Proper sushi uses Mirin (sweetened rice wine) and or sake as well a bit of sugar sometimes to taste. If you just use rice wine vinegar, you’ll get that sharp astringent taste that is not what good sushi should taste like.
Edit: Mirin/sake is used in addition to rice wine vinegar.
As for sauce, the only thing really needed is shoyu (soy sauce). Oh, and BTW, mixing the wasabi into the shoyu is a no-no, though you can do whatever want at home!
Another thought. If you’re not up to maki sushi (sushi rolls), you could make chirashi or donburi, Both are bowls of sushi or plain rice topped with whatever ingredients you like. You can put your nori (be sure to tear it up) below or on top of the other ingredients. Just make sure the rice is cool if you’re putting anything raw on it or else it will cook whatever you put on it.
In Hawaii, poke (traditionally raw tuna cubes mixed with shoyu and limu (seaweed) bowls are popular and cheap. I never order it unless I’m going to eat it immediately and where I can separate the topping from the usually with steaming hot rice. If I don’t, the bottom of the poke becomes half cooked.
We do it fairly often, the kids enjoy it.
You can knock-up a seasoning with exact Japanese ingredients or at a pinch, use a combination of water, sherry, wine vinegar, sugar, salt etc. Won’t be perfect but certainly good enough.
We use a rice cooker for the the sushi rice, rinse it well, cook it, then stir in some seasoning as your stir it and cool it and that’s really it.
For fillings we often slice up cucumber, carrot, spring onion, smoked mackerel, cooked salmon and let the kids loose to roll 'em up.
The most important thing for me is to have wet hands while spreading the rice out, I find it impossible unless I do that. Other than that, filling and rolling it is trial and error, the basic technique is pretty forgiving. They may be thicker/thinner/looser/tighter but it’ll normally hold together well enough and any that don’t work are merely to be scoffed as you practice further.
Certainly there is a bit of work to do to prep it all but it is an aesthetic and sensory pleasure when you are actually assembling, rolling and cutting.
I used to order fish from a place in La Jolla that would have it flown in daily from the Tokyo fishmarket. They’d overnight it out to your location. The stuff was great, huge variety including other sushi ingredients difficult to get around here. They seem to have disappeared maybe 10 years ago now, possibly taken over by another seafood company that has a much smaller selection of sushi items.
And to go over the frozen fish issue again, it is only a federal guideline, it’s not something that is enforceable at the federal level. Individual state regulations can be more restrictive since that’s where the enforcement comes from. Sushi grade fish is easy to find sufficiently frozen. Most of the sushi grade tuna available has been frozen, including top quality cuts that have been frozen at -40 or so, costs a fortune, and need a careful thawing procedure. Otherwise a lot of the best fish would be wasted.
I suggest you try making hand rolls. Maki can be great fun, and I don’t want to discourage your making those too, but you can make hand rolls without the mat. So if you want to take a stab at it with out shelling out extra money, that might be a way to go.
Other advantages of hand rolls:
(1) You don’t have to cut them. We’ve found that cutting can be quite messy and a sketchy maki roll will break when cut.
(2) you can put all the ingredients on the table and make hand rolls then immediately eat them. This also has the advantage of keeping the seaweed nice and crispy, which is how it should be enjoyed.
We used to go the maki route, but now exclusively make hand rolls at home.
If you try hand rolls, I suggest you take half a sheet of nori and roll it into a cone shape with NOTHING on it first. Get a feel for the geometry involved before putting the sticky sticky rice and slimy ingredients into the picture.
I love making sushi at home. The first thing is learning to make good sushi rice. Working with the rice is the next thing to master. Cutting fish is, I think, the toughest skill to get down. My most recent sushi has been Spam musubi. Mmmmmmmmmm
+1
I forgot that much of the best tuna in Japan is frozen because it’s from outside Japanese waters because of over fishing. There’s special techniques to thawing out the fish, one is wrapping it in konbu to retain the moisture and provide additional flavor.
My attempts at making sushi have been mediocre at best, but it’s often said that good sushi begins with the rice. It may not be noticeable to casual rice eaters, but there is a difference in texture, starchiness and sweetness in common calrose rice and premium brands like Nishiki and Tamaki. For your first trials, you might try buying some microwavable Nishiki rice https://www.amazon.com/Nishiki-Steamed-White-Rice-7-4-Ounce/dp/B004BJS1PM/ref=sxts_sxwds-bia?keywords=nishiki&pd_rd_i=B004BJS1PM&pd_rd_r=5d8c716b-f802-4155-8c46-3212c3bfdb3d&pd_rd_w=KulQJ&pd_rd_wg=P4S4S&pf_rd_p=b0a90583-d22c-4c32-806b-f09cd6946e61&pf_rd_r=DV88CQDF1MCK967SSKY0&qid=1559927060&s=gateway&th=1 which they label as “Excellent for sushi rice”. I keep a few on hand for when I don’t want to cook a whole pot (in my rice cooker) and it’s sometimes better than the one I make. Rice taste and texture changes depending on how quickly you eat it after the cooking ends.
Not a sushi expert, but properly prepared sushi rice isn’t “sticky sticky”. Each grain of rice is supposed to be separate with a sheen which means each grain was properly coated with the liquid mixture. It’s almost dry, barely sticking together. Good sushi rice should almost fall apart and melt in your mouth.
Watch a sushi chef and you’ll see the rice barely sticks to his/her hands.
Edit: I suspect that most premade sushi rice is overly wet and sticky because it keeps longer than premium sushi rice, which quickly dries out and turns hard.
And it’s only a guideline for fish served raw. As already pointed out, grocery stores in the US do sell “never frozen” fish, even advertising that fact.
In Japan, chirashi (bowl) and temaki (hand rolls) are the standard choices for home-made sushi. Maki takes more practice but is doable. Nigiri is only for professional chefs.
If you are not sure about the safety of raw fish, there are many other sushi ingredients available. Cooked shrimp, imitation crab, eggs, cucumber, avocados, smoked salmon, etc.
There’s nothing wrong with bottled sushi vinegar, and most Asian markets in the US should have it.
If you don’t have a rice cooker, cooking rice properly would be the most difficult part.
I’m pretty goddamned certain that the fish I have personally caught, killed, cleaned, gutted, and cooked was fresh. You know that we DO have bodies of water and living fish here in the desolate wasteland known as “flyover country”, correct?
Aside from that - even far inland it is possible to get never-frozen fish. You do have to pay a steep premium for that, as the only way to achieve that is to fly the fish inland on an airplane which increases the cost.
Further - as someone who HAS eaten fish as fresh as physically possible, that is at waterside after catching it with my own hands - I find the notion of deep-freezing fish to be preferable to picking up parasitic worms or other “fun” things from my food. But then, I’m not foodie with peculiar notions about the availability of fish.
I went to the international grocery store recently and they have an entire isle of nothing but rice. At least one bag said ‘sushi rice’ on it. So I may pick some of that up. Normally I eat basmati or jasmine rice.
I do have a rice cooker, and generally prefer to use that to make rice though. Its easy and convenient.
As others have mentioned this is a ridiculous statement. I’ve pulled fish out of the water and eaten them that evening. I’ve watched a shrimp boat pull into a dock and a crew member carry a cooler off of it and see it dumped into the steamer and being served a plate of it soon after. I’ve been to places where “catch of the day” isn’t just marketing or a way to use up something old… they literally bring you fish that was caught that day.
If you want to debate that this was not from a “grocery” I’ll point out that Broomstick’s location is NW Indiana and there are three shrimp farms in that corner of our state. I can get shrimp from there at a local store. And, yes it is labeled “Fresh, Never Frozen.”
I live in East Central Missouri and there’s a shrimp farm within a 2 hour drive.
Sorry, I forgot about the latest one 35 minutes away in St. Charles County.
Here is something from my local butcher shop.
So, maybe Kroger has everything previously frozen but I’ve never lived in or even been to Japan but as you can see I can get fresh within a five minute drive in the middle of Indiana.
Another tip.
You can only properly season the rice while it’s hot and while you can taste test it before it’s completely cool, the flavor will be much more intense (since it hasn’t had time to be fully absorbed). If necessary you can add more liquid after the rice is cooled, but it will remain only the surface, giving you two levels of flavor when you bite into rice.
Hopefully this will settle the debate about “The FDA mandates (well, strongly recommends) that all fish for human consumption be frozen for 7 days to destroy parasites.”
BTW, as I mentioned above, many types of fish of seafood (e.g. shrimp and lobster) can be eaten as sushi or sashimi. YUM!
From the FDA website:
"Buy Right
Fresh Fish and Shrimp
Only buy fish that is refrigerated or displayed on a thick bed of fresh ice (preferably in a case or under some type of cover). Because the color of a fish can be affected by several factors including diet, environment, treatment with a color fixative such as carbon monoxide or other packaging processes, color alone is not an indicator of freshness. The following tips can help you when making purchasing decisions:"
"Eating Raw Seafood - What You Need To Know
It’s always best to cook seafood thoroughly to minimize the risk of foodborne illness. However, if you choose to eat raw fish anyway,** one rule of thumb is to eat fish that has been previously frozen.** - My emphasis.
Some species of fish can contain parasites, and freezing will kill any parasites that may be present.
However, be aware that freezing doesn’t kill all harmful germs. That’s why the safest route is to cook your seafood."
If you can’t get the rice seasoning, prep down (which is the hardest part of making sushi), you might consider kimbap/gimbap, which is similar to sushi, but the rice is either plan or lightly seasoned with sesame oil. It’s typically made with vegetables and scrambled egg strips and while I’ve never seen one with raw tuna, like sushi, nothing’s off limits. I’ve heard that cheese kimbap/gimbap is popular in Korea! :dubious: