Summer’s finally here and sushi is the perfect food for a roasting hot day as it is great for barbecues, picnics and summer buffets and will fill you up without weighing you down.
This delicious seasonal recipe is very flexible – you can use tinned tuna steaks or tender chunks of raw tuna meat and add the spicy kick with either a sprinkle of chilli powder or a dash of hot or sweet chilli sauce.
Temaki hand rolls are the perfect food for a summer garden party or eating al fresco with friends as you all build your own. Just stuff the cones of nori full of sticky rice and tasty topping and eat immediately. If you are planning a picnic, then get out your rolling mat or sushi magic rolling machine and try making this recipe as fiery maki rolls instead. That’s the beauty of sushi – lots of ways to make it and lots of ways to eat it.
As always, the first step is to make your sticky and delicious sushi rice; you can make it from scratch on the hob or pop it in a rice cooker.
Once it’s cooked, put it in a hangiri or large bowl and mix in some rice seasoning. You can buy ready made rice seasoning but I like to use a dressing made of of 2 tablespoons of rice vinegar, 1 tablespoon of mirin, 2 teaspoons of castor sugar and 1 teaspoon of salt.
While your rice cools you can make the spicy tuna filling and for this version I am going to use raw tuna and chilli powder.
Chop the raw tuna steak into small chunks and mix with 1.5 teaspoons of Japanese mayonnaise and half a teaspoon of chilli powder. You may want to vary the amount and strength of the chilli powder depending on your taste. Make sure the tuna is completely coated in the spicy mayonnaise mixture and you are ready to roll.
Take a sheet of nori seaweed and slice it in half. Put a piece in the palm of your hand with the rough side up. First take a dollop of rice and spread it in a diagonal line across of the nori sheet, then spoon some of the tuna mix on top.
Roll the seaweed up into a cone shape and you have a nice, spicy tuna temaki that’s ready to eat and is great with slices of pickled gari ginger and a crispy green salad.
This recipe also works well with salmon, just make sure you get a nice fresh piece of sashimi-grade fish to get the full flavour of you are going to eat it raw.
The days are getting shorter and the weather’s getting colder, making it the perfect time of year for enjoying a warming soup.
In Japan, Miso soup comes with everything, whatever the weather. In fact, along with rice it is one of the key ingredients of a traditional Japanese breakfast and most of the 128million or so people that live there will have Miso soup at least once a day.
It is a clear broth which sometimes has chunks of seaweed or tofu in it and has a distinctive smoky taste. It normally comes served in a small, lacquered bowl with a lid and is drunk straight from the bowl with the solid ingredients eaten with chopsticks.
The Miso stock is known as dashi and is a fish stock made from dried fish and kelp. Miso itself is a seasoning made from a base of barley, rice or soybeans which are fermented to form a salty paste. For the soup, Miso paste is softened and mixed into the dashi. The other ingredients are added according to taste or regional variation and can include mushrooms, vegetables, tofu, daikon radish or wakame seaweed to name a few.
There are different types of Miso pastes which give a different character or flavour to the soup which, again, vary according to the region you are visiting and the season.
Miso soup normally comes at the start of your meal and, in Japan, usually precedes a salad course. It is surprisingly filling, even though it is mostly a broth, and is known for being very low in fat and having a high a high vitamin content.
If you don’t fancy making a dashi from scratch, there are a number of delicious instant Miso soup brands available which just need a kettle and are ideal for lunch. Tasty Miso paste can also be used as a marinade for meat, fish or vegetables or as a stock for noodle soup.
It is a versatile and unusual flavour that’s quite unique but can add a rich smoky dimension to your meals this autumn.
The spring cherry blossoms in Japan are world famous but Autumn is equally beautiful as the leaves on the trees change into vibrant, fiery colours known as Koyo.
The Koyo starts in mid-September on the northern island of Hokkaido and slowly moves southwards until it has transformed the whole country by the end of November.
This recipe uses some delicious autumn ingredients and is a fabulous accompaniment to both Japanese and Western dishes. It is unusual but tastes great and the ingredients are easy to find at Sushi Sushi and your local supermarket.
Take 2 medium sized, dried shitake mushrooms, soak them in a bowl of warm water for 30 minutes then squeeze them dry, cut off the stems and chop them up roughly.
Cut about 200g of chestnuts into quarters – they are easy to find at this time of year and can be bought fresh, tinned, dried or vacum packed. Each requires a slightly different preparation method but all give food that delicious smokey flavour.
Peel and dice a small sweet potato.
Mix the mushroom, chestnuts, sweet potato, a teaspoon of salt, 2 tablespoons of soy sauce and 2 tablespoons of mirin.
Add this mixture to a pan on the hob or a rice cooker and mix with your uncooked sushi rice and the required amount of water to cook it (just follow the instructions on the packet)
Cook the rice for 10-15minutes or as directed and, once it’s cooked. leave it to stand, covered for a further ten minutes.
Use a wooden rice paddle to break it up and served sprinkled with sesame seeds and daikon radish.
Enjoy!
 With the exception of sashimi most sushi dishes contain some amount of rice (even sashimi gets some rice on the side usually!).
To make great sushi you need the right sushi rice, cooked to perfection and seasoned with the right sushi rice seasoning. To make sushi rice you need a short grain rice. Sushi rice such as Koshihikari Japanese rice, short grain glutinous rice, sometimes known as pearl rice, is the best kind of rice to use. Similar to risotto rice but very different in taste.
I have used risotto rice before but for the best sushi rolls, use a branded “sushi rice” like Akitakomachi all readily available at many online Asian grocery stores. It’s worth the extra hunting around for ingredients as the taste is fantastic and it will have the correct adhesive qualities after all, rice is the biggest part of your sushi meal!
There are many kinds of rice available (some estimates say up to 38,000 varieties!) but sushi rice is special for it’s tendency to bind together perfectly for sushi. All these kinds of rice can be divided into three distinct categories; long, medium and short grain rice. All rice used in traditional sushi is short grain white rice. Along with the length of rice, varieties are also divided up by colour and content of fibre. Short grain sushi rice is almost round and is very starchy even when washed. It is this starch that makes sushi rice so sticky and great for the job of making things like nigiri.
Sushi, as we have all heard, is very healthy. The sushi rice plays a big part in this. White rice is basically brown rice with the husk polished off. This process removes a lot of the fibre from the rice. However it also leaves lots of carbohydrates to give you energy. In maki for example, there is a great deal of fibre from the nori wrapped around the roll, add to this all the vitamins and oils from the fish and you can see how healthy a diet that regularly includes sushi is. |
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