Laura was given a
sushi-making lesson as part of her birthday gift from work. The course was at Samsi, in Spinningfields, a new branch in the family of the best Japanese restaurant chain in Manchester. We arrived, and were sat in front of
My Neighbour Totoro until ate our starter arrived:
miso soup; vegetable
gyoza; chicken
yakitori. Lovely!
The lesson began with a description of how sushi rice is prepared and cooked. The properties that this imbues the rice with – stickiness most of all – are essential for making sushi. Sushi rice is short and fat, like pudding rice, or risotto rice. We learned how to wet our hands when handling the rice: enough that the rice wouldn’t stick
too much, not so much that the rice balls would fall apart.
We started with cucumber
maki, spreading rice over the seaweed, adding the filling, and then rolling it up using a mat (maybe made of bamboo?). Next up were avocado and salmon
California rolls, inside out
maki with more rice, and more filling. Much the same process as the
maki, but for some reason – my own clumsiness? – I managed to leave a big piece of salmon hanging out of one end. Oops! Laura’s
California roll was much neater. Clearly she had the hang of it far better than me!
The size of the rice blocks for our
nigiri also caused me a few issues – I kept making them far too big. That’s my greedy guts getting me into trouble again! We made a pair of salmon
nigiri each, and then one with tuna. I struggled with getting the salmon to stick to the top of the rice. “If you hold the fish too long, the temperature of your hand starts to cook it,” said the instructor. Blimey!
We finished with two cone-shaped
temaki, one with avocado and salmon, and one with cucumber. The wrapping for this was all done in hand, rather than with a mat. We smeared rice on part of the
nori, added the fillings diagonally, then tucked in and rolled up the cone, sealing it with a little sticky rice. The avocado and salmon
temaki looked like a bouquet of pink flowers.
To wrap up, we chopped and prepared the
maki and
California rolls, and laid them on the plate. The finishing touch was to sculpt a leaf from wasabi paste to decorate the plate. I was terrible at this, and ended up settling for a quasi-diamond-ish lump. Laura’s leaf was much better.
“How do you say ‘Thank you’ in Japanese?” Laura asked me.
“I think it’s
arigato gozaimasu, but I’m not sure of the pronounciation, nor of the etiquette around bowing.”
“Okay. We’ll just say it in English then,”
As for the taste? I loved it. And Laura? “I liked making it, but I don’t really like
eating sushi.”
