Sushi

In Japanese cuisine, sushi (鮨 or 鮓 or, most commonly, 寿司) is a food made of vinegared rice combined with a topping or filling of fish, seafood, vegetables, or egg.

Ingredients

All sushi has a base of a specially prepared rice, complemented with other ingredients.

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Sushi rice

Sushi is made with white, short-grained, Japanese rice mixed with a dressing made of rice vinegar, sugar, salt, konbu, and sake. It is cooled to body temperature before being used. In some fusion cuisine restaurants, short grain brown rice and wild rice are also used.

Related Topics:
Japanese rice - Rice vinegar - Konbu - Sake - Fusion cuisine - Brown rice - Wild rice

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Sushi rice (sushi-meshi) is prepared with short-grain Japonica rice, which has a consistency that differs from long-grain strains such as Indica. The essential quality is its stickiness. Rice that is too sticky has a mushy texture; if it is not sticky enough, it feels dry. Freshly harvested rice (shinmai) typically has too much water, and requires extra time to drain after washing.

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There are regional variations in sushi rice, and of course individual chefs have their individual methods. Most of the variations are in the rice vinegar dressing: the Tokyo version of the dressing commonly uses more salt; in Osaka, the dressing has more sugar.

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Sushi rice generally must be used shortly after it is made. The Wiki Cookbook has a simple .

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Nori

The seaweed wrappers used in maki and temaki are called nori (海苔). This is an edible seaweed traditionally cultivated in one of the harbors of Japan. Originally, the plant was scraped from dock pilings, rolled out into sheets, and dried in the sun in a process similar to making paper. Nori is toasted before being used in food.

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Today, the commercial product is farmed, produced, toasted, packaged, and sold in standard-size sheets, about 18 cm by 21 cm in size. Higher quality nori is thick, smooth, shiny, and has no holes.

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Omelette

When making fukusazushi, paper-thin omelette may replace a sheet of nori as the wrapping. The omelet is traditionally made in a rectangular omelette pan (makiyakinabe), and used to form the pouch for the rice and fillings.

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The Wiki Cookbook has a sample .

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Toppings and fillings

• Fish

:For culinary, sanitary and aesthetic reasons, fish eaten raw must be fresher and of higher quality than fish which is cooked. A professional sushi chef is trained to recognize good fish, which smells clean, has a vivid color, and is free from harmful parasites. Only ocean fish are used raw in sushi; freshwater fish, which are more likely to harbor parasites, are cooked.

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:Commonly-used fish are tuna, yellowtail, salmon, snapper, bonito and mackerel. The most prized sushi ingredient is known as toro, a fatty, marbled cut of tuna. This comes in varieties ?toro (the better kind) and ch?toro.

Related Topics:
Tuna - Yellowtail - Salmon - Snapper - Bonito - Mackerel

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• Seafood

:Other seafoods are squid, octopus, shrimp, eel, fish roe, sea urchin (uni), and various kinds of shellfish. Oysters, however, are not put in sushi; the taste is not thought to go well with the rice.

Related Topics:
Squid - Octopus - Shrimp - Eel - Roe - Sea urchin - Uni - Oyster

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• Vegetables

:Pickled daikon radish (tsukemono), fermented soybeans (natto) in natt? maki, avocado in California rolls, cucumber?in kappa maki, yam, tofu, pickled plum (umeboshi), gourd (kampy?), burdock (gobo), and sweetcorn mixed with mayonnaise.

Related Topics:
Daikon - Tsukemono - Natto - Avocado - Cucumber - Kappa - Yam - Tofu - Umeboshi - Gourd - Burdock

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• Red meat

:Beef and ham.

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• Other fillings

:Eggs (in the form of a slightly sweet, layered omelet called tamagoyaki), raw quail eggs.

Related Topics:
Omelet - Tamagoyaki

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Condiments

• Shōyu. しょうゆ, or 醤油, 正油. Soy sauce.
• Wasabi. Green paste with a sharp, horseradish-like flavor.
• Gari. Sweet, pickled ginger.

References

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• {{Book_reference|Author=Shimbo, Hiroko|Title=The Japanese Kitchen|Publisher=The Harvard Commons Press|Year=2000|ID=ISBN 1-55832-176-4}}