Sushi From A Live Eel

together we've already made a lot of different kinds of sushi and everybody's always joking in the comments about how i take from scratch really seriously i mean last week i made my own ketchup and yeah sometimes i take shortcuts but today absolutely not now i don't want to ruin sushi for anybody but one of my favorite types has always been unagi or eel and i recently learned that a lot of what we have probably almost all of the unagi you've ever had in a sushi restaurant unless you're going to nobu every single day is the same it's this pre-barbecued fake sugar and chemical pumped pre-packaged eel that's shipped all across the world to sushi restaurants and is the reason it looks the exact same every single time well fortunately i have a special treat today we're gonna get eel from the ground up and no we're not gonna go and grow it somewhere and wait for a while for it to mature and then kill it that way no i've got live eels right here and i hate snakes this is actually pretty terrifying for me but like always i'm doing it for you these eels are from american unagi up in maine they're grown sustainably chemical free and more importantly they're delicious now i'm really curious to see how these different flavor and texture from the traditional unagi we're used to in restaurants but first i'm gonna have to figure out how to actually fillet these i'm pretty comfortable with a fish but i don't know about an eel especially a live eel but first let me show you the goods you have to be very delicate now believe it or not these eel actually shipped overnight from maine you'll notice i've got ice sitting on top of the tray here eel are extremely resilient which means that as long as i leave just a tiny bit of water in the bottom and keep them very cold meaning this ice slowly drips through the cracks in the top of my container they will stay very very lively now i'll take off my lid and there you have it live eels now let me see if i can just build up the carriage to take one of these out they really do look like snakes but they actually also seem pretty gentle and do not let them trick you they're quite lively oh my god i also cannot even begin to describe how slippery they are they're somehow able to do this really cool thing with their bodies where they easily slip out of my grip every time i pick them up what normally happens with these guys are that these glass eels from maine which are basically these eels and their baby states they're actually really beautiful and see-through would be sent off to china to be fully grown they're then transported back to the united states after being questionably raised and grown which is what makes it cool that these were fully born and raised in maine so i'll just place one of these babies down so you can see it for just a second this isn't gonna hurt him being out of the water for just a minute so don't worry these eels are gorgeous they're so incredibly smooth they can move in such an amazing amazing way and i just quickly put them back in the water because i don't want to hurt these eels but you can see how well they can move even just across this flat surface now it's time to go ahead and actually fillet these eels if you know me you know my goal here is to teach you about food show you some really delicious dishes to make and eat and sometimes toss in a little bit about sustainability because i'm very very into that kind of thing we've just seen these amazing live eels and i'm not gonna kill and fillet them in front of you but i'll quickly go through the basic guide of exactly what i'm doing now to start you have to secure down the head once we do that we're making a cut right down the middle which basically opens up the spine and don't worry the eel's not feeling anything right now now we want to take our knife and basically just remove that spine which will give us this really nice butterflied fillet we can take off the head and using our knife with a pair of pliers just take off a few of the trimmings on the edge and this will ultimately leave us with an amazing butterflied filet of eel it smells incredible now once i've filleted a couple of these eel i want to try a really unique way of cooking it the sous vide i'll need to slice my eel in half then add two pieces per vacuum bag side by side once it looks like this we're ready to pack it up and cook it now before we sous-vide let's make our onagi sauce we'll start with three quarters cup of soy sauce three quarters cup of mirin a quarter cup of sake and one half cup sugar mini whisk this over medium high heat until the sugar dissolves and the mixture thickens up enough once it starts to get really nice and foamy like this it's usually a pretty good sign that you're close enough to having it nice and thickened up you want it thick enough that you can paint over the top of your unagi to get that incredible sweet tangy salty glaze keep an eye on your glaze at this point because i've had this burn on me and it's not pretty here's the only problem with mini whisk if you drop it you literally lose the entire thing in whatever you're making we'll pour our unagi sauce into a bowl to let this cool down and hopefully thicken up even more you can already see that the glaze is coating the pan really well which is a great sign look at that to each bag of eel we'll add a little bit of sesame oil and just a touch of our unagi sauce my hope is that these will provide some incredible flavor when these both cook slowly through the sous-vide process press to spread this around just a little bit and then our bags are ready to seal now i'll take the bag and feed the edge into my vacuum sealer then i'll press down click and seal now i should have a nice sealed layer up top and the eel is vacuumed so we're finally ready to cook now we'll add all three bags to our sous-vide bath which has been set to 138 degrees fahrenheit and we'll cook this for exactly 10 minutes you've probably heard of sous vide before and you might not know what it means so i'll make it simple sous vide is low temperature cooking over a long period of time typically the food is put in either a glass jar or a plastic pouch like this and it's cooked over a longer period of time than you normally see at a very precise temperature which is exactly why i use 138 degrees celsius you can look up the precise temperature for any food out there there's one for chicken one for steak one for certain types of vegetables it's almost a cooking cheat coat but it also allows you to cook things to that perfect temperature and i don't want to mess this eel up one of the top comments on my last video was that the person had learned that i speak fluent hand which now i can see what you mean after 10 minutes we'll remove them from the water you can definitely tell the difference even after it's cooked over those 10 minutes the flesh on there is no longer translucent and i'm very excited to take a taste of this let's open these bags up and see what we got we'll slice open each of the bags and gently slide the unagi into a large large bowl we're not done playing around with this just yet i want to find a really cool way to get that smoky barbecue flavor then we'll cover the whole thing in plastic wrap now i'll add a few mesquite chips to my smoker because i'm hopeful that these will really pump in that barbecuey flavor that you often get an eel then i'll fit the tip of my smoker into my bowl and seal it as well as possible after which i'll light it up we'll do this a couple times to get as much smoke as possible then we let it sit after about 15 to 20 minutes remove your saran wrap and let all that smoke come off what we essentially have here is perfectly barbecued unagi and after trimming it up we'll be ready to assemble our sushi let's move our bowl to the side and place a piece down on our board i'll gently cut straight through the middle with my knife this is so incredibly tender now so it's really not difficult to cut once i've trimmed a few pieces and cut it into small nice portions for sushi we can go ahead and make our nigiri as i'm slicing this into portions i'm realizing how incredibly different this looks from the sushi i get in restaurants you can actually tell this is from true real seafood every last marking on this skin is very clear this hasn't been messed around with needles injecting steroids this is real fresh unagi true eel from sea to sushi now one more quick step we have to do before making our sushi is cut our seaweed i keep saying sushi but what we're really making here is nigiri i'll cut this nori into long thin strips and once we have a couple of these we're good to go this will be what holds our nigiri together as for our sushi rice like i always say in these videos i won't go through making that every time because that's very simple and you can look up how to do that but i'm always happy to provide tips just make sure you really fluff it up and that it's not too wet to make her in a giri i'll start by dipping my fingers into some water this will allow me to take some sushi rice and start forming it into the correct shape without the rice getting stuck to my hands if you've ever watched a sushi chef do this at an omakase dinner you'll see that they don't want to pack it too tightly but just enough so it holds together in the right shape once we've reached the correct shape i'll take a piece of my unagi and rest it skin side down atop a piece of rice to finish i'll dip my paintbrush into the thick glaze we made earlier then gently brush this atop my unagi you'll see how perfectly the glaze coats the top of this and finally to finish i'll gently wrap a piece of nori somewhat tightly around my sushi and there you have it our piece of unagi nigiri now there's just something about this that's incredible i'm really excited to try this it is so cool to think about the fact that we did this from a live eel then we had our glaze which you can now see has thickened to an incredible consistency that gives us that bit of sugar a little salt and that unique flavor of sake and it's all bundled up in this nigiri let's take a bite [Music] wow that is unexpected it makes me feel like i've never actually had unagi before it tastes just so much more natural and i can get all of those flavors individually and doing that was such a treat first i get that creamy rice which has been cooked to perfection and is slightly chewy and sticky i taste that soft delicate meat of the eel it's a little smoky a little sweet and has a little bit of chewiness in a good way where that skin is if you have the opportunity i urge you to try true unagi true fresh eel this right here is really a special thing now as always thank you for watching the video i'll try to start tossing links for different things i use in the videos including the eel in the comments below but as always i urge you to subscribe if you enjoyed this video and if you don't want to do that consider tossing a like on the video below because i'd really appreciate it we've had some awesome episodes and see the sushi but this had to be my favorite one yet you know i'm happy i've always been really afraid of snakes but i think i got over that fear a little bit today i really enjoyed working with these eels that seem like very kind gentle creatures and i'll have to go back to the drawing board and figure out what we're gonna do next see ya

Channel: Nick DiGiovanni

Views: 3,277,972

Keywords: Nick DiGiovanni, Cooking, Food, Chef, Recipe, Gordon Ramsay, Kitchen, ASMR, MasterChef, Osmo Salt, Salt Bae, Learn To Cook, Knife Drop, Cookbook, Kid-Friendly, Kid’s Recipes, Kid’s Cooking, eel, unagi

Id: ISOlEXt5_K0

Length: 9min 13sec (553 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 21 2021