Recipe: Making Sushi at Home

Thursday was my son’s 8th birthday. My son is a sushi fiend. If the choice is between sushi and dessert, he chooses sushi. If the choice is between sushi and a toy, he chooses sushi. Needless to say, what he asked for his birthday was a big plate of sushi. My whole family loves sushi and the 4 of us at a sushi restaurant usually means a large bill so I learned awhile ago to make it myself at home. While many people are intimidated by sushi, there is no need to be. Here are step-by-step instructions (with photos) for making nori rolls:

Step 1: the Rice.

Select short grain brown rice, long grain rice is too dry and doesn’t hold together. There is also white rice specifically sold for sushi, usually marketed as “sushi rice”. If you select white sushi rice, follow the instructions on the bag. This method only works for brown rice.

Dump the rice in a strainer and wash well under running water. Put rice into a large pot with lots of water. Use more than twice as much water as rice. Bring to a boil and boil uncovered for 35 min, or until the rice is tender but not mushy. There should always be at least an inch or two of water covering the rice. You are not trying to get the rice to absorb all the water during cooking, you are instead cooking the rice like it is pasta. When the rice is done, dump into strainer in sink. Shake to remove as much water is possible. Dump the rice back into hot pot, put the lid on, let it sit on the stove (burner off) for 5 or ten min. to absorb excess moisture.

Gently pour all of the rice out onto a big plate (or plates). You want the rice to cool to room temp before you use it. Traditionally, the rice was cooled by kitchen helpers fanning the rice with paper fans.

Once cool, add seasoned rice wine vinegar. The Manchester Market sometimes carries this and sometimes carries a plain rice wine vinegar by the same company with a green cap instead of a yellow one. If you are unsure, read the ingredients; the vinegar needs to have sugar and salt as ingredients. If you have plain rice wine vinegar add 6 Tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt to 1 cup of the vinegar and stir to dissolve (you may need to heat it a little) or you can mix the vinegar with mirin, a sweet rice wine.

Add the vinegar to the rice carefully by gently lift and turning, not stirring. Imagine that you are folding egg whites into something – it’s exactly like that. Stirring collapses all of the air pockets between the grains of rice and makes the rice sticky and heavier. I added about 1 cup for the whole cooked bag of rice but you can add more or less to taste.

Step 2: the Filling

You can use anything you want as filling in your nori rolls. My favorite is plain avocado. My husband likes fake crab (an American sushi staple) and my kids like smoked salmon. Other easy to use common nori roll fillings include carrots, cucumber, radish, green onions and asparagus, but you can be creative. Once, I had signed up to make nori rolls for a class picnic and we were out of everything I normally use, so I made borage rolls, chive rolls and mint butter rolls.

The quality of sushi is dependent on the freshness of the ingredients. When selecting smoked salmon, read the package. There are two kinds of smoked salmon, hot smoked – which results in a smoked cooked fish, and cold smoked – which results in smoked raw fish. Cold smoked salmon is the type of salmon used as lox and is the kind used in sushi. (Although, like I said before, feel free to be creative). Some cold smoked salmon is treated with preservatives and food coloring to extend it’s shelf life and still appear to be fresh. Avoid this stuff. The smoked salmon without preservatives and food coloring is fresher and makes a better ingredient for sushi.  Cut the salmon (and whatever else you are using) in long thin strips.

Step 3: the Nori

Sushi rolls are wrapped in flat sheets of roasted pounded seaweed called nori. Nori usually comes in large square sheets which you can use to make large rolls or you can fold it in half and rip it to make 2 smaller rolls. I usually make smaller rolls if each roll is only going to have 1 type of filling. If you want to use 2 or 3 fillings per roll a large roll will be easier. The Manchester Market carries packages of nori occasionally. You can buy it at the Eden store in Clinton or asian food aisles in most big grocery stores.

Step 4: Assembly

Fill a bowl or jar with water.

Lay a piece of nori on your bamboo mat. (A bamboo place mat would work if you don’t have a sushi mat – just scrub it well first.) Nori has a smooth side and a rough side, make sure the rough side is up. Rice will stick to your fingers unless they are wet, so dip your fingers in the water and grab a hand full of rice and gently press it down onto the nori sheet, covering all of it except a strip at the top.

Now lay a row of filling across the middle. dip your fingers in the water and wet the strip of exposed nori. Water makes the nori stick to itself. This strip is going to seal your roll.

Now use your fingers to gently pull up the bottom of the roll and roll it up to the top . Now, pull the bamboo mat up around the roll so the bottom of the mat goes up to the top of the mat and past it, squeezing the roll, the whole time. This sounds complicated, but its is actually easy to do, just hard to put into words. I’m sure you can google it to find a video of “how to roll a nori roll”. Once the roll is tightly sealed, move it on to a cutting board. Dip a sharp serrated knife into your water and slice your roll into pieces. And you are done! You’ve made a sushi roll. Now make 10 more, because they are delicious.

Step 5: Additions

At restaurants sushi is usually served with soy sauce, wasabi paste and pickled ginger. You can buy pickled ginger in jars. Wasabi paste comes in tubes or as powder that you can mix with water. Read labels. Only some “wasabi” actually contains wasabi. Often it is horseradish and green food coloring. If you are a fan of “spicy salmon”, you can make your own by mixing mayo and hot sauce and dabbing this onto the top of each roll.

It may take a little practice to make perfect rolls, but one of the best things about making sushi rolls at home is that you can eat all the mistakes and even when they look bad, they taste great!

Oscar enjoying birthday sushi!

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by Sara Swanson

Sara Swanson is an editor, writer and founder of the Manchester Mirror.