For my birthday Sandra surprised me with a 2-hour sushi making course. The two of us have certainly eaten our fair share of sushi so it made sense that we should actually learn how it is made. When I was studying Japanese back at school, I won’t say how long ago that was but fair to say its in the double digits at least …, I remember going out on a excursion to watch someone make sushi. The two things I remember from that day was that rice was cooked in a rice cooker and that you needed to use a bamboo mat to make your sushi.

At the Your Sushi sushi making course you not only learn how to roll your sushi you also learn how you actually make sushi rice (it involved a lot more than whacking your rice into a rice cooker!), how to prepare some vegetables and then how to roll four different types of sushi. We actually learnt quite a bit in two hours – even given that we had time to muck around prepping veges and creating our own sushi rolls.

The good thing about the class was that it was only a small group (there is only ever a maximum of 12 students) and it’s a very hands on session. The surprising thing about the class was that we were taught by a non-Japanese sushi chef – Chef Manu (Emmanuel)Letellier – now he was certainly not from Japan but he sure new his stuff! One of the facts he imparted to us was that before you can get to the stage of even being considered a proper sushi chef that you would have to spend many years first learning the art of perfecting sushi rice not to mention all the other training that goes into learning about the ingredients and then the presenting!

As anyone who has ever cooked rice in their life one of the very first steps in cooking it is to rinse off the starch. With sushi rice you could be washing it up to nine times before being satisfied that you’d gotten rid of as much starch as possible. Eating sushi you can taste a certain flavour – and this comes in preparing the rice by mixing in a whole lot of vinegar, sugar and a touch of salt (about 600:395:5 ratio.) I was surprised by just how much sugar goes into the sushi rice – and here all along I thought it was, if not healthy, at least not unhealthy! Then after your rice is ready you have to wait a certain amount of time for it to cool etc. etc. Anyway, long story short – the rice was prepped for us and our hands on bit started with us preparing the veg and then, the fun part, making our sushi!

As I mentioned earlier we learnt how to make four styles of sushi: Hosomaki (thin rolls), Futomaki (fat rolls), California rolls (technically a type of maki or roll with very specific ingredients) and urmaki (inside out maki) and then also learnt about some presentation skills. Just imagine that making just four rolls took us quite some time.

The class certainly gave me a better appreciation of the effort that goes into making the sushi that I devour. If there is any kind of food that really typifies the Japanese traits its gotta be sushi. The amount of detail and care that goes into making the sushi (e.g. making the vegetables or ingredients precisely square, or making sure the item is balanced) is exactly how I know the Japanese to be – precise, neat, and taking great care.

The class was an excellent way to spend the afternoon, and even better, we got to take away our creations for nibbling on later!