Well, as I mentioned in the Tuesday Briefs this week, on Twitter several times, and on this week’s podcast – last night was sushi night at Casa de Blundell! Woot! Woot!
Now I’ve never been a huge sushi eater. I’ve had it a few times and liked it, but it always seems a bit overpriced to eat on a regular basis. So naturally, getting to eat it several times during our cruise – for free was amazing!
Then a short time after that, Pioneer Woman decided to post instructions on how to make sushi at home. Boy did I get a craving for sushi then.
So with Laurie being out of town (she has no desire to even try sushi), I decided to step up to the challenge and try making some sushi for myself.
So after work and a stop by Central Market, picked up a nice 1/2 pound fillet of farm raised Atlantic salmon ($5 from Central Market – I ended up only using 1/2 of it – plan to grill the other half later) and I was on my way to sushi goodness.
Of course what fun is cooking without a good beer or wine to refresh your pallet? So this evening’s sushi is brought to you by the fine folks at Real Ale Brewing Company in Blanco, Texas.
Now everyone will tell you that the secret to good sushi is in the rice — and as Pioneer Woman instructed, you can’t just throw rice in a pot and expect good sushi rice. You must first rinse the rice a number of times until you wash of most of the outer starches. The water should run almost clear through the rice.
Then I used a special rice cooker (I purchased from Bed Bath and Beyond for $20 or you can order from Amazon
While the rice was cooking I mixed up the Su mix for the rice.
Here’s PW’s recipe. I followed it except I went with Splenda instead of regular sugar.
Sushi Su
4 parts rice wine vinegar
2 parts sugar
1 part sake or mirin wine
You’ll need 1 part sushi su for every 4 parts rice.
So using the above proportions, here’s what I used for a cup of rice:
1 cup short grain/sushi rice
1/4 cup rice wine vinegar
1/8 cup sugar
1/16 cup sake or mirin (a Japanese rice wine)
Once they were all mixed I heated the liquids up on the stove while the rice finished cooking.
Once the rice and su were finished I poured the su over the rice and folded the mixture together. Then I let the rice sit for 10 minutes before continuing on.
While the rice was resting/cooling I cut up my cucumbers for the sushi rolls and made a spicy HOT sauce for the rolls as well.
I probably need some more practice on cutting my vegetables Julian style, but this worked for what I needed.
PW suggests using mayo and red chili paste for a spicy tuna roll. I opted to make my own sauce with low fat ranch dressing and chili garlic sauce. I mixed the two basically 1 to 1 and it was plenty spicy for me. If I ever convince Laurie to try it, I’ll probably need to use a 2 to 1 or 3 to 1 mixture instead.
Now that my sauce and cucumbers were ready – its time to get messy.
I should probably note here that I was pretty disappointed with Central Market in that they were out of seaweed (nori). However I did find some soy based wraps instead and opted for them instead of nothing. A package was roughly $4 and came with a variety of flavored wraps. I went the sesame seed wraps for my first attempt.
So with my bamboo roll wrapped in cellophane (PW’s suggestion – which didn’t work too well for me) and my sesame seed soy wrap it was time to start making some sushi.
I covered the wrap with rice (roughly 1/4″ thick and then laid out my cucumbers, HOT sauce and fresh Atlantic salmon.
You may notice in the picture that the wrap is going against the “grain” of the bamboo roll. Not a good idea, especially when you’re working with thin, easily tearing soy paper.
But I managed to get things turned correctly and rolled up my first sushi roll.
As you can see, the cellophane didn’t exactly stick to the bamboo roller and when I was done I had a nice sushi roll wrapped in cellophane. But who cares? I had sushi!
I did two rolls and then did a couple pieces of salmon on rice, topped with the HOT sauce. As you can probably tell by the photos, the soy wraps weren’t completely around some of the pieces. I’m not sure if it’s because of the soy wraps themselves that they had a tendency to tear easily and such, or if I tried to stuff them to full, or maybe the rice was a too moist.
Either way, it all tasted awesome and I’ll be looking forward to my next go around.
And if you’re getting that sushi hankering now, be sure and check out Pioneer Woman’s site for some more great sushi ideas and instructions and all sorts of other great recipes from her ranch.
