Making your own sushi is nowhere near as hard as you’ve been led to believe.  A lot of people worry about how hard it is to roll sushi rolls, you may have heard weird horror stories and you may have even seen that this non-problem solved with a sushi rolling machine.

The truth is, you don’t even need one of those bamboo mats.  I made the sushi in the picture using baking paper.

The only hard thing about sushi is the rice, it’s easily the most important thing.  Selecting good quality fish to go inside, or opting to get some nice tuna to put in, is another task to be completed successfully.  Thinking about it, the only easy bit is rolling the sushi!

This is how you make sushi for dinner, a hot weather dish that can be prepared in advance and then just taken out of the fridge.

Ingredients

To cook three cups of rice (easy enough sushi for four people)

  • 3C short grain rice, supermarkets stock “sushi rice” which is this and works well
  • little more than 3C of water
  • 1/3C of rice vinegar
  • 3 tbsp of sugar
  • 1 tsp of salt
  • Nori seaweed sheets
  • Fillings.  I most often use tinned tuna or very fresh salmon, cucumber, avocado and carrot.

Method

Cook the rice according to the packet instructions and while it cooks, mix the rice vinegar, sugar and salt together into a solution in a saucepan so it can dissolve.  Once the rice is cooked, let it cool on tray(s) (biscuit trays work well) on top of baking paper.  Sprinkle the vinegar solution on the rice evenly.  Cooling the rice in the pot can make it gluggy and the vinegar may react with the metal, this is also the reason why you don’t cool the rice straight on a metal biscuit tray.

Once the rice is room temperature, take some in your fingers and gently press it onto a nori sheet that is on top of a sushi mat or sheet of baking paper, until it’s about a centimeter thick all over but for the far edge which has a 2cm gap where there is no rice.  Place the fillings across the sheet on top of the rice about 4 – 5cm from the bottom edge, then carefully picking up the close edge, roll it by the paper.  When you have rolled all but the last (riceless) couple of centimeters, dip your finger in a water bowl and wet the riceless flap and close it to complete the roll.

Cut the roll into slices by repeatedly cutting it in half.

The best way to get your head around how to roll sushi is to have a look at youtube videos.  Watch two or three and then give it a hit.  Grab some pickled vinegar, soy and wasabi and serve in small dishes with the rolls.  It’s a great dinner.

PS:

No post on this blog is properly complete without an interesting fact.  Today’s is about wasabi, which is insanely expensive in a similar vein to saffron.   Wasabi paste that you buy from the supermarket is almost always horseradish with green food colouring and spices (but still delicious).