Today I joined the Oyama Senmaida sushi-making workshop.
It’s not regular sushi. This is vegetarian sushi rolled in special ways to form pictures. It’s like the origami of sushi, really. In today’s class we made a camellia and a snail.
For the first 90 minutes, we prepared all of the parts we’d need, cutting sheets of nori to size, steaming greens then trimming them to size, portioning the strips of pickles, making omelettes, and weighing out the rice for each of the two patterns.
It’s a lot of kitchen math to figure out. Each camellia takes 200g of white rice, and 65 g of pink rice. How much rice do you need to make for 5 participants? And what is that in go (the standard unit of rice). If you need 15 pieces of kampyo, will one packet be enough?
Fortunately our teacher, Sugimoto-san, has been doing this a long time and her kitchen prep notes were excellent. I was the only newcomer, so while everyone else moved smoothly through the process, I did the simplest of tasks and I learned how to split the nori neatly, how to color rice pink, and various tricks with saran wrap.
After everything was portioned and plated, we got started with the origami rolling fun.
There was lots of clucking over me and coaching when I misunderstood things. The rice mountains needed to be tall and pointy; the rice should be spread more evenly to the edge. I messed up the placement of nori in the camellia, but with some adjustments we had a solution.
Looking at the ends of uncut rolls, it was hard to tell if I’d formed the correct image or not. But after slicing them, I think the patterns were not too bad. I can certainly see where my mountains should have been taller and pointier!
The wrapped slices, along with a few bits of “leftovers roll” packed beautifully into a box to take home for dinner.
After cleaning everything up – I learned where the dishes and trays go in the Tanada Club cupboards, which feels like a useful accomplishment – we set a date for the next session: Tuesday, April 16th. I wonder what patterns we will make then?
