Sunday, May 17, 2009

Temaki Sushi

One of the really cool things about living in the Bay Area is that one gets to meet people from many different parts of the world, and learn about their unique language, customs, culture, and of course... their food!

We are very fortunate to have some very good Japanese friends, who invited us to their home for a roll-your-own-sushi party. They taught us how to make temaki-sushi (hand-rolled sushi). It's easy, fun, and very delicious!

To start, we laid out all the ingredients on the dinner table. There were the mandatory thin sheets of nori (seaweed) which serves as the outer wrapping of the sushi. And then there was a wide assortment of fish, vegetables, egg, tofu, and rice to act as filling.


To create your own sushi, simply take a sheet of nori and add a little bit of rice plus your desired filling. It is very tempting at this point to really load up on the filling. But as we soon learned the hard way, this is not a good strategy...


The next step is to simply roll up the seaweed into a conical shape (or in my case, as close to a conical shape as I can get ;-) and presto! - you've got sushi! If one got too carried away in the previous step and used too much filling, then it will be very hard to roll the sushi without the contents spilling (maybe even squirting ;-) all over the place.

After a few embarrassing attempts I kinda got the hang of it:


From there it's simply a matter of chomping away at your creation until it's gone...


We also enjoyed some great home-made miso soup:


Our friends told us that kids in Japan love temaki sushi not only because it's delicious, but also because of the extra added fun factor of rolling one's own sushi. Judging from our own temaki sushi experience, looks like that statement holds true for us "big kids" as well.

(You can find more recipes using nori - the seaweed used to make sushi - at Foodista.com. Just click on the image below:)

Nori on Foodista

4 comments:

Alisa@Foodista said...

I love Japanese food, but haven't tried making my own sushi...yet, but that sure looks like a lot of fun!I'd love to guide our readers to your site if you won't mind. Just add this foodista widget to this post and it's all set to go, Thanks!

AsianFoodFanatic said...

Hi Alisa

I've added the Foodista widget. Thanks!

-AsianFoodFanatic

foodhoe said...

I love make your own handrolls parties!

AsianFoodFanatic said...

Hi Foodhoe!

Yes, the party was so much fun! I learned a lot about Japanese culture and language that night, in addition to the great food.

cheers