Learning to make a Vegetarian Sushi

Tango community is diverse and yet closely knitted. It becomes like a family. And everyone is nice to each other and helps each other. I am not talking about the present Indian Tango community- that is nasty one. Actually to be fair, not all of them. Just a few of them- bad fishes, spoiling the whole pond. Soon India/Delhi too will have a Tango community which will be in every which way like any other international Tango community. In my international travels (majorly Tango related), I have been helped in every which way by Tango community- if I needed a Doctor, beautician, dentist, translator, you name it.

I wanted to learn how to make vegetarian Sushi. Turns out that we had sushi chef, who is a student of Daniel. So we had a nice Sushi making demonstration and private class. We got to make sushi and of course, eat it too.

Here is what you need.

Optional to add pickled plums etc.

Pickled plums look like this.

All the ingredients for sushi.

You get rolling mats, called makisu. First cover them in cellophane paper.

Sticky rice.

Wash them nicely.

Boil the sticky rice in 1-1 proportion of water.

Get Sushi Nori, in which the sushi is rolled.

Sushi is eaten with pickled ginger that you can get ready made.

And it is eaten with wasabi. Also ready made paste is available.

Once, you have kept rice for boiling, now prepare Shari-zu, the seasoning for rice. Shari in Japanese means flavored rice from which sushi is made.

For making Shari-zu, take Rice vinegar.

For 4 cups of rice, take 3/4 cup of vinegar.

Add half a cup of sugar to it and a tea spoon of salt.

Heat it. Do not boil it. Just heat it.

Take the Kombu sea weed sheet and cut it to half.

Now cut the vegetables- nicely and finely. Here is the cucumber

Carrots

And this was an art. She took  Daikon radish and started slicing it thin, going around it. It is called Katsuramuki.

She said that the slices need to be so thin that you can read newspaper through it.

She also carved some nice flowers from carrots.

In the meantime, the rice had boiled. Put the rice in some flat dish.

And add the shira-zu to it.

Now start cutting the rice (mixing the shira-zu well in rice and also cooling it).

Also there were butterflies made with carrots.

And butterflies made with cucumber.

And now chopping Katsuramuki- the radish, which was thinly sliced.

Chop it extremely finely.

Now wet your hands with water so that rice will not stick to it. Take ball of rice.

Evenly spread it on the Kombu sea weed.

Press it.

Now invert it upside down, so that the rice faces down and on sheet of sea weed, put your vegetables. In this one, she put cucumber and avocado.

Roll it.

And finally give it shape with your bamboo makisu.

Cut the sushi roll using a sharp knife.

This sushi roll was made with rice side facing up.

Roll it.

This time the sea weed was outside.

In this our sushi chef/ Tango dancer placed avocado outside- This kind of sushi is called Nigiri.

Look at our sushi platter. The ones not so pretty were rolled and cut by me and also Daniel.

And we had a feast.

Daniel Trenner with our sushi chef