The Art of Sushi - Finally Giving It a Try
16 September 2008
Last weekend we had yet another fantastic meal at our favourite sushi restaurant, Sushizanmai near Tsukiji fish market. The place is known to be one of the best of its kind in Tokyo, not so much for refinement, but rather for the superb quality and freshness of the fish. There is usually a long queue on weekends (they don’t take reservations) - but it is well worth waiting, and it is particularly recommendable to insist on being seated on the ground floor, so you can quickly respond to the specials of the day, which the chefs frantically announce. Besides the mere quality (the generous chunks of fish literally melt in your mouth like butter), I always enjoy the bustling atmosphere at the place, which, by the way, opens 24 hours a day, 365 days a year (I’ve been there at 7am, too, and even though there was no queue, it was reasonably full).
Anyways, inspired by our visit last Sunday, I decided I should finally give it a try and make sushi myself. Having lived in Tokyo for more than half a year now, you might say, it’s about time - but it is actually not that easy to get involved in the art of sushi here. As a matter of fact, it is not very usual at all to prepare sushi at home – the job is rather left to professional sushi chefs, who have gone through several years of thorough training. Sushi making is considered an art you have to learn from scratch, starting from proper rice-cooking and fish-slicing.
With delicious (and, compared to Europe, very reasonably priced) sushi waiting at every corner, there is really no need to prepare sushi at home. Yet I’ve been wanting to try it myself ever since I moved to Japan. Not that I would ever dare to think that I could do it anywhere close to as well as a "real" sushi chef, nor do I intend to compete with them. Also, I have not too much interest in really learning how to cut the entire fish; I’d rather leave this part to someone who knows what he’s doing and buy the neatly arranged pieces. A professional chef would probably break out in panic if I told him, but I’d actually just like to experiment with different condiments and flavours you could add to the rice and to the toppings.
All I could find on the internet so far were courses for professional chefs, and when I asked my Japanese friends about leisure-time sushi classes they would burst out laughing… so I decided to stop wasting more time looking for an appropriate workshop, and just to start my own trial-and-error process instead, having consulted a number of cook books and the internet for a few basic instructions.
Making Sushi
Preparing Sushi Rice
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Sesame-Aubergine-Caviar Sushi
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Variation of Clingfilm Sushi
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more sushi recipes to come… |
Equipped with my rice cooker (which has become my favourite kitchen tool – I really would not want to do without it anymore!) and a newly bought flat, wooden tray used to mix the rice with the sushi vinegar while it cools down, rice cooking went quite smoothly. This time I also added some black sesame seeds to the vinegar mixture as my special feature, giving the rice a nice nutty taste.
This time I had no time to go and buy fresh fish, but I had several vegetables in the fridge, so my first ever sushi became to be battleship sushi (i.e., the ones with the strip of seaweed wrapped around to keep the topping in) with sesame-aubergine-caviar (which, despite the name, has nothing to do with caviar as in fish roe, but merely refers to the puree taken out of oven-baked aubergines). So quite an unusual combination to begin with, and my amateurish tinkering would probably have given any sushi chef a heart attack. But the result was undeniably tasty.
Even though making sushi at home is not all that common, I wanted to give it a shot myself – not because I am trying to compete with any trained sushi chef, but rather because I have for some time been imagining some slightly different toppings which I was eager to try out. Lacking some of the essential skills of sushi making, I made use of a little trick to shape the rice: clingfilm. This is supposed to be a method often used by the few amateur chefs who actually do attempt home-made sushi, and I have to say it really worked surprisingly well. Other than "proper" nigiri sushi, which is shaped into little ovals by hand, clingfilm sushi doesn’t require any particular skill or aptitude to get the little pieces into regular shape. Just wrap some rice in clingfilm, squeeze it tightly, and there you have a pretty little rice ball which sticks together perfectly and doesn’t tend to fall apart.