February 4, 2007
Matthew gave me a few classes at the Institute of Culinary Education for my birthday. My first class was Advanced Sushi & Technique, although there's really no prerequisite. We learned about sushi history, etiquette and ingredients, then spent a couple hours doing prep. After everything was ready, we made fancy, decorative rolls and had a sake tasting. We ran out of time to eat, so we wrapped everything up to go, so Matthew got to sample everything.
We were broken into groups of 4 to prep sushi rice and a huge variety of ingredients.
Here are some of the veggies we'd chopped, diced and julienned for our sushi.
Shaved carrots cooking in dashi (kelp broth), with a parchment paper lid. The carrots would be pureed and used to color some of the rice.
Some of the other ingredients used, including sake, dried shitake mushrooms, Sirracha (for making spicy tuna), vinegar, and rice.
Super fresh hamachi (yellowtail), which we learned how to slice for sushi and sashimi.
Some of our other ingredients included carrot sticks, cucumbers, avocado, and maguro (tuna).
Making usuyaki tamago (thin Japanese square egg pancake) is similar to making crepes (without flour).
Sushi making started with a practice inside-out California roll. Easy!
These are the 3 "advanced" rolls we made - ryougawa maki (two-in-one sushi - mine had crab stick, avocado, spinach and spicy tuna), bara zushi (rose-shaped sushi, with the tamago and rice colored with pureed carrot) and tonbo zushi (dragonfly-shaped sushi, which was very complex and huge).
The innards: (clockwise from the top) two-in-one, rose, and dragonfly sushi.
Back home, Matthew was very impressed with my skills.
We ate an early dinner of these rolls, along with hamachi sashimi, spicy tuna, and grated fresh wasabi I'd brought home from class. There's also a whole piece of unagi (packaged BBQ'd eel) with unagi tare (sauce) we made, which I will have for lunch this week. Yummy!
My masterpiece: (clockwise from the top) two-in-one sushi, dragonfly sushi, spicy tuna roll, and rose-shaped sushi.