Cook Monkeys

I decided to make sushi one day and get rid of those seaweed wraps thatI had lying around. This was my first time making sushi myself. I saw a real sushi chef do it once at my uncle’s barbeque in front of everybody. My sister and mom have made sushi before using just seaweed, rice, and smoked salmon. I chose to use eggs, avocado, and fake crab meat. I accidentally bought smoked salmon at the supermarket. I guess I had a subconscious craving for it.

After getting my ingredients out, I put the sushi mat on a cutting board and placed the first seawood wrap on the mat. There is a rice vinegar that one is supposed to add to the cooked rice before spreading it on the seaweed. I had rice wine thinking that it was sufficient. However, when I reviewed the recipe, it stated rice vinegar. I didn’t feel like going back out to the supermarket again after having just been there so I mixed the rice with the rice wine. It smelled a little funky due to the alcohol so I decided to add some white vinegar. It was a hokey process of mixing a little of each until it smelled like rice vinegar (or at least what I recall from memory) and tasted appropriate.

The next step was to place the ingredients on the rice. Rolling the sushi was something I didn’t manage to get a good hold of. I always either had too much filling or not enough rice. My first roll came out kind of weird and thick. However, with subsequent rolls, they improved a little bit. One of the important things for making sushi is to use a good knife when making the slices. It has to be sharp otherwise your sushi will tear and its content will just fall out all over the cutting board.

The sushi didn’t come out too bad for my first time. Most of them came out nice looking. Towards the end I was beginning to run out of rice. For my last roll of sushi, I had to thinly spread the rice around. When I actually rolled it, it didn’t stay together very well. Most of the slices fell apart. By the end, I did have a good pile of sushi roll ends and other craptastic slices that fell apart. But I did have a good plate of sushi to eat. It was three layers of sushi that lasted me for about three days.

You can see more sushi pictures on my Flickr account.