Sushi Rice (Sushimeshi) 寿司飯

Learning how to make sushi rice is really easy and simple. Once you have your homemade sushi rice, you can make any types of sushi such as “chirashi (scattered)”, “temaki (hand rolled)”, “maki(rolled with bamboo mat)”, “temari”(ball-shaped sushi), and for more ambitious home cook, “nigiri”(hand shaped sushi) would be worth trying although it needs practice for a certain time.

The great part of homemade sushi is that you can enjoy with your friends and family who have a different preference in taste. For people who don’t eat fish, prepare variety of meats e.g. spam, grilled beef, pork, and chicken instead. For vegetarians, for example, sliced avocado, cucumbers, marinated eggplant or peppers, and natto (fermented soybeans) are the popular ingredients. It is also an ideal food for gathering because sushi rice contains vinegar which preserves food for longer time.

Japanese loves eating sushi at both restaurants and home, deciding by types of sushi you’d like to have, budget, and special occasion. We hope you can enjoy cooking and eating sushi more casually with our recipe!

How to cook

1. Place the rice in a fine-mesh strainer and rinse it with cold water until the water runs clear.
   
   
2. Put washed rice, 3 cups of water, and combu into a rice cooker and cook it. You don’t necessarily need combu, but I prefer using it as it gives a “umami” flavor to sushi rice.
   
   
   
3. While cooking rice, make sushi vinegar by mixing 5 tbsp of rice vinegar, 2 tbsp of sugar, and 1 and 1/3 of tsp of salt. You can use pre-made sushi vinegar instead.
   
   
   
4. Once the rice is cooked, place in into sushi tubs.
   
   
5. Pour sushi vinegar over rice scoops into sushi tubs.
   
   
6. Mix it quickly with rice scoops while fanning with Uchiwa. If you use the rice scoop vertically, you can mix the rice without crushing the grains
   
   
   
7. Serve. If you don’t eat sushi rice immediately, cover the sushi tub with hard squeezed wet cloth (in Japan, we use a cloth called “sarashi”) to prevent it from being dried and hard.
   

Points

• To make sushi rice, make sure to buy short -grain Japanese rice. With a higher content of moisture, Japanese rice is different from other types of rice. Its unique stickiness and texture is essential for authentic sushi.
• If you have an extra time for cooking,  soak the rice its cooking water for 20-30 minutes before cooking. By doing that, it gives the rice to moisten and cook more evenly.

For our recipes about other types of sushi, see the link below.

Chirashi Sushi ちらし寿司

Temaki sushi (hand-rolled sushi) 手巻き寿司