I started using my at home sushi making kit today, and while the result was delicious, it was catastrophically unlike a professionally made sushi roll. I imagine that with time I’ll get better at it. But I don’t expect to become a sushi chef ever.
In the Land of the Rising Sun, is sushi made in the home, too? Or do the Japanese prefer to have a professional product (be it from the convenience store or a 3 Michelin star restaurant)? I note that making sushi is somewhat labor intensive and somewhat time consuming, although nothing on the order of ramen’s requirements. I also not that my sushi was filled with cucumbers and cream cheese, as I’m not yet confident in cutting fish properly.
According to my Japanese-American wife (born in Cleveland) her mother and aunts all made sushi at home. They learned it from their Japanese-born mother.
I suspect that even in Japan, homemade sushi is reserved for special occasions because it is time consuming.
I have to wonder whether you actually know anything about sushi.
It’s a little bit – but only a little – like asking whether westerners make western-style foods at home. Of course we do, but few of us can match the skill of well-trained chefs. For sushi, it’s even more extreme, because a great sushi chef is the result of a lifetime of training, including the ability to select and match the finest ingredients.
I have never been to Japan, much less served sushi at a Japanese home, but I think it’s a good bet that it would be similar to getting a home-cooked meal in an American home – probably very good, but nowhere near the first-class fare of a really accomplished sushi chef.
Absolutely true. When you order omakase (“chef’s choice” – basically, a tasting menu of sushi) it would be an insult to get a “roll”. What you would expect to get would be the most delicate fresh fish available, possibly layered on top of wasabi and delicately brushed with soy sauce, or else anointed with some appropriately rich sauce and spices. A sushi “roll” is what you might expect at a Walmart in Kansas City.
I’ve experienced temaki only at one great sushi bar. It unfortunately closed down but, happily, the head chef founded his own restaurant which is now one of the most exquisite (and expensive) in the area! They no longer offer hand rolls, but I loved them when they did. They had to be eaten immediately – warm crunchy seaweed wrap around a filling of chopped otoro tuna belly and rice.
While the chef’s new restaurant no longer makes them, they’ve introduced me to the wonders of what sashimi really means. I used to think it just meant “raw fish without the rice”, and maybe it does in some contexts. But what it means in this restaurant when you order “sashimi and sushi” omakase style is that you get a variety of great foods, hot and cold, and that may or may not even involve fish, before the nigirizushi dishes come on. I must admit it’s been years since I’ve done this, because it’s fabulously expensive, but so wonderful!
Japan has a serious apprentice culture which values tradition and consistency. It takes a long time to learn to prepare perfect sushi. Japanese enjoy sushi at home, which tastes nearly as good. Ultimately, great sushi is about fresh fish, which is taken more seriously in Japan than most places and is widely available there.
Canada has many good sushi places which offer an impressive amount of Japanese and Korean food for a reasonable price. The salmon based sushi and sashimi tend to be fresh and flavourful. But even the simple sushi served on a Japanese economy train is going to be far, far better than that, just because of availability and cultural expectations. Tokyo chain restaurants serve filling plates of fatty tuna sushi for a reasonable C$15-30 (lunch/dinner), among the most delicious things I’ve ever tried.
I like to make sushi at home. But I just make chirashi, which is easy and delicious and made with stuff easily bought at local Canadian supermarkets (which tend to sell “fresh” previously frozen salmon, perfect for this). It may not look “artistic”. But the taste buds and budget are plenty happy with the result. Many Japanese families do the same.
i second this. Fish and rice quality is “next level” in Japan.
But i guess one really should ask the Japanese SDMB for a real answer…? Anecdotally, OP: i am JA (first in family born in USA/California) but i recall my grandma (moved from Osaka) made sashimi and chirashi here at home often, with temaki on occasion.
In Korea, China, Taiwan, Vietnam, Australia, all along the Pacific Rim and plenty of other countries people make sushi at home. I’ll take a wild ass guess that they do it in Japan also.
Mom is 50% Japanese, and she has never made sushi. My assumption is that her 100% Japanese mother never made it, since that’s where Mom learned how and what to cook (Japanese curry, for example).
I’ve made sushi a few times, but only because I like it and wanted to see if I could make something approximating the good flavor of the mediocre local restaurants. The results were quite good, beating my attempts to make chicken pad Thai or Indian butter chicken. I make a mean Japanese curry meal though, and get the most compliments from it.
My guess is that ingredients are the secret sauce. The best Sushi I ever had was at some random sushi bar in SF that happened to be walking distance from the AirBnB we were staying at. The tuna melted on my tongue. It was uncooked, so “cooking” wasn’t the secret sauce. It had to be the cut of meat itself that made all the difference.
It’s not just the specific piece of protein and its quality that make the difference, though of course this is a big part of it. It’s also how it’s cut. Anyone who’s tried to make thin-sliced beef starting with a steak (say, for a stir-fry) knows that the placement and angle of the cut has to be correct if you want the meat to “chew” properly. You have to know how the grain lies in the beef, and you have to cut across it just right, or it’ll be unsatisfying in the mouth.
Same for sushi. The masters will lay their knife across the salmon or tuna or whatever just right to maximize the pleasurable texture.
I am in no way an expert on anything sushi. If anything, I might be considered a gourmand rather than gourmet, the latter being a food expert, while the former (me) just someone who enjoys stuffing his face and knows what he likes, but nothing much more than that.
But I will say a few things here, based on a combination of things I’ve read and things I’ve experienced at top-notch sushi bars. One is that salmon sushi is mainly the staple of supermarket sushi and low-end sushi restaurants. This may be in part because salmon is notorious for potentially harbouring parasites if uncooked. I have never – not ever – been served salmon sushi at any decent sushi bar. I was once presented with a pinkish sushi that looked like salmon and I missed what the chef told us it was, and when I asked if it was salmon he seemed downright insulted. Needless to say, it was not.
But on the subject of the best sushi being in Japan, of course! No one would dispute that. But there’s an interesting mitigating factor that can contribute to great sushi in North America. It’s the fact that the usual food rule of “fresh, never frozen” equates to the best quality usually doesn’t apply to the fish used to make sushi. AIUI (and I welcome any correction) sushi fish will typically be flash-frozen to a very cold temperature as standard procedure in order to kill any possible parasites.
The chefs I’ve spoken with at top-tier sushi bars get much of their fish from Japan, but the long distance isn’t an obstacle to quality because it’s all flash-frozen – the key to running a great sushi bar is having the knowledge and contacts to be able to source great fish and know exactly how to serve it. The difficulty of doing all this well is why great sushi is so freaking expensive! It’s truly a form of high art and I greatly admire it. I only wish I was rich so I could enjoy it more often.
There are a couple different misconceptions relating to sushi and the word ‘fresh’. One misconception is, as you point out, that the best sushi is always ‘fresh’, as in ‘never frozen’. Not (always) true.
The other is that the best sushi is always fresh, as in 'the fish that this sushi was made from was alive mere hours ago". This was surprising to me when I learned it, since I thought “the fresher the better” when it came to sushi fish. But several types of sushi fish (not shellfish, to which ‘fresher the better’ does always apply) are carefully aged to break down enzymes and improve the flavor and texture, similar to the way beef is aged for high-end steaks. I’m guessing this is the difference between the nigiri I get from the grocery store, which is tasty but otherwise nothing special (too fresh?), and the nigiri I get from a high-end sushi restaurant, in which the fish is buttery and sublime.
Excluded middle much? A “roll” (in scare quotes) comes from a big box store in Middle America, while standard sushi in Japan is an omakase meal?
This has become my go-to order at many sushi places, particularly if I have eaten there before and know their fish is good regardless of species. Generally a good value, and it also solves decision paralysis when presented with an a la carte sushi menu.
I’ve only been to Japan once. I met several Japanese who had travelled to Canada. They raved about the salmon. It is not native to Japan IIRC, and so is not often used in their sushi. Japanese are all about tradition. Fatty tuna is the best.
Salmon is fatty (essential for flavour) and delicious. It is good for homemade Canadian sushi precisely because it has been frozen soon after catch to minimize parasites. It is available and fairly cheap. It is the smartest and tastiest choice for everyday sushi. It isn’t what they serve at Kaji, a high end Toronto sushi place with $200 fixed dinners that serves sushi almost as delicious as a $15 lunch in Tokyo, which buy fresh tuna from the fish market in the wee hours every morning.
This thread is about homemade sushi. In Canada, salmon chirashi is a no brainer. Cheap and easy and highly delicious. But not as pretty as a high end restaurant. The Canadian AYCE Korean-Japanese places are incredible value, not really gourmand but good, though sushi is not always the tastiest thing in the menu, and salmon is the best fish they offer.
Learn to make salmon chirashi, and you can enjoy the taste of delicious sushi as often as you please.