How I Roll

I’ve been having fun making sushi lately! I basically taught myself how using youtube. I had no experience making sushi about a month ago, but the sushi I’ve made has been a big hit with everyone who’s tried it. Making sushi was something that seemed difficult and intimidating, but after just watching a few youtube videos it was way easier than I expected – you should try it! Here’s how I made mine …

I found sushi rice (short grain rice), sushi vinegar, and a small inexpensive sushi rolling mat at my local asian store. I followed these instructions for preparing my sushi rice (it also tells you how to make sushi vinegar from more normal ingredients).

Last week I made sushi for dinner with some friends, and wanted 5-6 rolls and a pretty wide variety – but I just made one roll at a time at first. For this set I got nori, rice paper, smoked salmon, shrimp, imitation crab, cucumber, carrot, avocado, sriracha, mayonaise, toasted sesame seeds, tempura flakes, cream cheese, soy sauce, and wasabi at my normal grocery store. But that’s for a lot of different sushi! This video was the best I found as far as instructions for making sushi – both with the nori/rice paper on the outside and inside of the roll. The fun part about sushi is there are so many options and so many combinations!

The best tip I learned was to clean and wet the knife I used to slice the sushi roll into pieces in between cuts – this helped the slices stay really neat. Also – wet your hands before you try to handle the rice – it keeps the rice from sticking to your hands nearly as much.

The rolls I made in the order of pictures in this post:

• Two rolls – one with shrimp cooked in sriracha, cream cheese, and toasted tempura flakes wrapped in nori, one with smoked salmon, cream cheese, and toasted tempura flakes wrapped in rice paper. Both have rice on the outside with toasted sesame seeds.
• Avocado and imitation crab mixed with some mayo and sriracha. This was everyone’s favorite!
• Two rolls – they both have smoked salmon, carrot, cucumber, and avocado. One is wrapped in nori with rice and toasted sesame seeds on the outside and the other is wrapped with rice paper on the outside.