The secret is in the sauce

Last April my mom came out to Berkeley to visit us. One day after a trip into the city we decided to go out to eat. There was this sushi restaurant that I’d had an eye on for awhile. It always had a line outside and I had heard fairly good things about it. The best being that it is a vegan sushi restaurant. I loved it. Oh my did this restaurant start a love affair with vegetarian sushi. Although everyone just thinks about the sliced raw fish (sashimi), sushi is actually more about the seasoned rice that could be topped with vegetables, seaweed, raw fish, or fish eggs. We went back to the restaurant about two months later with our downstairs neighbors as they were moving out. In California, we are blessed with the great store, Trader Joe’s. (and as soon as we left Michigan, we heard that a TJ moved into Royal Oak or Farmington?). TJ’s has wonderful prepared sushi and one day during the summer I decided to pick some up. What a great experience again… a delicate roll of seaweed, rice, and vegetables, topped with some sweet pickled ginger and the smallest dollop of wasabi. Yum-Yum. And since then there have been 3 other occasions that I’ve succumbed to the urge to eat another serving: mid-fall on the way from school to a meeting at church, Christmas, and this past weekend when we were on the way to Yosemite. Since moving apartments, we found a great Japanese restaurant about a mile away that has great sushi without the line of the other restaurant. Yeah for us! A friend from church took us there while our apartment was still in boxes. This prompted the request for sushi making tools for Christmas and birthday presents from Grant’s parents. All of the gifts have come in the last week (except the sushi cookbook). We have an electric rice maker. We have dishes to put the sushi on and dishes to hold the dipping sauce. We have the bamboo mat to roll the sushi and now, after biking to the Asian market about a mile away, we have the secret ingredient that makes it all worth it, rice seasoning. (a mixture of rice vinegar, salt, pepper, sugar, and other seasonings) And tonight, we made maki-zushi. Oh so good. Oh such a long time to prepare! What a process! On the outside of a maki-zushi roll is Nori (roasted seaweed) which is the weirdest thing. It’s like seaweed leaves, dried, and pressed into 7x8” squares sold in a bag by the hundred. You use it dry but as soon as the rice touches it, it has enough moisture to be able to roll up. The next layer is rice (kome). You have to buy rice that is specifically made for sushi. It is a white, short grain variety that soaks up the rice vinegar well. First you have to wash the rice, rubbing it between your fingers and rinsing until the water is clean. Second you let the rice soak in the water until it turns a milky color. Third, you actually cook it in the rice cooker. Fourth, you let it sit and steam for 15 minutes. Fifth, and most exciting, you dump the rice into a non-metal baking dish, and start folding in the rice seasoning mix while someone else fans the rice so that the temperature will quickly drop to room temperature. (refrigeration, so the book says, is the worse thing you can do to rice, so it must be fanned). For the “stuffing” we used cucumbers, green onion, tomatoes, mushrooms, cabbage, avocados, and daikon sprouts (a different mix of vegetables for each roll). We made enough rice for 6 rolls and ate two of the tonight (each roll is about 7” long and is usually cut into 6 or 8 pieces, depending on thickness of the roll). The other 4 will be saved for lunch tomorrow as we go wine tasting with Grant’s parents. I’m in heaven. Sushi took a long time to make tonight, but it was great to see and eat my new creation!