Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. It’s time to take this proverb seriously if cooking is what you love. Protein-heavy, healthy, and tasty! If you are someone who swears by sushi as your go-to meal, then why not ace the art of making it at home. Here are a few tips and tricks to keep in mind before mastering the art of homemade sushi.
Homemade sushi tips to get you the perfect sushi every time
Figure out your type of sushi
If you are a sushi aficionado, you probably know all the types of sushi and not just the popular maki variety that’s served at restaurants. Get your basics right — one of the many homemade sushi tips any chef will give you. Figure out which kind of sushi you want to make. Choose from maki, temaki, uramaki, nigiri and inari, and stick to the variant one at a time, practise it till you master it and then move on to the next one.
Buy sushi-grade seafood
To perfect the art of homemade sushi, you cannot just buy any seafood off the market. You need the freshest quality of sushi-grade seafood. For a long time, this high-grade seafood was only available to high-end sushi restaurants. But due to the lockdown, they are all available. So, make sure you make the best buy.
Choose the correct fish
For sushi, tuna is a great choice to start out with. Tuna has the perfect balance of lean and fat, which makes it a great fish to make sushi. Salmon is another.
Choose the right kind of rice
No, Basmati rice or arborio rice is not ideal for sushi. The key ingredient of sushi is rice, and you cannot go wrong with it. You need rice that is high in starch so that it becomes sticky when cooked. The short-grain Japanese rice is ideal for sushi, and with most modern supermarkets going glocal, it is not difficult to find the perfect ‘sushi rice’ to master your homemade sushi.
Do not overwork the rice
This is one of the key homemade sushi tips you have to keep in mind. But you need to let a good amount of air in the rice to get your perfect sushi. Working too much on it, either while cooking or seasoning, will turn it into a paste, and that’s not what we want.
Keep a bowl of water next to you
When dealing with sticky rice, make sure your hands are wet at all times. You do not want to make a mess out of the rice, which is already difficult to deal with. Wet your hands and then clap once, to get the right amount of moisture in order to make it easier to work through the rice.
Rolling the sushi
Nobody wants a clumsily rolled sushi, right? To make sure that your roll is perfect and tight, you need to follow this little tip. Make sure to maintain a little gap between the rice and the top of the nori sheet. With wet hands, place the ball of rice at the centre of the nori sheet. Press it against the sheet, keeping in mind not to let the rice reach the brim. Then start rolling tightly. These little homemade sushi tips will help you go a long way.
Clean bamboo mat for every roll
It is highly important that you keep your bamboo mats clean every time you prepare your sushi. For this, a little tip you can follow is to stick a plastic sheet on the bamboo mat every time you are rolling your sushi so that tiny bits of rice or other food particles do not get stuck in the slats of the mat.
The correct order to organise the roll
Do not make the sushi so high on toppings that you are unable to fold in. The correct order of ingredients for the perfect sushi every time is a bamboo mat, plastic sheet, nori, sticky rice, a line of wasabi between it, and lastly, the fish. You can add one other ingredient of your choice, like avocado. But make sure not to make the fillings too heavily loaded.
You do not need an expensive Japanese knife
There, we said it. Contrary to what you may believe, for cutting your sushi rolls and your seafood, you do not need restaurant-grade expensive Japanese knives. However, what you do need is a lean, sharp knife. Since you will be working on a lot of wet ingredients, the sharpness of the knife cannot be compromised.
Wet the knife for clean cuts every time
Just like your hands, the knife should be wet. Once you have rolled your sushi, you don’t just need a sharp knife to cut it, but also a wet one. The knife will be passing through the layers of rice, fish, and other toppings, and you do not want a messy cut. A damp knife will give you clean cuts, every time.
All Images: Courtesy Shutterstock
A self-proclaimed plant mom, Sreetama finds joy wherever she sees greenery. The list of other things that bring her joy is pretty long, but writing about them is her way of celebrating them. In love with little, inconsequential things, like neatly tucked-in bedsheets and big, significant things, like whole cheesecakes. She dreams of being a baker and writing about food someday.
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