SUSHI MAKING 101 with ROLL THIS WAY

hello friends and welcome to sushi making 101 with roll this way [Music] my name is john i am the chef and owner here at roll this way i want to say thank you so much for joining us today while we learn how to make some sushi but before we do let me tell you a little bit about us in 2011 a small group of friends wanted to have a dinner party we didn't know what we're gonna make luckily one of them knew how to make sushi asked everybody if they wanted to learn how to do it we of course all said yes and then one thing led to another everybody wanted to make their own role and by the end of the night we thought this be a great idea to go to people's homes or offices and teach them how to make sushi this quickly grew into a full-on catering business from dinners for two to weddings in the hundreds to huge corporate events in the thousands we have now come full circle and we're super excited to bring you sushi making 101 with roll this way i would imagine that for most of you this is your first time doing this but don't you worry you're in good hands and it's a lot easier than you think so before we get started there's a few things we're gonna need first thing damp wash cloth we're gonna get a little bit of saran wrap a bowl with water in it and then maybe a platter or a plate so we can put our rolls onto it once we're done rolling next we're going to talk about what's in your kit first things first our food box we're going to talk about the details of this as we go along with the lesson we have our trusty rolling mat this thing's going to get wrapped in saran and we will get into that a little bit later we have our reusable chopsticks our little but super sharp knife so please be careful with that all right so let's talk a little bit about what sushi actually is uh contrary to popular belief sushi is actually anything that has to do with vinegared rice so as long as you have a little bit of rice and season that with vinegar that is technically sushi it doesn't have to be raw fish as most people think it could be any kind of meat it could be vegetables anything to do with vinegared rice is technically sushi all right so in this class we're going to go over four of the main types of sushi we're going to cover nigiri which is the little ball of rice with fish on top classic mackie roll with the nori on the outside we're going to tackle an ura maki roll which is the inside out roll and we're going to make a tamaki roll or a hand roll or a cone all right so we're almost ready to start the lesson but before we do we're going to wrap our rolling mat all right guys so the purpose of wrapping our rolling mats is quite simply to keep them clean when the rice gets in between these little bamboo sticks super hard to get it out so it makes our lives a lot easier if we just wrap this thing in plastic so all we gotta do is pull out a nice big sheet of saran we're going to wrap this once making sure not to leave a crack here so that everything is nicely sealed inside you want to force a lot of that air out and then we fold it on both sides and then i like to wrap it twice and then we flip it the other direction like so again flattening it out making sure everything is nicely sealed get that air out okay the last step we're just going to cut a little hole give it a squeeze get that air out there she is all right so for the first lesson we're going to be doing a classic avocado cucumber mackie roll mackie coming from the term makimono which actually means roll thing so for this one we're gonna go into our food box and we're gonna need an avocado and the thicker stick of cucumber first thing we do we're grabbing our nori out of the pack these nori sheets come in full sizes like so but before we get started we're going to need to cut these down to size okay so we're gonna be cutting these into two different sizes for this first roll we're gonna be cutting off one third so all we gotta do is grab a knife and measure out one third give it a little cut and you can either discard this other half or give it to your dog i'm gonna be using this guy for the first roll just because we're gonna need the other ones as well we're gonna take a couple more sheets and we're gonna cut these guys in half like so so now we have two small ones and one large one so um for that first roll we are grabbing our larger sheet of nori one thing about nori very important is you will notice that these things are double sided one is very rough looking and jagged the other one is super shiny and nice and smooth important to remember that every time we are working with nori the rice always goes on the rough side an easy way to remember that is rice on rough so we're gonna need our rolling mat and the rolling mat is also double-sided one side is nice and smooth and flat the other is kind of rigid so we're always using the flat side up to roll so we're grabbing our rolling mat placing it right in the middle of our cutting board i'm assuming you guys have all washed your hands and if you have not go ahead and do that now i'm gonna go and throw my trusty gloves on i like to use these while i make sushi because it keeps the rice from sticking into my hands which i'm not a big fan of so here we go we're grabbing our large sheet of nori as i said the rough side up and the nori is going down onto our rolling mat which is positioned horizontally the the bamboo sticks are going from left to right not up and down obviously we won't be able to roll it that way so large sheet of nori goes down on the rolling mat with about a centimeter of bamboo showing at the bottom and before we work with rice every time we work with rice we get our hands nice and wet that's what that bowl of water is for we're gonna make sure that we get that water in between our fingers this stuff gets very sticky and we are grabbing a ball of rice about the size of a baseball we want to make sure to keep this thing nice and fluffy and airy we don't want to squish it if we squish it we're not going to be able to spread this thing out over the nori which is basically what we want to do so once we have our ball of rice about the size of a tennis ball we're placing it right down in the middle of our nori what we're trying to accomplish here is to cover this entire piece of nori except for one little strip exposed at the top about a centimeter wide just like this bottom edge over here so again making sure that those hands are nice and wet what we want to do now is dig our fingers in right in the middle of that ball and spread that rice out to the sides so after we've spread this out we don't want to push the rice down into the nori we actually just want to gently move it around pull it towards ourselves the reason we do that is because if we were to push it straight down into the nori the rice would stick to the nori and you wouldn't be able to move it around so what we want to do is gently push the rice around away from ourselves and then down towards ourselves and if you have any little gaps left over feel free to grab a little bit more rice and fill them in that's what we're looking for so now that we have our rice spread out over our sheet of nori we are grabbing our thicker stick of cucumber placing it right down in the middle of our rice we are grabbing our avocado if you've never opened up an avocado before quickly we just take the tip off like so discard that and then we take our knife cut right into the middle and we want to do is just spin that avocado around the blade and feel that pit inside and we take it and we just spin it open like so you put the one with the pit on a side for now and then we grab our knife using the back end of the knife not the sharp side we are scooping out two nice thick slices of avocado and placing them right down in the middle of the nori right next to the cucumber [Music] okay we can wipe our knife on our trusty little kitchen towel here and then we are ready to roll this thing all right so it is time to roll we want to make sure that we have that exposed piece of bamboo at the bottom and before we roll we put our thumbs underneath the rolling mat very important not just under the nori under the rolling mat we are using our left over eight fingers if you still have all eight we are using these guys to keep everything tucked inside what we want to accomplish here i want to make sure that this bottom edge of the rolling mat does not go over the top of the nori edge you want to make sure that it closes in somewhere within this area here so we are going to go ahead and roll this over itself and like i said making sure that this top bottom edge of the bamboo does not go over the top make sure that we get to this point here guys make sure that we got all this rice and nori left over to be able to seal the roll in so i'm just going to open this up for you so you can see that now if we're going to roll this over itself all this rice and nori left over is going to give us a nice tight seal so here we go just roll this thing over itself making sure that that seam is right at the bottom in the middle and we're giving a nice little squeeze and there she is beautiful classic makimono with the scene right at the bottom in the middle so a common question i get a lot is what is sushi great fish and what is sushi rice sushi great fish quite simply is the freshness you can buy sushi grade fish at a local grocery store just go to your fish monger and tell them that you want to make sushi that night and let them know that you need the freshest piece of fish they have all that stuff that's in that display case that's the good stuff if uh if they have the stuff at the bottom that's wrapped in saran already that means that the stuff has already been living in the display case for a couple days you want to stay away from that you want to get the freshest fish they have in the display all right and then what is sushi rice quite simply it's just short grain white rice that's been seasoned with rice vinegar that rice vinegar has also been seasoned with sugar and salt totally depends on how sweet salty or sour you like your sushi rice and that's going to be depending on you and you can control that when you are making your own sushi rice all right so for the next lesson we are doing a tamaki or a hand roll or a cone some people call it so for a regular menu uh we are gonna be pulling out our spicy tuna ramekin and for anybody that's doing our vegan menu you're gonna be pulling out our vegan spicy salmon it's gonna have a little vss on it everybody else we're pulling out the s t ramekin all right guys so spicy tuna tamaki we have our small sheet of nori rough side up first things first anytime we use rice we are getting our hands nice and wet and we're grabbing a ball of rice much smaller than the first one we're looking for something about the size of a ping pong ball we're looking about something this big and we're keeping it nice and fluffy and airy just like last time ball of rice goes in the top left corner furthest away from us so this is the bottom edge closest to me we are looking for the top left corner further away from you now what we want to do just like before we don't want to push straight down into the rice we just kind of want to pull gently on it towards ourselves creating a beautiful little v-shape like this okay and we are grabbing our spicy tuna ramekin just putting it right on top of that now what we want to do is cover that rice with the spicy tuna making sure that we bring it down all the way covering every little bit of rice this way we ensure that we have a little bit of tuna in every bite all the way down to the bottom and now all we got to do is pick this thing up placing it in our left palm and now we have it in our left palm with our left thumb we can take this bottom little edge over here and just close it up like that onto the tuna and quite simply we are literally just rolling this over onto itself to the right creating a perfect little cone just like that all right guys so hopefully that tamaki went well for you what i like to do with my hand rolls is eat them right away and make sure that that nori is nice and crispy and while you do that i'm gonna tell you a little bit about the origins of sushi all right so a little bit of a controversial topic is the origins of sushi where did it come from where did it start um a lot of scholars believe it actually started in china not japan roughly 200 bc back in the day when the rice paddies would get flooded with water a lot of the fish would come in as well and that's how the people would catch the fish and then the way that they would preserve the fish and the rice they would cover it in salt and vinegar and then that would keep the fish and the rice preserved as they didn't have refrigeration back then so fast forward about 900 years sushi made its way over to japan where they took it on and kind of made it their own the primary forms of sushi in japan are something called omakase which is i put my faith in you where the sushi chef kind of chooses the menu for you primarily what they do there is sashimi and nigiri fast forward to about the 1960s is when it made its way over to north america um dealing with a little bit of a different palette in the west um sushi chefs had to come up with different ideas to please everybody not just the classic nigiri style that they had in japan so they came up with the makimono uh more specifically the california role it was born and from there it's evolved to what we know sushi as today there's a lot of big flavors and a lot of sauces and a lot of flair all right moving on next lesson the ura makiro which literally means inside out so for this one we are doing our lobster california roll and if you have the vegan kit this will be our tofu california roll first thing we're going to need for this one we are grabbing our lobster ramekin that has a little l on it care of daily seafood that provides us with all of our amazing seafood and you will also note that there is no filler in any of our stuff nothing but pure amazing seafood so we got our lobster we are grabbing our small stick of cucumber and the rest of our avocado and then we are using our smaller sheet of nori for this one so let's go ahead and grab our rolling mat all right guys so for this one we are using our small sheet of nori and as always using the rough side up we place our nori down on our rolling mat with again another about a centimeter of bamboo exposed at the bottom and then we all know by now first things first went over handling rice we got our hands nice and wet and we are going in for a ball of rice oh about the size of a tennis ball maybe a little bit smaller than the first roll keeping it nice and fluffy and airy we are placing our ball of rice down onto our nori sheet this time around we are not leaving a centimeter of nory exposed at the top we want to cover up this entire sheet of nori so again making sure our hands are nice and wet we're going to go ahead and poke our fingers right into the middle of that ball spreading it out into the sides and remembering not to push straight down into the nori we are pulling the rice towards ourselves nice and gentle just moving it around on the sheet taking our time okay and again if you have any little gaps feel free to grab a little bit more rice and fill up those holes now also in your kit you will find a little ramekin with sesame seeds in it so if you like sesame seeds this would be the time to go ahead and toss those on top of our rice i'm just going to use my shaker here and go ahead and put that right on top of the rice you don't have to do this if you don't want to and now like i said at the beginning this is an uramaki roll or an inside out roll so all we got to do to make that happen is grab the top corners and flip this bad boy over okay now this is the lobster california roll or for our vegan friends our tofu california rolls so we're gonna grab our two sticks of tofu and we're literally just going to place them side by side right in the middle we start with our beautiful east coast lobster that's going to go right down in the middle of our nori like so and then we grab our thin stick of cucumber placing it at the top or the bottom it makes no difference it's up to you guys i'm grabbing the remainder of our first half of avocado we're slicing much thinner slices of avocado this time around reason being we already have all this product inside of the roll we don't want to put too much stuff in there and then we won't be able to close it up so two pieces of avocado nice and thin go right down in the middle of the nori what we want to make sure that we do here is we don't want to cover up more than about one-third of the nori so we're looking for something like this okay now we're gonna be rolling and now just like the first roll first thing we do we put our thumbs underneath that rolling mat what we want to achieve here is get this bottom edge of the nori to not go over the top edge so all we got to do using our leftover eight fingers keeping everything tucked in we start rolling and we want to bring this bottom edge of the rolling mat right to this point here again we're making sure that we're not going over that edge we can tuck everything in with our fingers like that and then i'm just going to open that up for you so you can see now that we have all of this leftover nori here that's going to allow us to seal the deal all we got to do now is roll this thing over itself keeping that seam right in the middle at the bottom tucking it in give it a nice squeeze and we slowly pop her open revealing our beautiful lobster california uramaki sushi fun fact if you ever wondered what those weird towels are that hang inside of a sushi restaurant you got to walk through sometimes the doorway well fun story back in the day when sushi was more of a street food in japan a lot of street vendors would hang towels for people to clean their hands with so if you want to find the best vendor on the street you find the one with the nastiest towels the dirtiest towels so yeah it uh definitely has um evolved over the times but uh that's what those little towels are inside of sushi restaurants sushi fun fact the giddy translates into gripped in hand so we were literally just grabbing a little ball of rice forming it into a nice little football shape putting a little piece of fish on top and that's what our nigiri is in our regular kit you will find the salmon and tuna nigiri so you could go ahead and pull that out totally up to you whether you want to do salmon or tuna for this one i'm gonna do one of each and then for our vegan friends we are doing the red pepper nigiri first things first we always get our hands nice and wet whenever handling rice and for this one i'm only getting my left hand as i like to make my with my left hand so nice and wet not too wet you want to make sure that the rice sticks together so don't want to get it to it it's always about that sweet spot i'm grabbing a ball of rice about the size of a ping-pong ball looking something about this big again keeping it nice and fluffy we are kneading it between our knuckles trying not to squeeze it too hard we're looking for something about the shape of a um football something like this nice little cylinder and if you like wasabi this is the time to go ahead and just dab a little bit of it and put it right on top there and for this one we are doing the tuna nagiri so i'm going to grab my beautiful slice of ahi tuna placing it right on top of that ball and again cupping it with our hands like this creating a nice little basket we're grabbing our index and middle finger of our other hand and we're basically creating a little cocoon closing it inside like this giving a nice squeeze but not too hard so we don't miss shape that ball of rice open it up twist it around and another little squeeze pop it open flip it over upside down and another little squeeze and at this point our tuna is stuck to our ball of rice looking all beautiful like so boom there's your beautiful tuna all right so i'm gonna go over a quick vegan version of the nigiri and we're gonna do it with avocado this time so first things first we're gonna get our hand nice and wet we're grabbing a ball of rice again about the size of a i don't know ping pong ball maybe a little bit smaller trying to keep this thing as fluffy as possible we're gonna be kneading it in between our fingers forming it into a little bit of a football shape like so i'm gonna put this down and grab our avocado the blunt side of our knife very carefully we are slicing out a nice sliver of avo and grabbing our ball of rice putting it right into that little basket there in between our first knuckles we place the avocado right on top and just like with the fish we are cupping it in between our knuckles grabbing our other hand two fingers on top creating a little cocoon and we give it a nice little squeeze not too hard we don't want to squish this avocado spin it around and do it again and we just flip it over one more squish and we pop it open into a beautiful avocado nigiri you might have noticed there's a little bit of extra product left over for regular menu friends we have the spicy salmon mix you can use this however you want you want to make an uramaki or a hand roll or you just want to eat this with a spoon right out of the container that's up to you that's what it's for and then of course for our vegan friends we have some pickled beets and some hummus and with this we can make an amazing mediterranean roll basically just take out the pickled beets lay them down inside of an uramaki roll a little bit of avocado spread out some of this beautiful hummus roll it up and bang mediterranean roll all right friends we are at the last part which is cutting but before we get into that i'm going to tell you a little bit about japanese sushi knives it all started when the uh these bladesmiths that used to make the swords for the samurais uh had no more swords to make because the samurais were a thing of the past so what they did was they pivoted into making uh sushi knives seeing as sushi became such a popular big thing in japan this was a perfect way for them to pivot and keep their craft alive and then this beautiful example of that would be the takeda hamono blue carbon steel kind of an all-around utility knife that you can pick up over at tosho knife arts in toronto if you should so please all right guys so one last thing before we get into cutting we're gonna go ahead and step up the difficulty level just a notch here and we're going to turn our lobster california roll into a green dragon so first thing you're going to need to do is grab our other half of avocado and we're going to pull that pit out if you don't know how to do that we just grab the heel of our knife and we're just going to tap it right into that pit and give it a little twist and it should come right out now if your avocado is nice and ripe which it always is with roll this way we can go ahead and peel this thing right off okay so we have our half of avocado sitting nicely on our cutting board and what we want to do here now guys is we're going to turn this into an avocado fan what that means is we're going to take our knife and we're going to stand it up perpendicular like this and we're going to be making little slits in this avocado as thin as possible now being very careful again these guys are very sharp we're going to hold our avocado like this we're going to use our knuckles as a guide so now all we got to do is using the tip of the knife make super thin cuts in the avocado you can go nice and slow make sure you get it as thin as you can and we make sure we don't cut ourselves okay you don't actually have to use the whole avocado for this about two-thirds should do the trick okay now what we're going to want to do is fan this thing out so that it's about as wide as a classic mackie roll so all we got to do now is just push forward and down on the front and pull back and down on the back until we are left with a beautiful little avocado fan like so all right all right and now we have our avocado fanned out so what we want to do next is take this whole thing and place it right on top of our roll so we grab our knife and slide it underneath and we can do it in pieces like so and now we have our fan sitting on top of our roll just like that and then we grab our trusty rolling mat we're just gently sliding it right over the top and laying it down making sure that that avocado fan doesn't fall off on either side and we give it a good squeeze adhering that avocado to our lobster california roll we slowly and carefully peel it open revealing our beautiful new green dragon inside all right there it is green dragon now let's go ahead and cut these bad boys okay here we go we're cutting our first roll let's bring back our avocado cucumber roll this one is a lot easier to learn how to cut on seeing as all the rice and everything else is contained inside so first thing we do we grab our knife and remember the water that we used for keeping our hands nice and wet uh we can now bring that back and we're gonna use it for lubing up our knife so all we gotta do is dip the tip of our knife into the water and we're gonna tap on the bottom of our handle making that water drip down the front edge of our knife lubing it up and now what we want to do is use the sharpness of the knife to our advantage so we don't really need to put any downward force down into the roll because we want to avoid squishing the roll we want this to look beautiful after we cut it as well so what we want to do first is put the tip of the knife right in the middle of our roll and then we want to just put our fingers right over the top and with the constant sign motion back and forth we never stop moving our hand until we cut all the way through so starting at the tip we hold our roll and we start sawing never stop go all the way through boom end up with a gorgeous straight cut all right bring it back together get a blade nice and wet and then we're going to turn these two into four again constantly moving that blade back and forth never stopping if we were to stop kind of halfway through and push it straight down we're going to squish this thing and that's the last thing we want seeing as a big part of sushi is presentation so now we turn our four into eight and there we go there's our beautiful avocado cucumber roll which i like to typically plate it like so there it is and next we have our beautiful green dragon so this one guys is getting a little bit more tricky because we have all this stuff on top and the rice is on the outside so if things start falling off don't worry that's bound to happen happens to me all the time and i'm going to show you how to fix everything at the end so just like with the first roll we're dipping our knife in the water tapping the handle letting that water run down the edge of our knife and we're going right down in the middle of our roll with the edit front tip of our knife we grab our roll and we start sawing back and forth never stopping and then we turn the two into four and then the four into eight see sometimes these things fall off no fear i will show you how to fix everything at the end there we go eight pieces good to go i'm just gonna put this guy right back on top and seeing as it's all kind of messed up looking we can go ahead and fix that by grabbing our trusty rolling mat placing it right over the top give it a nice little squeeze and we bring it right back to life that's pretty much it there's our green dragon and the way i like to plate this guy is take them apart and kind of stagger them like this all right and if you have any sesame seeds left over you can also spruce this guy up a little bit like so and there we go you guys that's how we cut our maki rolls all right friends and that concludes the lesson of the day we want to thank you again for joining us and um please encourage you guys to go ahead and put some of your creations up on your socials it's really going to help us out a lot don't forget to tag us at rollthiswaysushi and uh we'll see you in the next lesson

Channel: ROLL THIS WAY SUSHI CATERING & CLASSES

Views: 4,945

Keywords:

Id: GOOW7Zz-QPg

Length: 34min 51sec (2091 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 21 2022