that’s easy for you to say
Lovely.
Here ya go…
If I recall mirin is cooking wine. Sort of a Japanese sheery.
I used to use a sauce made of soy and mirin thickend with corn starch.
Congradulations, I hope you have a great shen dig. May I suggest that you practice first. Sushi requires skill to do well,and you must get the rice,vineigar,mirin mixture just right. Not to wet not to sticky. Also you can not pack the rice to tightly or to loose when makeing rolls.
You’ve reminded me of a sushi question I’ve been meaning to ask for a while. Can sushi be made with brown rice? I’ve never seen it at a restaurant, but I can’t think of a reason why.
Brown rice is regarded as cheap food or at best, health food. Doesn’t go along well with sushi which is a luxury. Brown rice may not be sticky enough to make good sushi too.
The sauce used for unagi is, um, unagi sauce. Definitely soy sauce based, plus sugar and mirin and perhaps fish broth. Aren’t you going to buy pre-cooked unagi though? They usually come with packets of the sauce. The sauce is used during cooking as well, so I usually find that I don’t need to add additional sauce.
Mirin is a very sweet cooking wine. You can usually substitute sweet sherry, but any decent Asian market should have mirin. You shouldn’t use it raw, just because the scent of alcohol is usually not desired.
It might be easier to do a make-your-own-sushi party. Cut up seaweed into quarters (about 4" square), have bowls of vinegared rice and plates of sashimi. You just put a bit of rice and a piece of sashimi on the seaweed and roll it up. If you can find shiso (perilla or beefsteak plant, according to my dictionary), you can add that to the sushi as well. This type of sushi is called a temaki-zushi (hand-rolled sushi) and it’s a staple meal at my parents’ house. We Japanese amateurs never even attempt to make real sushi, we leave it up to professional sushi chefs with years and years of experience.
…Wasn’t there another thread on here not to long ago explaining that Sushi Rice IS BROWN rice that is polished so it appears white… BUT not as polished as to make it WHITE rice
Not quite. All brown rice is white rice with the outer shell still on. Remove that and it becomes white rice. There’s not such thing (that I know of, preparing to be proved wrong) as brown rice that appears white.
All that the other thread was talking about was the sushi chef wanting very fresh rice, so he started with brown and removed the bran himself. Ta da, fresh white sushi rice.
Well, I was planning on either hiring a local chef to come in or do a “roll your own” party. I certainly wouldn’t work THAT hard at my own home…just ask my hubby. 
And “unagi sauce”? That’s about as clear as, “soy and mirin thickened with cornstarch”. Can anyone give me a recipe?
Mirin, soy sauce and sake. Those are the fundamental ingredients. If you’ve had it before, you’ll probably remember the sweet flavor. That’s not entirely from the sauce. The unagi itself has a bit of a sweet flavor. It also comes from the mirin and the sake. Cheap ol’ sake will do, but I think it’s best with a sweet, smooth sake.
I’m guessing you know not to use regular kitchen vinegar for the rice. Sushi-su is vinegar just for rice to be used with sushi.
Here’s a site, but don’t open it if your 'puter doesn’t support Japanese fonts.
OK, I did find an industrial-quantity recipe for unagi sauce here. Here’s my crude translation:
1.8 liters (about 2 quarts) soy sauce
1.8 liters mirin
2kg (about 2 lb) sugar
Boil soy sauce on very low heat for 2 hours, removing the scum (?) frequently. In a separate pot, bring mirin to a boil, ignite the alcohol to burn it off (like flambe’). Add this and the sugar to the soy sauce and let cool.
Sometimes fish bones and heads are used to add flavor.
I looked at the site I tossed out earlier and it was for unagi chazuke, a bit different.
I have made it with sake, and with sugar. YMMV
Basic Unagi sauce is 1 part soy sauce, 1 part mirin and 1/2 part sugar. Mix them all and simmer until it thickens to your liking.
The wife plays around with the general recipe and makes some great sauces substituting sake, raw sugar, molasses, chili oils, etc. that work wonders on tuna and salmon sushi, and also with chicken, pork, veggies, just about anything.
Start with the basic sauce and adjust it to taste. Sounds like a fun party.
Mmmm…fish heads.
Thanks all! There’s a big Asian supermarket about 15 miles away and I think I’ll go browse today. Yum!
Actually, I’ve been told by numerous sushi chefs that eel heads are used in the sauce. Bon Apetit
I think I answered this a week or so ago, but there is a brown rice sushi bar in Palo Alto. I don’t recall the name, but I could find it if I were there. It is a half mile or so from the California St. station. It is mainly take-out although they do have about three tables. The owners appear to be Japanese. And it tastes pretty good too.
The trick to good unagi sauce is to make sure you don’t add too much ketchup. My sushi master always tells me (and this is a loose translation) “Ketchup is like the wind: it is to be tasted, but not seen.”
Ketchup goes with everything. It is God’s way of apologizing after the flood.
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Sue Duhnym, I just now got your name! That’s so funny. For the longest time I’ve just thought you had an interesting last name. Ha!
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I like sushi too!