The Art of Sushi - Making Avocado Rolls

We love eating sushi. We have sampled sushi from about a dozen places in bay area and finally arrived at one place we really like. 

It always amazes me to see so much subtle art is there in sushi making. Even though the ingredients are few and simple, the taste and texture of sushi can be so varied! It is almost like every chef makes the sushi his or her own in a unique way!

Sushi is great but the only problem is eating out can get expensive rather quickly, not to mention the hour or more wait at really good places can be tiring with young kids. I wondered instead if we could attempt sushi at home. To begin with just simple avocado rolls. It seemed very simple at first but boy I was in for a surprise!

It took us upwords of 10+ attempts to produce a recipe that comes even close to the one we really liked. After a couple of not-so-great attempts, I had a smart idea - to buy sushi rice from the restaurant and then make different sushi rice at home (vary water, cooking times and seasoning) until I could get the same texture and taste - and voila, now that the rice is perfect, the home-made sushi rolls are a treat!

The recipes are fairly straight-forward. I used this base recipe to make rice for sushi in instant pot. I reduced the cooking time to 9mins instead of 12 which suited better for our rice. I also reduced the vinegar a bit than recommended, the full quantity was a bit too strong for the daughter.

And I practiced my sushi rolling techniques from this illustrative article.

Here are my key learnings from the dozens of times making sushi and trying to improve upon the techniques:

Ingredient tips:
  1. A trip to an Asian store is well worth it to get the right tools and ingredients: a good quality sushi grade rice, a sushi mat, rice vinegar and nori (seaweed wrapper).
  2. There are prepared sushi seasonings sold in Asian stores. I found them to be a bit mild and on sugary side; making your own is not that difficult and highly recommend so you can adjust to your taste.
  3. Buy good quality nori sheets - there is a whole range there. The cheaper once can get a bit chewy quickly.
Rolling tips:
  1. Place the nori on sushi mat, rough side up. Spread rice on nori sheet. Don't press rice too hard, instead gently spread it using your wet fingers. Leave atleast a half an inch border on the edge of nori farthest away from you. You will use this empty edge to seal
    the roll.
  2. FIllings (avocado in this case) should be thinly and evenly sliced and placed at about 1/3 point on the sheet closer to you.
  3. Dab the empty edge away from you with water, just before you roll.
  4. Follow a roll and press, roll and press model. Don't press too hard, gently.
  5. While rolling sushi, always keep a large glass full of water next to you - really helps to keep the rice from sticking to your hands and also to clean the knife in between cutting the rolls.
Cutting and serving sushi:
  1. Cutting the sushi roll is a learnt technique. Use a non-serrated knife, don't put a lot of pressure (unlike how you would cut a potato or zucchini); instead move the knife gently forward and backwards until it cuts through the nori layer, rice and then another nori layer.
  2. And to top the experience, you really need a good quality prepared wasabi in a tube. There are many varieties - experience until you find the one you like. The wasabi powder didn't really have much punch for us.
It is a lot of fun and a lot cheaper to make sushi at home. I highly recommend you try it - embark on your own adventure to achieve that sushi perfection and let me know how it goes! Good luck!