Sushi!

A couple of weekends ago, I had some friends over to make sushi.  I had never made sushi before.  Believe it or not I only started eating it about a year go.  Here's the scene:

The first step in making sushi is to make sushi rice. According to my bag of rice, sushi actually means "vinegar rice."  I bought a special bag of sushi rice at the regular grocery store.  It is different from other types of rice because it has shorter grains and becomes sticky when it cooks.  I found a recipe for sushi rice online here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/sushi-rice-recipe/index.html.  It's really simple.  First I made rice (hopefully you know how to do that).  Then, I mixed in a combination of rice vinegar, sugar, and salt that I had heated up in the microwave. 

The most torturous part of sushi making is letting the rice cool to room temperature before continuing.  After it cooled, we patted the rice down on sheets of seaweed.  My normal grocery store doesn't sell seaweed, though I'm sure more upscale groceries stores do.  I bought mine at WholeFoods. Here are a few tricks that will make your lives much easier when making sushi:

1. Keep a small bowl of water handy to dip your fingers in when working with the rice.  It is really sticky.
2. Leave a strip of seaweed exposed on one end of the sushi so that you can seal the roll.

The next step is to lay on the fillers.  This roll has cucumber, avocado, and crab.

This roll has cucumber, avocado, and salmon.  We cooked our salmon before using it.  It is possible to buy high quality fish that does not have to be cooked for making sushi.  Be sure it is sushi grade fish. This fish goes through a different process to ensure that it is safe to eat raw.

After all of the ingredients are laid out on the seaweed, roll it up.  There are special bamboo mats made just for this purpose.  We used a towel and plastic wrap instead.  There are lots of Youtube videos out there on how to do this. 

And voila!  Here is the avocado cucumber crab roll:

And the avocado cucumber salmon roll:

 

Making sushi at home really is not difficult, but actually quite fun.  In the long run it would be far cheaper than buying take-out.  There is a little up-front investment though, since the ingredients aren't household staples (in my house at least).