Making Sushi at Home

hi I'm chef Thomas Reese and I've been making sushi all around the country for the past ten years I am currently the head chef at piranha killer sushi and Flower Mound Texas I'm here today a Central Market to show you just how easy it is to make sushi we'll be taking an in-depth look at some of the fresh produce some of the Japanese condiments and ingredients as well as the sushi grade fish will then head up to the Central Market kitchen where I'll teach you how to make restaurant quality sushi right in the comfort of your own home hi I'm Alex I'm the seafood production expert I have all different sorts of sushi-grade products from salmon a choux dough comes in a block barbecued eel okay the hamachi yellowtail and the reason why they can have to get frozen is state laws require it so anything that's required by law by the city taxes to be considered sushi-grade has to be kept frozen so here we have the the premium grade sushi rice that we just purchased from Central Market there are instructions on the back of the bag that'll tell you how to either cook the rice in a rice cooker and if you don't have a rice cooker it also tell you how to cook it in a pot we also have the natural organic soy sauce for me I always like to use the Kikkoman brand they're generally very good with the soy sauce we also have the the rice vinegar now sushi rice vinegar usually consists of vinegar salt sugar and kombu which is the dried seaweed luckily for us Central Market sells the bottle where it's already pre-mixed so that way you don't have to worry about mixing the right proportions of salt sugar and vinegar and once again the instructions on how to mix this with the rice or right on the back of the label here we also have the the wasabi that comes in a tube it makes it real simple so that when you're ready to use the wasabi you can literally just squeeze it like a tube of toothpaste it'll come right out of the tube there we have the the pickled ginger which in this case it's the pink pickled ginger sometimes you'll find the white ginger as well there's really no difference in the color of the ginger as long as it's the pickled sushi so as you guys well know Central Market carries a wide variety of sushi grade fish they actually have a whole freezer section where they carry the raw sushi grade fish now the fish does have to be frozen before they sell it so when you buy the fish it's going to come in frozen blocks now to properly thaw the fish you want to place the frozen fish in your refrigerator 24 hours prior to using it that will allow the fish to naturally thaw in a cool environment you really want to avoid thawing the fish in the room temperature or running it under water so careful planning and preparation does play a key role when you're handling the sushi grade fish also the the fish is somewhat expensive so you don't really want to do anything to compromise the quality of the raw fish itself once the fish is thoroughly thawed in your refrigerator you can go ahead and open up the package and you'll notice that there's a fair amount of juice and water left over from the fish and that's always going to happen with frozen packed fish so what you want to do is you want to take a dry paper towel and just kind of Pat the fish dry you don't want to make it too dry where the fish looses its quality but you just want to remove the excess moisture from the top layer of the fish that way it doesn't leave a residual taste in your mouth every time you take a bite also with the fish you want to keep the cold so right before you you're going to use the fish you want to make sure that it stays in the refrigerator you don't want the fish hanging out at room temperature for too long because then the quality of the fish will be compromised and the taste will definitely be different as well now that we finish all of our prep we're ready to move on to making the sushi roll so we have the toasted seaweed here you'll notice that there is a rough side and a smooth side you're always going to be placing the rice on the on the rough side so to make a basic California roll I'm going to first kind of moisten my hands to create that separation from the sticky rice to my skin you know I'm going to grab the amount of rice I'll be about the same shape and size of a pool ball so after I have my pool ball shaped rice I'm going to place it directly in the center of the toasted seaweed now I'm going to spread the rice across from the seaweed from one end to the other and I'm going to kind of create a hotdog shape with the rice once I've spread the rice I'm actually going to divide this rice into two halves again I'm just using my fingertips I'm going to gently press right in the center where I just placed the rice this will divide it from the top to the bottom from here I'm going to use my fingertips primarily my thumbs to push the top portion of the rice to the top portion of the seaweed and again I'm going to go from left to right so I'm just going to gently press and push the rice away from my body right to the top part of the seaweed there and whatever I do to one side I want to make sure I do the same thing to the other side so I'm going to flip this around and again I'm just going to gently press with my fingertips pushing the rice away from my body so now I've successfully put the rice onto the seaweed now I'm going to go ahead and sprinkle a little bit of the toasted sesame seeds right on top of the rice okay and since a California roll does have the rice on the outside I'm going to be placing all the ingredients on the side of the seaweed so I'm going to flip this over and I always start with the vegetables first and then put the meat on top very last we start with the julienned cucumbers and as you can see I'm not directly placing the ingredients right in the middle of the seaweed I'm placing them a little below the center part of the seaweed next I'm going to do the avocado I'm just going to take a regular butter knife here and I'm just going to cut into the avocado and that wedge of avocado should come right out okay and lastly I'm going to put the the meat right on top of the vegetables in this case it's the the crab stick that we got from Central Market and you don't want to put too much ingredients in the sushi roll otherwise the sushi roll will break open on you so since this crab stick is fairly large I'm just going to simply break it apart kind of split it into two halves here and again I'm just kind of putting that on top of the vegetables and that's going to kind of hold it all together now from this point I'm going to line up the bottom edge of the seaweed about an inch above the bottom edge of the bamboo mat so as you can see I have about a good inch right here from the bottom of the bamboo mat to the bottom of the seaweed I'm going to use my thumbs to lift up on the bottom edge of the bamboo mat and I'm going to use the rest of my fingertips to kind of hold the ingredients in place so when I lift up I'm going to press and hold the ingredients now the bamboo mat is going to come up and over all the ingredients that I have in there so once it completely covers ingredients I'm going to gently press with my fingertips to kind of mold it and hold it all together into one spot so if you're new to sushi or if this is your first time making sushi rolls I would recommend just kind of lifting up the bamboo mat and just making sure that you're on target so that when you do make that rotation that you will get a complete seal with the rice to the seaweed and as you can see I'm right on target when I make that rotation it's going to create a spiral effect and it will hold all those ingredients in place so again I'm just going to kind of tuck it and gently press it now from here that I always want to have the bamboo mat above the sushi roll I never want to have it tucked underneath as I'm rolling the sushi so again always having the bamboo mat on top and we use my fingertips and the bamboo mat to kind of guide the sushi roll so I can make that rotation and from here I'm just kind of keep pulling on the bamboo mat it'll kind of spin the sushi roll around a few times which will give you a really nice shape so from here I'm going to kind of clean up the the edges of the California roll real quick so what I do is I line the edge of the bamboo mat the edge of the sushi roll and I kind of tuck those extra ingredients back into the roll and square off the edge here and again what I do to one side I'm going to do to the other side as well took those ingredients back in square off the end of the sushi roll and now I'm ready to cut using your chef's knife you want to make sure that you start out with a clean and lubricate a knife that's why I have this bowl of water here to create the separation from the blade from the sticky rice so I'm going to go ahead I'm just going to dip my knife right into the water now we'll let that water drip all the way down the edge there and that will be sufficient to keeping the sushi rice away from the blade so I'm going to cut the sushi roll into half and I'm going to cut these halves into halves and the quarters and a halves and that will give me eight to even pieces for the sushi roll again before each cut you always want to start out with a clean and lubricated knife that will ensure that it's a easier to cut the sushi roll and your cuts are also a lot cleaner as well okay after I've made date of the eight even pieces I'm just going to take the bamboo mat and gently lay it over the top of the sushi roll again and I'm just going to press and straighten out the roll because once you cut the roll a kind of each piece kind of gets misplaced so lining up the bamboo mat over the top will just kind of straighten out the roll once again so after you have the roll straightened out it's time to plate the sushi roll now there are many different ways to plate a sushi roll I'm just going to show you one basic idea but this really comes down to personal preference here the main idea is to be able to distinguish each piece of the sushi roll and each ingredient inside of each piece of the roll so when take the roll I'm going to separate the pieces just kind of offset them from one another place this on the plate and again I'm just going to offset these pieces here and that will give me the effect that I want okay so as you can see I have completely made cut and plated the sushi roll and if you're to look you can see each individual piece of the sushi roll and you can see each ingredient inside of each piece so you can tell we have the cucumber the avocado and the crabmeat and it's and with the sushi every single piece of the sushi roll should look and taste just like the piece next to it so you want pretty uniform pieces you want to make sure that you get an even distribution of ingredients inside the roll as well so the next thing I'll show you how to make is a hand roll hand rolls are personal size sushi rolls they're in a shape of an ice cream cone and they're actually eaten just like an ice cream cone too from the top all the way to the bottom what's nice about hand rolls is that you can make a whole bunch of them very fast and they're kind of good for large parties because they're more or less appetizers that everyone can just kind of grab also the nice thing about hand rolls too is you can pretty much put anything inside of them so if you're a vegetarian just even having some leftover vegetables can be used to make the sushi hand rolls just so to start out we're going to start with the the half sheet of the toasted seaweed again the rice is always going to go on the texturized side and for the hand rolls you want to make sure that the seaweed stays as dry as possible once the seaweed gets wet it starts to shrink and it doesn't look as nice and appetizing so you want to make sure to start out that the seaweed is really dry so I'm going to place it right on top of the bamboo mat again and since we are looking for a cone shape roll we're going to make sure that when we put the rice on to the seaweed we're going to create a triangle with the rice and that will give us the exact shape that we want so to make the hand roll we're going to use a lot less rice than we did for the California roll for the amount of race that we're going to use is pretty much going to be the same size as a golf ball or a ping-pong ball so it is a fair amount of less rice than a traditional classic roll so I have about a golf ball shape size amount of rice I'm going to place that on the left portion of the seaweed and again I'm going to create a triangle or a v-shape with the rice itself and that will in turn produce the cone shape once I start rolling this hand roll and again it doesn't have to be a perfect triangle as long as the basic shape is there okay so I made the triangle you can see that the triangle is not directly in the center of the seaweed is actually a little bit set to the left-hand side and that's important for when I'm rolling the the roll itself so again just like the the California roll I'm going to start with my vegetables in this case I'm going to start with a julienne cucumbers I'm going to put some of the julienne carrots in it and we use some of the snow pea shoots and again when you're making a hand roll you kind of want some of the ingredients to kind of stick up over the top so I'm going to kind of place these so that the shoots will be visible for when you're eating a sushi roll next I'm going to put a little bit of avocado inside just using the butter knife gently pressing removing the avocado and since the hand roll isn't as big of a role as the California roll we don't need as much of ingredients to make this so for this one I'm just going to use a little bit less than half of a full crab stick place that right on top so now there's two ways to roll this hand roll one is to roll it a flat on the bamboo mat and the other way is to actually roll it in your hand the traditional way is to roll in your hand but a easier way to do it at your house is probably just to do it on a flat surface so now I'm going to lift up on the bottom left tab and this tab is going to come up and over the ingredients that we just placed into the handle so this is going to come up and over and it's going to fold over and this corner right here is going to line up to the top part of the seaweed right where the rice and the seaweed meet so it's going to line up right there and I'm just going to continue in that rolling motion gently pressing to hold all the ingredients in place and now once I get to the very end the seaweed won't stick to itself so kind of a cool little technique to do is just you want to grab a couple grains of the sticky rice place it right on that tab and then you're going to kind of smudge it and smear it with your thumb so that way this will stick right onto the seaweed itself so once you've done that you have successfully created a what's called a tamaki and Japanese and the translation would be hand roll and again I really like these hand rolls you can make a whole bunch of them for party guests or just for your own personal use and it's just a really cool way to eat sushi itself so what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a few more of these hand rolls more fast and I'm going to plate them on a platter just to kind of show you what a what the different kinds of sushi hand rolls look like so this one did have some of the crab meat I'll go ahead and make some vegetarian sushi hand rolls and then I'll show you a good way to to play and present and rules you made for hand rolls relatively quickly I like to uh serve the hand rolls on a circular plate that we have a really nice presentation and so as you can see if you if you're having a large party it's a it's a very good way to eat sushi it like I was saying it is somewhat of an appetizer you can make a whole bunch of these different types of hand rolls and have a beautiful display and presentation again they don't all have to be different ingredients they can contain just one vegetable or just one ingredient and you can be creative with it too kind of mixing and matching different ingredients to create different types of sushi rolls so this one was a California and all of these were vegetarian sushi rolls but again it's totally up to you what you want to put inside of your hand roll next what I'll be showing you is how to make a sushi nigiri and what that is it's the it's the fish that's molded over the rice so in this case we have the Hawaiian tuna and the Atlantic salmon so now if you look at the fish very carefully there's actually a lot of moisture that's on the outside so we're going to gently Pat the fish dry with a paper towel and again the raw fish is somewhat delicate so you want to make sure that you're gentle when handling the fish so we're just going to Pat the outside dry real quick to remove that excess moisture and once we do that we're ready to pick up the fish so that we can make the sushi nigiri now you'll see that the fish has the muscle lines just like any good be if you want to cut against the grain not with the muscle tissue so when I'm cutting the fish you'll notice that I'm cutting it in a very specific manner okay so using my chef's knife I need to create strips of fish that will be molded over the rice so in order for me to do that I'm actually going to remove the bottom left corner of this block of tuna I'm just going to remove that from the rest of it so now from here I have a nice smooth even surface with the tuna and I can literally just keep following that edge to cut my nigiri strips so again using my chef's knife using my opposite hand to brace the fish in a kind of hold the fish in place so that way the fish doesn't shift around when I'm actually cutting the fish itself so using my opposite hand to kind of hold the fish in place I'm going to use the knife start from the heel and work my way to the tip and this comes straight down and there is one piece of tuna for the nigiri so again my opposite hand is holding the fish then I cut a few more pieces and again the the size of the the fish that you're cutting doesn't have to be real big the idea of sushi is that one piece of sushi is one bite so if you're cutting a very big piece of fish that piece of sushi will probably end up being two bites so keep that in mind when you're cutting the fish it's pretty much going to be bite sized pieces okay so I just showed you guys how to uh to cut the tuna for sushi I'm going to place that off to the side just for one moment and I'm going to go ahead and cut the the Atlantic salmon now and again there is some excess moisture on the salmon I'm just going to Pat it dry with a paper towel so you can see with the Atlantic salmon it's a little bit different than the tuna the the centerline of the salmon is still on the block of the salmon so when we cut it it's going to be a little bit of different process for this one again there's that centerline and that's a part that you usually don't want to eat or in that you don't want to serve so we're going to go ahead and cut that centerline right out you'll also notice that there is kind of like a brown edge on the salmon there's no harm in that but it's just not as appetizing to look at so I'm going to go ahead and remove some of that the brown color as well just as my chef's knife and just gently take off some of that some that other salmon so I'm left with just a nice orange flesh right there and again so I know the center point is there I'm going to cut that right out from the salmon so I'm left with a nice block of salmon there's none of the brown none of the brown flesh on there just the meat itself so from here I'm ready to to cut the nigiri slices again so we're going to be cutting out an angle so I would be removing the bottom left part of the salmon and that way I can cut the salmon into strips okay so I'm going to remove that piece there I'm just going to kind of keep working my way down again holding the bracing the fish with my opposite hand it's kind of creating that a slice right down so again you want to keep the idea that one piece of sushi is one bite so you don't want to make huge pieces when you're cutting the fish okay so the next thing I'm going to teach you how to make is the actual nigiri itself I just demonstrated how to properly cut the the fish so now I'm going to go to tip back to the sticky rice so again I'm going to really make sure that my hands are moist for this part and so now to make the the nigiri itself I'm going to get a ball of rice that's probably about the same size as a tater top so if you think of the shape and the size of a Tater Tot that's the same shape and size that I want to make with a sushi and again if we think of tater tots tater tots or bite-sized pieces so again you don't want to make anything too big where someone's going to have to break that piece in a half I need to move on to the fish so we start with the tuna if I'm right-handed I'm going to place the fish on my right hand right like this I'm going to take the Tater Tot shaped rice and we'll place it directly in the center of the fish then I'm going to flip the fish over so that the fish is on top and the rice is on the bottom I'm going to do it on my opposite hand just like that now we all know how to make the okay sign so the okay sign is this this will allow you to mold the fish onto the rice and to really create the shape that we're looking for here so making the okay sign the O part is going to come up and over the fish and it's going to help mold that fish right onto the rice so I'm going to flip it over and I'm going to do it a few more times to really get the shape that I'm looking for so again the okay symbol the O is going to come up and over the fish and mold right onto the rice do a few more times and that is a perfect piece of sushi nigiri so again I'll do this a few more times with the rest of the fish that I have and I'll just explain it quickly as I'm doing it here for you guys again really damp hands going to grab some rice and make a Tater Tot with it and again it doesn't have to be perfect you know you just always want to keep in mind that it should be bite-sized okay I have my tater tot we grab the fish I'm right handed so the fish is going to go right in my right hand the Tater Tot is going to go directly in the center of the fish I'm going to flip it over onto my opposite hand the okay symbol is going to come up and over the fish and it's going to mold right onto the rice and you don't want to do this too many times because you don't want your body heat to transfer onto the fish so you want to do this probably about three to four times maximum you really don't need to do any more than that to really get that shape that we're looking for okay so have the tuna done I'm going to move on to the salmon here real quick and it's just going to be the same technique nothing's going to change as far as the rice or the size goes okay so we're done making the negeri I'm going to show you guys how to WOM to plate the nigiri in a way so that it will be visually stunning for your party guests or if it's just your own personal use as well so again just like when I was making the California roll I was offsetting each piece so that way it was very easy to be able to distinguish from piece to piece so again I offset it all the pieces of the tuna do the same thing with the with the salmon so now also if you having if you're having a party come over the sushi negeri is a really good way to go because you can really create a lot of individual pieces of sushi which will allow your party guests to kind of pick and choose the piece that they want to eat and again you can easily create a visually stunning display and get all different types of fish in this case it's just the tuna in the salmon and just even these two fish alone gives you a really good presentation when you're plating the sushi you

Channel: Fort Worth Star-Telegram

Views: 1,941,467

Rating: 4.8554897 out of 5

Keywords: Star-Telegram, Sushi (Cuisine), Cooking (Interest), Central Market (Business Operation), Chef Thomas Reese, California Roll, Hand Roll, Nagiri, How to, sushi, cooking at home, make sushi at home, fish, seafood, sushi roll, central market, cooking, thomas reese, chef

Id: Y3wUntEvUAw

Length: 31min 45sec (1905 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 18 2014