Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

It’s the Rice that Makes Great Sushi

Making excellent sushi means making excellent sushi rice. No matter how good your fish is, if the rice sucks, your sushi sucks. Unfortunately, my sushi sucks.

I’m working on it, though. I know that apprentices in real sushi restaurants – not the all-you-can-eat variety – can take years to perfect their sushi rice. I might not be able to perfect mine, since I won’t be making sushi rice several times a day for several years in a row, but I’m aiming to make mine good.

Here’s something I came across from an excellent little food-related blog:

A friend once told me about meeting a team of Japanese master chefs. Chief among them, the oldest and most respected, most deferred to, was the man who had perfected cooking rice. Seventy years of experience behind him, and his most revered accomplishment was rice. This is a cuisine, I realized, of finding the complexities in simple things, of perfecting the humble. It’s a cuisine of contemplation, deliberateness and concentration, a cuisine that asks you as a cook and as a diner to understand and to appreciate the difference between rice that is cooked well and rice that is cooked perfectly.

Yes, there is indeed a difference between rice that is cooked well and rice that is cooked perfectly. There is a gargantuan difference between the crap that all-you-can-eat sushi joints give you, and the rice made by a master. My rice isn’t total crap, but it’s not much better than that just yet.

As I told a friend recently, making good sushi rice isn’t just about buying the right kind of rice grains and dumping a few scoops into the automatic rice cooker. Yes, you can make fantastic sushi rice from an automatic rice cooker. There’s no shame in using a machine that will cook your rice evenly and consistently. The issue is what happens after you scoop your rice out of the rice cooker.

My friend was surprised to learn that sushi rice is gently mixed with a combination of rice vinegar, sugar & sake (or real mirin if you’ve got it), and a bit of salt. The trick is to do this well – the right amount of seasoning and mixed in just the right way.

I freely admit that as of this moment in April 2010, my sushi rice sucks because it’s terribly inconsistent. I’ve made rice that was pretty good, and I’ve made rice that was way, way off.

You have to love your food, and you have to have pride in your culinary craftsmanship to make excellent sushi. The fish gets the glory, but it’s the rice where you can tell the difference between a master and a hack. The details are what separate the excellent from the eminently-forgettable.

Pay attention to your sushi rice when you make sushi. Better yet, pay attention to the rice you get when you go each sushi. It’s how I judge the quality of a sushi joint, and if you pay attention a few times, I’m willing to bet that what you’ll start doing, too.