Some foods belong in a restaurant and some belong at home. To a Japanese person, sushi, for the most part, would be considered a restaurant food: You go to a sushi bar and the sushi chef makes it for you. The quintessential sushi is nigiri sushi — hand-formed rice made into a small, bite-size clump with sliced raw fish resting on top. With nigiri sushi, both the fish and the rice are fresh. When made by a skilled sushi chef, the flavor is divine. I don’t make that kind of sushi.
Still, when people find out that I teach Japanese cooking classes, one of the first questions they ask is if I teach sushi making. When I have to tell them that I don’t teach nigiri sushi, they seem rather disappointed. What I make is home-style sushi, which includes chirashi sushi, Inari sushi and maki sushi, but I leave nigiri sushi to the professional chefs. Most cooks in Japan will tell you the same thing. It takes years of laborious practice to learn how to properly select, clean and cut fish to make good sushi — just watch the documentary “Jiro’s Dreams of Sushi.”
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Recently, I was browsing on Amazon and found dozens of sushi cookbooks, many of them featuring nigiri sushi. Can there be that many people attempting to make nigiri sushi at home? Or are they just salivating over the beautiful pictures of nigiri sushi?
On the contrary, if you go to bookstores in Japan, you will have a hard time finding a cookbook devoted to sushi for home cooks. You would mostly likely have to look in the professional section. And because sushi is a trade you learn through years of training under a sushi master, you won’t really find a manual for it at your corner bookstore.
The only memory I have of making nigiri sushi is with my grandmother while growing up near the sea in Kamakura, Japan, where there were plenty of fishermen and fish to be had. Grandmother and I would get up at dawn to buy fresh fish fresh off the boat. We got to look at and pick the fish, and the price depended on the fishermen’s mood. The fish was still wiggling in the bag while we walked home.
My grandmother would clean the fish, fillet it and marinate it in a vinegar sauce for a few minutes. We then cooked some rice, which she seasoned with salt, sugar and vinegar to make sushi rice, and she would julienne some fresh ginger. When the fish was marinated and cooked like ceviche, she sliced it up, made little rice balls and put the fish on top. That was her version of nigiri sushi. The rice clumps were not even and artful like a sushi master’s, but it was tasty because the ingredients were good and they were made by my grandmother.
Coming back to the present, there is hardly any sushi-grade fish like that available here in Southern California where I live, so there is no point in pursuing that kind of sushi. Sushi chefs can go to wholesale sellers and buy sushi-grade fish, but home cooks rarely have that kind of access to high-quality fish.
Let’s not be completely pessimistic. I do have a few things to make sushi that are harvested in Southern California — sea urchin, Santa Barbara shrimp and squid. But I don’t make nigiri sushi with them. I just slice them up sashimi style and eat them with wasabi and soy. Easy.
Sushi for home cooks
So what is the sushi I make at home or most home cooks in Japan make at home? There are basically four varieties: chirashi sushi, maki sushi, Inari sushi and oshizushi.
Chirashi is a kind of a pilaf, made with sushi rice and a variety of toppings. You are already familiar with maki sushi if you have eaten a California roll or other sushi rice — it is a sushi roll that includes toasted nori seaweed rolled around vinegar-flavored rice and various fillings, including raw seafood and vegetables. California roll was invented by a sushi chef based in Los Angeles who, in the early days of sushi, didn’t have good access to sushi-grade fish like the fatty tuna. He discovered that avocado had a similar meaty and fatty flavor and texture, so he used that to make the rolls, and history was made.
Inari sushi, or footballs, as Japanese-Americans nicknamed them, is a deep-fried tofu pouch stuffed with seasoned sushi rice and vegetables. There is also oshizushi, which is a type of sushi that uses a small wooden box to press the sushi into little rectangles.
These types of sushi are easy to make for a home cook, and the ingredients can be varietal. These types of sushi also don’t require hand-molding each piece. I wouldn’t hesitate to make sushi with non-Japanese ingredients.
In spring, Japan celebrates Girl’s Day on March 3 with chirashi zushi, but this pilaf-like sushi can be eaten throughout the year. I make it quite often, using a vegetarian recipe. But you can also add shrimp, sea urchin or slices of fish toppings. If you happen on something very fresh — sushi-grade quality — slice it up and put it on, too.
Vegetable chirashi sushi
Serves 4
Ingredients
For the sushi:
16 ounces (450 grams) short-grain rice
1 piece kombu, about 2 inches long
3 tablespoons ginger, peeled and minced
10 shiso leaves, minced
3 tablespoons roasted sesame seeds
Amazu ginger for garnish (optional)
For the vinegar dressing:
5 tablespoons rice vinegar
3 tablespoons sugar
2 teaspoons salt
For the kanpyo (dried gourd) and dried shitake mushroom filling:
8 dried shiitake mushrooms, hydrated with 2 cups water
½ ounce (15 grams) of dried kanpyo, hydrated
1 teaspoon salt
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 to 2 tablespoons sugar
For the carrot filling:
1 carrot, julienned
½ teaspoon salt
For the tamago, or egg topping:
3 eggs, beaten
1 teaspoon cornstarch, dissolved with 1 tablespoon water
½ teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon sugar
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
For the garnish:
2 or 3 mitsuba leaves or watercress leaf
Directions
1. Cook the rice with the kombu seaweed as you would standard rice, according to package directions.
2. Meanwhile, mix the ingredients for the vinegar dressing in a bowl and combine.
3. To make the seasoned gourd and shitake mushrooms, combine the hydrated shitake mushrooms and kanpyo in a saucepan and bring to a boil. Turn heat to a simmer and season the vegetables with the salt, sugar and soy sauce until most of the liquid is absorbed. Remove the mushrooms and kanpyo, then mince them and set aside.
4. Bring water to a boil in a small pan, add salt and blanch the carrots. Drain. Set aside.
5. To make the tamago, beat the eggs, cornstarch solution, salt and sugar in a bowl.
6. In a non-stick frying pan, heat oil over medium high heat and add ⅓ of the beaten egg mixture to make a thin crepe. When one side is cooked, flip the crepe over and cook the other side. Repeat two more times.
7. Slice the crepes into 1½–inch (4-centimeter) matchsticks. Set aside in a bowl.
8. When the rice is cooked, discard the kombu and transfer the rice into a large bowl. Add the vinegar dressing and toss lightly.
9. Add the minced ginger, shiso and roasted sesame seeds to the rice.
10. Add the minced shitake mushrooms, kanpyo and carrots to the rice and toss lightly.
11. Top with slices of egg and garnish with watercress or mitsuba leaves.
Top photo: Vegetable chirashi sushi. Credit: Sonoko Sakai
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