Sushi Class
Lemme tell you ‘bout making sushi. Yeah! We made sushi!
This was our third Downtown Market cooking class after successful pasta making and burger grilling classes. Both times we made real swanky, real tasty, real simple food. Sushi is swanky and tasty, but not simple.
The most unsimple of all is the rice. Dealing with sushi rice is like wrangling 15 3-year-olds as a day camp counselor on a rainy day. And trust a girl, I know from experience.
You have to rinse the rice, drain it, rinse again. Cook the rice—BUT DON’T YOU DARE PEEK UNDER THE LID!!! Then dump the rice, fan it, season it while you fan it, and keep fanning and fanning and are you fanning? You better be ferociously fanning!
After that there’s a brief moment of simplicity in building and filling. We lined our nori (seaweed sheets) with rice, which you can only spread three times or else the rice gets tough and the sushi gods put a curse on your home. Ben and I joked about the secret ancient Japanese technique we utilized where we patched bald nori spots with rice blobs. Then we creatively added thinly sliced veggies, crab meat, tuna and spicy mayo I stole from the tasting table. Shh! Don’t tell.
Then you roll. Rolling is… not my strong suit. Ben was much better. Our instructor said good rolling takes a lot of experience. Noted. We did get a few decent rolls in, but they’d occasionally explode upon cutting.
Whatever, sushi is sushi and it was fun to attempt and delicious—even if I did have to use my “finger chopsticks” to pick up the real broken pieces. When's the next class? I'm ready to sign up.
This was our third Downtown Market cooking class after successful pasta making and burger grilling classes. Both times we made real swanky, real tasty, real simple food. Sushi is swanky and tasty, but not simple.
The most unsimple of all is the rice. Dealing with sushi rice is like wrangling 15 3-year-olds as a day camp counselor on a rainy day. And trust a girl, I know from experience.
You have to rinse the rice, drain it, rinse again. Cook the rice—BUT DON’T YOU DARE PEEK UNDER THE LID!!! Then dump the rice, fan it, season it while you fan it, and keep fanning and fanning and are you fanning? You better be ferociously fanning!
After that there’s a brief moment of simplicity in building and filling. We lined our nori (seaweed sheets) with rice, which you can only spread three times or else the rice gets tough and the sushi gods put a curse on your home. Ben and I joked about the secret ancient Japanese technique we utilized where we patched bald nori spots with rice blobs. Then we creatively added thinly sliced veggies, crab meat, tuna and spicy mayo I stole from the tasting table. Shh! Don’t tell.
Then you roll. Rolling is… not my strong suit. Ben was much better. Our instructor said good rolling takes a lot of experience. Noted. We did get a few decent rolls in, but they’d occasionally explode upon cutting.
Whatever, sushi is sushi and it was fun to attempt and delicious—even if I did have to use my “finger chopsticks” to pick up the real broken pieces. When's the next class? I'm ready to sign up.