Next weekend, we want to try and make sushi at home for the first time! Does anyone have any tips and tricks? We have eaten lots of sushi (lol) but neither of us has ever tried any kind of Japanese-style cooking.
We bought a kit that I think comes with everything we need - a rolling mat, nori, rice, vinegar - and we also have lots of soy sauce, wasabi etc.
I think the only thing we still need is the filling. Our local open-air market has a very good fishmonger on Thursdays so we have access to very good quality fresh fish, and we like all types of veggies. Are certain ingredients easier to process than other ingredients? I’m thinking fewer ingredients is probably easier, so I was thinking of salmon of cucumber maki as a first try.
Sticky rice is sticky! Wet hands make nori sticky so keep them dry & only wet the edge of the sheet to finish the roll.
Don’t be tempted to over stuff! Less is more
Watch videos so you can see good, tight rolling technique. @roler might have some advice?
while wasabi does help to keep the germs away, do NOT leave your fish out or allow it to get warm/hot. A friend of mine has given himself food poisoning more times than I can count by not being good about food safety.
Eww, but also that might have been the rice. It very quickly develops a highly toxic spore when it cools. It’s one of the first items you learn about in food safety class, rice is actually responsible for a very high percentage of food borne illness.
I have immune issues so I’m pretty careful with food, both with rice and fish. I’ve never had food poisoning from sushi thankfully, but we only get it from good quality restaurants.
Just be aware that in Europe there is legislation about raw fish in sushi, I believe it all has to have been frozen to kill any parasites. Obviously if you’re making your own, then the fish will be fresh. So just be careful!
I sort of knew about that for raw herring, our national food that people used to get sick of before freezers existed, but I hadn’t considered that regarding other fish. I just googled it and it seems that all fish intended for raw consumption must be frozen first. So if something is labelled as “sushi quality” or “for raw consumption” it’s supposed to have been frozen first. I will definitely double-check if it’s been frozen before buying!
You could just freeze it yourself. The texture might suffer a little, because you don’t have a super fast blast freezer, but I don’t think it would make a huge amount of difference
Or you could go totally rogue and have our favourite sushi filling which is cooked chicken and bacon with cream cheese. Probably makes all Japanese people weep, but it’s delicious!
When we know how to make the basics we will certainly try to make some more complicated rolls! I really like fried chicken or prawn and avocado in sushi.
I was done with work a bit early today so we figured, why not make it today?
We made cucumber, cucumber-salmon and salmon-cream cheese. I don’t know why we never tried this before because it’s definitely pretty easy! We overstuffed some rolls and we need to perfect our technique but the taste was great!
We also fried more stuff in tempura batter that didn’t even make it out of the kitchen. Everything is good when it’s fried in a crust! All kinds of cheese were especially good.
