Sushi Week continues! I’m sorry I’m taking so long with the rice, but – and I hope this doesn’t sound too cheesy – rice is the foundation of your sushi. You can fill a roll or top your nigiri with the best white albacore tuna, but it’ll taste all wrong if the rice isn’t right. Sushi rice is subtle but unmistakable, distinctive. It’s soft and sticky without being mushy. It’s just the tiniest bit sweet and the tiniest bit savory. It’s not rocket science, but it can be really hard to really get it right.
So, some notes:
1. I have read that you’re not supposed to cool the rice in the fridge. This may be true, although I have had really good luck cooling rice in a TUPPERWARE in the fridge. Specifically, I made a bunch of brown sushi rice, coated it with the vinegar, put it in a tupperware while it was still hot, and didn’t use it for almost a week, and it was still good, and maybe even easier to work with. This happened once, so it’s not really a viable scientific sample size. If this is your first time trying this, give yourself an afternoon and let it cool naturally. You can fan it (they even make specific sushi rice fans for this), and you can stir it VERY gently once or twice to try to release some of the heat, but pretty much just let it rest til it cools.
2. I bought the hangiri – the wooden bowl – because I make sushi, well, a lot. The rice cools pretty fast in the wooden bowl, I think plastic and metal retain the heat too well. Ceramic would probably be okay.
3. When I say wet your hands repeatedly, I mean pretty much whenever the rice starts sticking to your fingers, which will be about once every 20 seconds.
4. I don’t actually have any video games that go “boop beep beep boop beep.” I am playing Okamiden on the DS right now, and it makes a lot of very Japanese noises, none of which are really communicable through comics (unless you know of a way to draw what taiko drumming sounds like).
Are you ready for Friday? Friday we’ll fill and roll and slice and (hooray!) EAT our maki!
PS! Hey, if you haven’t already, and you feel so inclined, you can ‘like’ my facebook page. I’m going to be posting a lot of random doodles and pictures of projects-in-progress there that won’t get posted other places, so if that wounds like your kind of gig, there you are.
I like this series of comics. What a great idea. :) I really would love a whole cookbook like this.