Sushi: Easy recipes for making sushi at home

by Emi Kazuko, Fiona Smith, Elsa Petersen-Schepelern

Healthy, delicious, modern, everyone loves sushi. But if you thought sushi was hard to make yourself then not so. With clean, fresh flavors and great good looks, sushi has never been so popular.

Sushi is delicious as a quick snack or as part of a more substantial Japanese dinner and makes perfect fingerfood. The term ‘sushi’ is used for dishes based on ‘sumeshi’, meaning vinegared rice, the most vital part of sushi-making. This book explains how to cook the rice perfectly. Start with simple rolled sushi using classic ingredients such as cucumber, tuna or salmon. Once you’ve mastered the easy ones you can explore more adventurous variations. The recipes use easy-to-find ingredients, including everything from spinach, asparagus and carrots to shrimp, crab and smoked salmon. If you thought making sushi was strictly for the professionals, Sushi will amaze you. With these recipes you will never eat ready-made sushi again. There are also recipes for sashimi and the miso soups that traditionally end a sushi meal as well as others for making great accompaniments, like fabulous pickles and three ways with wasabi. You can have parties where you provide the ingredients and guests make up their own hand rolls from their favorite ingredients, or you can do it for them—it takes no time at all! This is really easy party food, healthy snack food, and great food for kids.

Genres: Cookbooks, Japan, Cooking

Paperback

First published December 3, 2005

About the author

Emi Kazuko is the author of numerous food books, and was the winner of the Best in the World Asian Cuisine Book Award from the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards 2001 in Périgueux for the book Japanese Food and Cooking. Another of Emi's books, Street Café Japan has been made into a 3-part TV series transmitted in UK and Australia by the UK Style digital channel. For this, Emi acted as a programme consultant, leading the crew to various culinary centres in Japan.

Emi has also contributed articles to magazines such as Condé Nast Traveller and to bestselling books such as the Eyewitness Travel Guide to Japan. As a professional broadcaster, she has appeared on ‘Woman’s Hour’ (Radio 4) and BBC World Service current affairs programmes.

Japanese home cooking is Emi's strength and she both teaches cooking as well as prepares food for photography. She is particularly thrilled to work as a consultant on food development and leads delegations from the foreign food industry to Japan.

It is Emi's hope that Japanese cooking will one day become part of the daily Western diet. Through her professional work, she is helping to achieve this.

Reviews

[Stephen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The great advantage to reading this book immediately after reading Fiona Smith's "Easy Sushi Rolls and Miso Soups" (London: Ryland, Peters & Small, 2004) is that one immediately recognizes both the photographs and the writing style. Smith was joined by Emi Kazuka, a Japanese, and Elsa Petersen-Schepelern, a Dane, to revise and expand the earlier book. Many of the recipes are identical to those in the earlier text. This book is, however, twice as long and therefore includes many additions: more recipes, more detailed instructions on technique and more varieties of sushi (and sushi-like) preparations. Especially welcome is the addition of an entire chapter on pressed sushi. Less appealing is the suggestion that children may be encouraged to eat sushi by molding vinegar-rice around lengths of hot dog! There is also the most needlessly-complex description of how to make tamago yaki (Japanese omelet) I have ever seen. Skip the 2004 shorter edition and buy this one.

[Sherry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mmmm

[Penny · Rating 5 out of 5]

easy to follow and has some of the techniques that I wanted to read up on. Tomorrows lunch box is going to be more exciting this time around