Insourcing : learned to make sushi at home

[ChipmunkSavings]

I'm not too keen on restaurant meals, and we rarely go out to dinner as a couple (only when family forces us). However, if there is one thing we cannot resist, it's sushi. We always go during lunch hour at the AYCE sushi, but it still runs us 40+$ with taxes and tip. Ordering sushi is very expensive by the roll, so we always hold out for the AYCE, which is not good on the waistline either.

I've finally decided to tackle the beast and try to make sushi at home. There were a few small start-up costs (ex: rice vinegar, special rice, mat, nori sheets), and we used most of the stuff we already had in the fridge. After getting a few practice rolls in, we managed to make rolls under 5min. For 6 rolls, we took 40 min, including cooking the rice, cutting the veggies, making the rolls and cutting them.

I estimate the price per roll as such :
- Rice : 0.20$
- Nori sheet : 0.10$
- Rice vinegar : 0.02$
- Sugar : negligeable
- Carrot/cucumber : 0.10$
- Avocado : 0.20$
- Tempura bits : 0.10$
So, for a vegetarian roll, we are looking at less than 0.75$. Adding tuna or salmon added about 1$ per roll.
Therefore, we made 6 rolls (4 salmon, 1 tuna, 1 veg) for 9.50$, instead of the 40$ of the sushi shop. Plus, we didn't stuff our faces as much, which is all the better.

Since we average 1 visit per month to the sushi shop, this is a potential saving of 360$+ per year. That and it sounds awesome to say you made sushi at home :)

[sparkytheop]

My son taught himself how to make sushi simply because there were no options to buy any in our town.  Now we have a place that serves sushi, and the price is reasonable, but I hope he continues to make his own more often, since he enjoys experimenting.

[o2bfree]

Have you ate at one of those conveyor belt sushi places? The ones near me aren't AYCE, but are quite a bit cheaper than the full-service restaurants.

I sometimes make sushi at home, and find it challenging to make aesthetically pleasing rolls. They sometimes fall apart, or the ingredients aren't perfectly centered. Getting the rice just right is tricky, too. The seaweed around my cut rolls usually seems too soft, which may be because my rice is too wet.

I keep looking for a sushi making course at our local community college. Took one at a local Buddhist monastery, but it was just one afternoon and very basic, so I didn't learn much. Fun though, and we had quite a feast at the end.

[691175002]

Calgary sushi is either awful or jaw-droppingly expensive, but our primary seafood wholesaler is willing to sell to private individuals (cash-only, if you know what I mean) and they will provide the same quality they provide to high-end restaurants if you order in advance and can purchase an entire fillet or entire fish.

Making sushi is extremely labor intensive so every month or so I get together with some friends and we spend a few hours making and eating dinner.

One of us works as a line chef and has passable knife skills so these days we do a pretty smooth job.  I still find Nigiri to be a challenge, as you must both cut attractive slices of fish and form properly sized rice balls that won't fall apart.  There are some good youtube videos to get started, but a lot of it is muscle memory and practice.

I find the biggest challenge of sushi-night is variety.  At all-you-can-eat, you might be having small portions of 5-6 different fish along with a variety of fruits/vegetables and some deep fried appetizers.  At home, serving even two types of fish feels like a stretch.

Aside from the obvious ingredients, we also fry the salmon skin for rolls, fry/slice a small steak for rolls, make tamago for nigiri/rolls, and make teriyaki sauce.

[o2bfree]

I've also made my own tosa dipping sauce. A typical recipe includes soy sauce and/or tamari, sake, mirin, kombu, and bonito flakes. You cook it all together, let it stand overnight, then strain through cheese cloth to get the bonito flakes out. Then comes the beautiful part: you put it in a jar let it age 6 months to a year, or longer. It develops a complex, slightly smokey flavor that makes plain soy sauce taste shockingly crude.

[ChipmunkSavings]

I don't think there are conveyor-belt sushi places here unfortunately.
We made basic sushi rolls ; no nigiri nor hand rolls, as there are not our favorites.

A real time saver is a rice cooker. We have the one you put in the microwave, and it does wonders. We put the rice in for the appropriate amount of time, and out came the rice, perfectly sticky. I added rice vinegar, salt and sugar as seasoning.

Cutting veggies was pretty quick, and our salmon/tuna was pre-sliced by the butcher at no extra cost to us.

Spicy salmon, crispy salmon, dragon roll and veggie are pretty much 90% of our orders, so it's nice to know it's very doable at home.