moist without being wet. If your hands are too dry, the rice will stick all over your hands and if you hands are too wet, the rice will crumble as you try to shape it.
1. With moist hands, take approximately 3 tbs of rice.
2. Shape into an elliptical ball.
3. Slather on some wasabi to the bottom side of whatever you were going to place on top.
4. Place the top piece.
5. Cup your left hand to hold the bottom of the rice and use your index and middle fingers on the right hand to make the top and bottom pieces firmly fit together. Use caution here, since if you press to firmly, you'll have a mushy ball of rice.
6. If desired, give the sushi a thin seaweed belt going vertically to unite the top piece with the bottom piece.
GUNKAN SUSHI:
Gunkan, which literally translates to 'battle ship', is the method used to make sushi out of loose, crumbly, or soft pieces of ingredients that are not fit to be nigiri sushi. Traditional examples are fish roe and sea urchin, but I found goat cheese to be a very enjoyable gunkan sushi in the past. Boiled crab is also excellent as a gunkan topping.
1. Follow steps 1 and 2 of nigiri sushi.
2. Cut a piece of seaweed sheet to be 1/4 taller than your rice ball and just long enough to overlap ever so slightly when wrapped around the sushi.
3. Wrap rice with seaweed.
4. Load the empty top compartment with whatever ingredients and enjoy!
SOME FUN INGREDIENTS:
Zuke ('marinated') tuna:
Mix 1/8 cup soy sauce and 1/8 cup sake. Marinate 0.5 lbs fresh sashimi-grade tuna for 10 min. Use in rolls.
Spicy tuna:
Marinate fresh sashimi-grade tuna in any hot sauce for ~2 hrs. Use in rolls.
Spicy cream cheese:
Mash up a few hot peppers into cream cheese. Serve rolled with cucumbers or asparagus.
SOME MORE REFERENCES
Japanesefood.about.com
My fusion sushi
PS:
I was planning on having one for a long time now to supplement this entry with pictures, but alas, I have been too busy... Maybe I will update this page as I find time...
Showing posts with label Sushi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sushi. Show all posts
Monday, March 06, 2006
Thursday, October 20, 2005
Confessions of a Sushi Princess
Because I am having some trouble focusing on work today, we started talking about whether non-natives can make authentic dishes. Colleen thinks non-Australians can make Australian food just fine, and Shan says her favorite Chinese cookbook is written by an American. Jutta and I are on the other side of the camp, saying that native people who grew up with the food know the subtle flavors best to produce the just-right results.
This all started out because of my announcement that I generally don't eat at sushi places with non-Japanese chefs. It's not that I think there's some sort of genetic requirement to prepare sushi, but my experience has been that if you want good sushi and are paying top dollars for it, a small-scale Japanese restaurant is the only way I can justify the price point.
Here's why:
1. There is such a thing as the perfect rice-to-fish ratio in sushi. If you exceed one or the other, all you taste is rice or fish, not that perfect melting of the two in your mouth. Many non-Japanese places (or even Japanese places, for that matter) get the ratio all wrong by either putting a giant piece of fish on it under the name of generosity or packing too much rice to keep the cost lower.
2. There is a sequence for which sushi can be enjoyed best. I don't want the massive strength of toro or hamachi as the first piece during a sushi dinner!!! All the subtleties of the more delicately flavored snapper and halibut will be lost if my tongue is coated by the fatty ones first! Same goes for any fish with ginger and onions on top - like aji, sanma, etc. I LOVE those hikari-mono (shiny fish), but please, hold them until after the delicate ones!
3. Ditto with cooked dishes. I see nothing wrong with mingling cooked dishes from the kitchen during a sushi meal, but the timing is delicate. I don't want to start my dinner with deep-fried pork skewers when I am there to eat some sushi! Timing is key. A deep-fried pork skewer around the ~75% finished point is perfectly timed, perfectly presented to break the monotony.
4. Miso soup is not a starter! This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Why, oh why, do Japanese restaurants serve miso soup as a starter?! Miso soup and rice is supposed to be a FINALE! The final dish! The last of the last! It's supposed to be enjoyed at the end to conclude the meal and finish you off! Why the heck would I want to destroy my appetite and my taste buds with a strong bowl of soup with enough umami to exhaust my tongue at the beginning of the meal?!
I can go on and on, but now I am starting to sound less constructive and more whiny, so I'll just stop here. I guess I should clarify my point, though, and say that there are tons of Japanese sushi chefs who do not meet my sushi standards for the $80+ per person price point. To complicate the matters more, there are also Japanese sushi chefs that, unless you let them know you want it traditional, will try to accommodate the Western ways, which in their minds, is to overload you with fat, salt, and as much umami as their establishment can pack. Subtleties that build up in a slow crescendo to a powerful finish with a bang, my friends, is what makes sushi so pleasurable.
Do you think I am a snob?
PS:
At the same time, I am a deep lover of the California roll and other funky rolls on occasions. However, I rate these as a totally different experience, especially since they charge only a fraction of the cost of the real nigiri-style sushi.
PS2:
I hope Joy thinks the title of this post is OK - it's actually Paris Hilton-inspired - nothing literary here...
This all started out because of my announcement that I generally don't eat at sushi places with non-Japanese chefs. It's not that I think there's some sort of genetic requirement to prepare sushi, but my experience has been that if you want good sushi and are paying top dollars for it, a small-scale Japanese restaurant is the only way I can justify the price point.
Here's why:
1. There is such a thing as the perfect rice-to-fish ratio in sushi. If you exceed one or the other, all you taste is rice or fish, not that perfect melting of the two in your mouth. Many non-Japanese places (or even Japanese places, for that matter) get the ratio all wrong by either putting a giant piece of fish on it under the name of generosity or packing too much rice to keep the cost lower.
2. There is a sequence for which sushi can be enjoyed best. I don't want the massive strength of toro or hamachi as the first piece during a sushi dinner!!! All the subtleties of the more delicately flavored snapper and halibut will be lost if my tongue is coated by the fatty ones first! Same goes for any fish with ginger and onions on top - like aji, sanma, etc. I LOVE those hikari-mono (shiny fish), but please, hold them until after the delicate ones!
3. Ditto with cooked dishes. I see nothing wrong with mingling cooked dishes from the kitchen during a sushi meal, but the timing is delicate. I don't want to start my dinner with deep-fried pork skewers when I am there to eat some sushi! Timing is key. A deep-fried pork skewer around the ~75% finished point is perfectly timed, perfectly presented to break the monotony.
4. Miso soup is not a starter! This is one of my biggest pet peeves. Why, oh why, do Japanese restaurants serve miso soup as a starter?! Miso soup and rice is supposed to be a FINALE! The final dish! The last of the last! It's supposed to be enjoyed at the end to conclude the meal and finish you off! Why the heck would I want to destroy my appetite and my taste buds with a strong bowl of soup with enough umami to exhaust my tongue at the beginning of the meal?!
I can go on and on, but now I am starting to sound less constructive and more whiny, so I'll just stop here. I guess I should clarify my point, though, and say that there are tons of Japanese sushi chefs who do not meet my sushi standards for the $80+ per person price point. To complicate the matters more, there are also Japanese sushi chefs that, unless you let them know you want it traditional, will try to accommodate the Western ways, which in their minds, is to overload you with fat, salt, and as much umami as their establishment can pack. Subtleties that build up in a slow crescendo to a powerful finish with a bang, my friends, is what makes sushi so pleasurable.
Do you think I am a snob?
PS:
At the same time, I am a deep lover of the California roll and other funky rolls on occasions. However, I rate these as a totally different experience, especially since they charge only a fraction of the cost of the real nigiri-style sushi.
PS2:
I hope Joy thinks the title of this post is OK - it's actually Paris Hilton-inspired - nothing literary here...
Tuesday, October 18, 2005
Yet another sushi variation: temari-style
I've been meaning to take a picture of my pumpkin beer and pumpkin butter outside to conclude my pumpkin-season food posts, but with the sun going down sooner and my work schedule being a little bit on the crazy side, I just haven't had the time. I really enjoy taking pictures of food a whole lot more when I can take pretty pictures. My chances of taking pretty pictures are exponentially higher when I take them outside...
Anyway... I spent the last two days in Berkeley, attending a bioinformatics conference/workshop over at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBL). I'm amazed to say that at this conference, the people there - both participants and organizers - talk a whole lot about food. We've had discussions on a wide range of topics, starting from the origins of corn oil to the pricing structure of milk in CA. Interesting group of people - seems like these bioinformatics-type people are a whole lot more interesting than cancer biologists! Since this workshop has a hands-on component, I've had my laptop handy for the past two days...and what better things are there to do than to look at all the backlogged photos during breaks?!
Here's what I found, lurking in my folder!
This is a temari-style unagi sushi from Yuzu in San Mateo. Temari-style, like the futomaki, is a non-nigiri style sushi found in Japan. Temari, which directly translates as hand-ball, is a little children's ball that girls and little boys played with back in the old days. I have never seen a temari myself, but the image I have is one that is made out of cloth - which makes me wonder how bouncy this temari could possibly be.
Temari-style sushi mimics the temari-look with its curved, round structure. They tend to be smaller in size, averaging around bite-size, than regular nigiri. Interestingly, anytime I have ever had temari-style sushi was in restaurants that didn't specialize in sushi. They tend to be served at fine-dining establishments, known as ryotei, or at smaller, quiet Japanese bistros, known as koryouri-ya, where the focus is on an assortment of delicately cooked plates. These temari-style sushi is frequently made with fish that's either been marinated or grilled, highlighting the culinary skills and creativity of the chef over the freshness of the ingredients.
The round circles you see on the unagi are small pieces of rice crackers. They were a very welcome addition of crunchy texture to the unagi-rice softness. I tend to not be a big fan of unagi because it tends to be too mushy and oily, but I remember really, really liking the crunch. And these look so cute too!
Anyway... I spent the last two days in Berkeley, attending a bioinformatics conference/workshop over at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBL). I'm amazed to say that at this conference, the people there - both participants and organizers - talk a whole lot about food. We've had discussions on a wide range of topics, starting from the origins of corn oil to the pricing structure of milk in CA. Interesting group of people - seems like these bioinformatics-type people are a whole lot more interesting than cancer biologists! Since this workshop has a hands-on component, I've had my laptop handy for the past two days...and what better things are there to do than to look at all the backlogged photos during breaks?!
Here's what I found, lurking in my folder!
This is a temari-style unagi sushi from Yuzu in San Mateo. Temari-style, like the futomaki, is a non-nigiri style sushi found in Japan. Temari, which directly translates as hand-ball, is a little children's ball that girls and little boys played with back in the old days. I have never seen a temari myself, but the image I have is one that is made out of cloth - which makes me wonder how bouncy this temari could possibly be.
Temari-style sushi mimics the temari-look with its curved, round structure. They tend to be smaller in size, averaging around bite-size, than regular nigiri. Interestingly, anytime I have ever had temari-style sushi was in restaurants that didn't specialize in sushi. They tend to be served at fine-dining establishments, known as ryotei, or at smaller, quiet Japanese bistros, known as koryouri-ya, where the focus is on an assortment of delicately cooked plates. These temari-style sushi is frequently made with fish that's either been marinated or grilled, highlighting the culinary skills and creativity of the chef over the freshness of the ingredients.
The round circles you see on the unagi are small pieces of rice crackers. They were a very welcome addition of crunchy texture to the unagi-rice softness. I tend to not be a big fan of unagi because it tends to be too mushy and oily, but I remember really, really liking the crunch. And these look so cute too!
Thursday, October 13, 2005
Sushi instead of pumpkin today...
Wow, it's been a busy few days - so busy I've had no time to look at any pictures I've taken or take any new pictures! I've been meaning to take pictures of my other pumpkin favorites - a pumpkin beer from a local brewery in Hayward, CA and Trader Joe's pumpkin butter (sort of like apple butter, but pumpkin), but I haven't been able to get home before the sun is down. As you can tell from the sub-par indoor pictures, the lighting inside my house is less than optimum to do the beer or the butter any justice! Since I've got no good pumpkin pictures left (although I still have THREE pumpkin entries left), we're taking a break from Pumpkin Season posts today...
Instead, I'm sharing something my friend, Ted, made for the party last Saturday. Ted and his sweetheart, Shuko-san, brought these wonderful home-made sushi rolls and we gobbled them up!
You see, it is somewhat of a misconception that we Japanese don't eat rolls. We do! We just don't have the wacky fried rolls or ones with avocado and/or cheese! We also don't use that orange tobiko roe to coat the outside of rolls - rolls in Japan are black with the seaweed on the outside. Rolls in Japan are somber and serious, not full of party like the rolls here...
What you see here is 'futomaki', one of Japan's most common rolled sushi. It literally translates to 'Fat Roll' and is often stuffed with all cooked items. Egg and kanpyou (re-hydrated dried gourds seasoned with sweet soysauce) are the usual suspects. Sometimes, spinach or other greens find itself wrapped into these big, giant rolls.
The dilemma as a consumer is always figuring out how to eat these monster sushi rolls. One bite? Woa! That'll be a big bite! Two bites? But then all the innards fall out! I usually pre-cut my roll on my plate and make them into bit-size mini rolls myself, but then the whole point of having the Fat Roll is lost...
Ted's rolls were BIIIIIIIIIIG too. His sushi rice was nicely seasoned and the egg inside, moist with a complex balance of sweet and savory. The nori actually does more than just hold the roll together, as they contribute a delicate aroma of the ocean. Yum!
With that hunger-inducing memory, it's time for dinner!
Instead, I'm sharing something my friend, Ted, made for the party last Saturday. Ted and his sweetheart, Shuko-san, brought these wonderful home-made sushi rolls and we gobbled them up!
You see, it is somewhat of a misconception that we Japanese don't eat rolls. We do! We just don't have the wacky fried rolls or ones with avocado and/or cheese! We also don't use that orange tobiko roe to coat the outside of rolls - rolls in Japan are black with the seaweed on the outside. Rolls in Japan are somber and serious, not full of party like the rolls here...
What you see here is 'futomaki', one of Japan's most common rolled sushi. It literally translates to 'Fat Roll' and is often stuffed with all cooked items. Egg and kanpyou (re-hydrated dried gourds seasoned with sweet soysauce) are the usual suspects. Sometimes, spinach or other greens find itself wrapped into these big, giant rolls.
The dilemma as a consumer is always figuring out how to eat these monster sushi rolls. One bite? Woa! That'll be a big bite! Two bites? But then all the innards fall out! I usually pre-cut my roll on my plate and make them into bit-size mini rolls myself, but then the whole point of having the Fat Roll is lost...
Ted's rolls were BIIIIIIIIIIG too. His sushi rice was nicely seasoned and the egg inside, moist with a complex balance of sweet and savory. The nori actually does more than just hold the roll together, as they contribute a delicate aroma of the ocean. Yum!
With that hunger-inducing memory, it's time for dinner!
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