- 200g short grained (pudding) rice
- One of each of red, yellow and green peppers
- 1" ginger root.
- 2" white turmeric root /Amba Haldi.
- 2" Carrot.
- 50mls sushi seasoning (if you can't get this:
- 25mls rice vinegar (or, failing that, spirit vinegar or even normal brown malt vinegar),
- 25mls water
- 1tsp of sugar dissolved in it
- add a pinch of Mono Sodium Glutamate if you have it, otherwise a pinch of salt instead
You might want to make up a couple of hundred mls or so of this mixture for further use)
- 4-6 sheets of sushi nori
Additionally, you will need:
- A bamboo sushi mat that is made for rolling sushi, or, failing that, a silicone rubber mat;
- A, what is for vegetarians, extremely sharp knife - the sort of thing that you keep in a separate drawer so that there are no accidents involving finger tips.
Buy a sharp knife and only ever using it for this. It needs to be sharp because it needs to cut the sushi nori which is extremely thin and tears easily.
If you are ever going to sharpen it, you will need to use a proper knife-sharpening stone - the metal ring sharpeners will only make it too blunt - the edge needs to be really fine and the jagged edge left by sharpening rings will tear the sushi nori.
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a) Red pepper; b) Yellow pepper; c) Green
pepper; d) Amba Haldi; e) Ginger; and, f) Carrot |
First of all, wash the peppers and scorch them in a naked gas flame by holding them, one at a time, in the flame until the surface changed colour and starts to burn in small areas.
Skin the amba haldi, ginger and carrot.
Cut them into one or so inch lengths
Cut them lengthways so that they are around 2-3mm wide - like matchsticks.
Slice the peppers into similarly shaped pieces.
The idea is that they can occupy a space that is only around 1cm in diameter but ron for a long enough distance down the centre of the sushi roll we are going to make so that they don't fall out when it is cut up.
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Boil the pudding rice until it
is soft and starts to go sticky. |
Boil 200g of pudding rice until it starts to go sticky.
Regarding the type of rice you use, it needs to be short-grained but I have found that some of the 'specialist' rices - those that are for a particular purpose such as 'Arborio rice' for risotto - are cheaper than the so-called pudding rice on the pudding aisle.
If it is short-grained, it doesn't have to have the words 'pudding rice' on the label for it to do the job we want here.
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Sushi seasoning. If you can't
get it, make your own. |
Now add around 50mls of sushi seasoning to the rice and stir it in.
If you haven't got sushi- seasoning, you can make your own with some vinegar, sugar and either monosodium glutamate or salt, according to the proportions in the ingredients list at the top of this page.
The rice should now be sticky and quite tasty.
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Place the sushi nori
on the rolling mat. |
Place a sheet of sushi nori, shiny side down, on the mat.
It needs to be around 5cm away from the top edge so that you can roll it properly.
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Cover two thirds of it with a
6mm thick layer of sticky rice. |
Spoon some of the rice onto the nori and spread it and press it down with your finger tips so that it ends up covering the top two thirds of the nori to a depth of around 6mm.
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Arrange your sliced vegetables
on the rice in a line. |
Arrange your sliced vegetables on the rice, a few centimetres from the top edge such that they are evenly distributed and don't form a cross section of more than around 1cm diameter if rolled together.
If you put much more that that in, then you are going to run out of rice layer when rolling it.
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Roll over the sushi so that the vegetables
are secured then continue rolling. |
Pick up the top edge of the mat and carefully pull it towards you so that the rice layer wraps around the filling.
Continue with the rolling, using the mat to press the rice down to compress it tightly into a circular cross section as you roll it.
Once you have rolled past the end of the rice layer, continue rolling until you get to the end of the sushi layer.
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Slice the rolls into
one inch pieces. |
Carry on rolling, rolling it onto a choppng board.
Use the extremely sharp knife to slice the sushi roll into one inch sections, using a sawing action.
Sushi nori has a very high tensile strength and tears very easily
A badly sharpened knife will tear it and a blunt knife will just not cut it.
You need to cut it neatly into slices.
If you press too hard without cutting it, you will push the filling and the rice away from your cut, along the nori tube.
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Perfect vegan sushi and unlike its fish cousin, this will
last in the refrigerator without putting your health at risk. |
