The Daring Kitchen: Adventures in Sushi

The November 2009 Daring Cooks challenge was brought to you by Audax of Audax Artifex and Rose of The Bite Me Kitchen. They chose sushi as the challenge.

The challenge is in four parts:-
Part 1: Making proper sushi rice – you will wash, rinse, drain, soak, cook, dress, and cool short grain rice until each grain is sticky enough to hold toppings or bind ingredients. Then the cooked rice is used to form three types of sushi:
Part 2: Dragon sushi roll – an avocado covered inside-out rice roll with a tasty surprise filling
Part 3: Decorative sushi – a nori-coated rice roll which reveals a decorative pattern when cut
Part 4: Nigiri sushi – hand-shaped rice rolls with toppings

Caution to those reading at home: I made this on a Saturday. I made the rice around 4:00 in the afternoon, so it had a nice little spot of time to cool off. Handling hot rice can burn your hands! When making the actual sushi, I was a little lazy about it. Making the rice is a little bit time intensive, but easy if you follow the directions! I had no trouble getting it to turn out as it should - glossy and a little sticky. The recipe DID make a LOT of rice though, so you may want to make a little less. As someone (as my husband reminds me) who doesn't always eat all the rice in sushi, perhaps we did not need quite as much rice!

Making the rolls was fun. I started with the Dragon Roll, and used crab meat and cucumber as fillings. I cooked the jumbo lump crab meat (the kind you buy at the grocery's seafood counter) in some salted butter over a skillet. I also salted and drained the cucumber slices. I actually made cucumber shavings using a benriner (which is like a mandoline, only smaller), but batons would have worked just fine, and maybe even better! I did not add the avocado until I'd made everything else, though - because it browns quickly, I simply waited until the very end, then used the benriner to slice the avocado into thin shavings and placed them in a scaled pattern over the roll.

For the Spiral Roll, I wanted six different fillings. I used crab meat as in the Dragon Roll, but also used some poached shrimp, with each shrimp sliced in half length-wise, some smoked salmon cut into thin strips, and carrots, asparagus and mushrooms. With the vegetables, I chopped the mushrooms and sauteed in a little butter to soften and bring out the flavors. That took about 10 minutes. I cut the carrots into thin batons and sauteed them in some butter too, just to soften them. I also did the same with asparagus. I could have achieved the same effect by steaming them. I filled the roll, and...I was overzealous. It was huge. Beautiful, extremely tasty, and huge. I cut slices of the roll, and ate them like a cookie! Less really is more.

For the Nigiri sushi, I made the little pillows of rice first. Then, I added the "raw" ingredients to the top. I used smoked salmon, poached shrimp, some carrot batons wrapped with a cucumber shaving, and some asparagus. It was lovely. A word of caution, however - the recipe calls for using wasabi paste to "bind" the ingredients to the rice. My wasabi paste was VERY powerful! It all tasted good, but the wasabi was almost too strong. Be careful, and when in doubt, use less!

Overall, the adventure was a success. We had a filling dinner of sushi, and could have fed many more guests! While I certainly won't be making sushi on a regular basis, it is nice to see that it's entirely manageable, and as you can see below, it really does look lovely!