This is the second part of our SMBC quest to make something from every continent. You can check out the first installment here!
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You're waiting for a train. A train that will take you far away.
It was a few weeks ago during
SMBC when M&M planted a simple idea into our heads:
"
Make sushi."
An idea. Resilient, highly contagious. The smallest seed of an idea grew and drove us mad...
...well mad enough such that PC and M&M found themselves sprinting to Tesco at 4:45pm for one piece of raw salmon, whilst I found myself buying half a kilo of
flying fish roe. Not an everyday occurrence.
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| Fish roe within a sushi within a Trinity gyp room? Three layers... that's too unstable! |
Three hours later and the result? 83 pieces of awesome sushi (not including everything we ate along the way). But not only your regular maki-zushi...
But also prawn and tobiko ship sushi, inari-zushi...
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| You mustn't be afraid to dream a little bigger, darling. |
Plus some nigiri-zushi, 5 bowls of miso soup, green tea and a few butter-soy and miso yaki-onigiri for good measure:
But hold on, this kind of food can't be possible in a Trinity gyp room...
Paradox.
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Sushi Madness
Sushi is actually pretty easy to make. I hope this blog post is proof of that! Really top notch sushi however requires skill though... and really fresh ingredients. If you ever get the chance, go eat
chirashi sushi at
Tsukiji Fish Markets in Tokyo. Mind-blowingly amazing stuff.
Before anything else, I highly suggest reading my favourite Japanese website
Just Hungry where I got a lot of my information from, and my favourite Youtube channel
Cooking with Dog (where I got the inari-zushi from).
Ok, so to make this:
we need to start with this:
It looks like a lot of specialist ingredients that you wouldn't normally have in the kitchen but for the basic sushi, you only need a few of these:
Seaweed (nori) - Thin crisp sheets of green goodness. It tends to go soft and discoloured if you store it for too long though.
Japanese rice - Not the same as regular supermarket rice, this is a specific variety which tends to be a little sticky. Good for all sorts of Japanese dishes, not just sushi.
Rice vinegar - Combined with sugar and salt, you mix it into the rice to make it actual sushi rice. They also commonly sell pre-mixed sushi vinegar (which is what we bought)
Soy sauce and wasabi - self-explanatory?
Bamboo mat - For rolling the sushi up. Basically a bunch of sticks tied together with string.
The Rice...
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| Sometimes you just have to work with what you're given... |
Given that rice is the main ingredient, good sushi starts with good rice. For full detail, see
this thorough description, but a couple of important points:
- Make sure you wash the rice properly several times before use... you don't want gluey mush at the bottom of the rice-cooker/pot
- After it has cooked and absorbed all the water and rested, put it out onto a large (I mean large) plate - the rice needs to be fanned whilst the sushi vinegar is added and the rice is mixed in a cutting motion. We used 3 plates and a makeshift fan...
- Once done, cover the rice with plastic wrap so that it doesn't dry out
We ended up using a whole kilo of rice. Hard to say how much water we needed or how much vinegar. Follow the instructions on the packet of rice (if they exist), and as for the vinegar, keep tasting the rice until it tastes nice!
The Fillings...
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| Left: Prawn, mayo and tobiko ; Right: Tuna, mayo, spring onion and shichimi spice |
In addition to the regular stuff like strips of cucumber, avocado, carrot, and salmon, we also made a couple of fillings for the ship-style sushi.
Option 1: Mix together flying fish roe (tobiko), Japanese mayonnaise and chopped up bits of cooked prawns.
Option 2: Combine canned tuna with mayo, salt and pepper, Japanese
"shichimi" mix and chopped spring onion.
Rock 'n Roll...
The picture below is nowhere near a perfect example, but it roughly goes like this:
- Place seaweed on mat, shiny side down
- Lay out a reasonably thin layer of rice over the seaweed, leaving a strip of bare seaweed at the top
- Place ingredients in a row closer to the bottom
- Roll away from you towards the top
- Cut the roll into bite sized pieces
The Other Stuff...
Firstly the
miso soup (I've written briefly about this before
here):
- Soak kelp aka kombu and bonito shavings in water for ~30 mins
- Bring to the boil, remove kelp, and strain away the bonito shavings through a sieve, squeezing out the liquid
- Place miso in a ladle, add a bit of hot broth to ladle and mix around until miso breaks up evenly, then add it back to the pot. This just helps to avoid the miso clumping and not mixing properly. Don't boil the miso!
- Add cubes of silken tofu and top with spring onion!
Next the
inari-zushi (See
this video! Ok, so the filling we had wasn't the right thing, but oh well):
- Halve fried tofu skin pouches, then sit in boiling water for 5 mins. Gets rid of the oilyness...
- Squeeze out excess liquid, then boil in a dashi (kombu and bonito) stock with sugar, mirin and soy sauce until the tofu absorbs the stock.
Now they are ready to stuff with rice and whatever else you like!
Onigiri are perfect if you have leftover rice! Basically you just shape the rice into triangles... and for yaki-onigiri, you can fry them with butter and soy, or coat the sides with miso and fry. Yum!
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Gosh, that was a long post. Anyway, we had a fantastic sushi feast whilst watching Wall-E! After getting beaten into submission by sushi, M&M swore he couldn't even look at sushi for at least a week... two days later, and who brings in takeaway sushi for dinner?
Haha, big thanks to M&M anyway for making that awesome video!
