As promised, here’s a little tutorial on how to make sticky sushi rice like a pro at home!

I buy my sushi rice from the farmer’s market in bulk but I’ve seen it in grocery stores too. This whole bag is a little over a buck!

Sushi rice is different from regular rice in that it’s a short grain, (you can see it’s kind of rounder and fatter) and it’s more glutinous than regular rice, which makes it sticky when cooked.

For two people, 3/4 cup of uncooked rice should be enough.  If you’re super hungry, make a full cup. The rice to water ratio is 1 to 1, easy to remember.

Before you cook it you need to rinse it. Just run some cool water over it until the water that drains out is mostly clear, not cloudy.  This takes out some of the starch so that it doesn’t just form a gluey porridge when cooked.

Put both the water and the rice in a pot that has enough room for it to expand some and steam.  Now here’s where the important stuff starts.  Turn the temperature up to high and wait for it to boil uncovered.  As soon as it boils, turn the heat all the way down to the very lowest setting and put the lid on.  Set a timer for 15 minutes and get ready to make the seasoning.

Sushi seasoning is basically a mixture of salty, sour, and sweet flavors.  There are many recipes, but the one we use is this: A three-finger pinch of salt, 1 tbsp mirin, and 1 tbsp rice vinegar. Mix it together and set aside.

When the timer goes off for your rice, remove the pot from the eye and set another timer for 10 minutes.  Do not open the lid at any time!

When that timer goes off, dump your rice into some sort of plate or dish with high sides. We use a baking dish for this.  Try not to mess with the rice too much from here on out. You want to “cut it” with a spatula and fold it, but don’t stir or press.  Be gentle! Fan it like crazy, fold again, fan like crazy some more.

Pour your seasoning slowly over the back of your spatula and lightly fan the spatula to spread the seasoning around.  Fold and fan like crazy one or two more times.

What you’ll have is a pleasantly sweet and slightly sour rice that sticks together, making it simple to pick up with chopsticks.

It may seem like a lot of work, but really most of the process is spent waiting on the rice to cook.  There’s plenty of time left over to create something to go with it. Top it with a stir-fry or roasted vegetables, maybe some simmered squash and tofu, and you’ve just made a donburi!

Hope this was helpful. Maybe someday I’ll finally get a rice cooker and I can have it do all the work for me!

Jeff and I have both been craving sushi for weeks now, so we thought we’d have a night out at one of Atlanta’s best: Nakato.

We started by selecting a sake.  This one is called Kitaya, a dry sake that tasted very fruity and light.

 

Jeff pouring for the lady first…

We decided to do an omakase dinner for 2.  Omakase means “I’m in your hands,” and it’s where the sushi chef will prepare for you whatever he feels is special or seasonal for that day.  It’s a great way to make sure you are getting the best the restaurant has to offer, and to learn a little about your chef’s style to see if you’d like to sit with him again in the future.

We started off with a whole aji (horse mackerel) for our sashimi (raw fish without rice).  The chef prepared it diced with scallion to be eaten with wasabi, and sliced for eating with ginger.

 

Then we had a sashimi plate of tai (snapper), another type of aji, and bonito (skipjack tuna) with shaved radish and a sticky soy-garlic sauce for dipping.

The bonito was awesome.  I use dried and shaved bonito all the time at home, but I’ve never had it fresh.  I had always just assumed that because it is more commonly dried, that it must just not be a particularly good fish to eat raw.  Wrong!  It was amazing.

 

Then we were given the fried skeleton of the aji that we were served in the beginning.

 

Yes, you eat it bones and all.  Tastes like a crispy fish cracker.

Then we were ready to start our sushi courses.  The chef makes one item at a time and you just keep going until either you tell him to stop….or he stops you.  I’ll tell you right now that we had to be stopped.

First up, fatty tuna torched on top and glazed in soy.  One of my favorites.

 

Pretty sure this next one is aji again.

I forgot to take a picture of this next one, snapper, but Jeff caught it just as it was shoved into my gaping maw.

Next up, ika (squid).  I hate raw squid.  I especially hate that it’s commonly served with a bit of shiso leaf under it, I think the combination tastes like soap.  That and it takes a long time to chew, so the offending flavor is in my mouth for twice as long as anything else.

It’s my own fault though.  I looked the chef straight in the eye and told him that we eat everything, to make sure he wouldn’t neglect to offer us something because he might have thought it was too “adventurous” for us.

 

The chef watches your reactions to each item to try and figure out what you like.  After my conspicuous face-full-of-squid grimace, he offered to make us something soft and sweet.

Behold…ama-ebi with uni, or sweet shrimp with sea urchin roe.

 

Uni is Jeff’s favorite.  His eyes were rolling back in his head.

This is all that’s left of that sweet little shrimp…

While we were gushing about how good that uni was, the shrimp heads were being fried up behind the counter.

 

Again, just shove it in your mouth and bite down.  Tastes like soft-shell crab.

Mmmm…shrimp heads!  I am convinced that the picture behind Jeff here is some kind of calligraphy interpretation of two people gettin’ it on.

Next was salt-water eel, and my favorite of the night, but I neglected to get a picture of it because the delicious smell caused me to shove it in my mouth before I realized what I was doing.

And then ikura (salmon roe), not a fav of mine but one that Jeff really likes…

 

And you know the meal is over when you are served tamago (sweet egg omelet).  This one was sweet and soft enough to be considered a dessert!  Hard to explain what it tastes like, it’s not an exceptionally eggy flavor, more like a pancake soaked in syrup.

 

We ran out of sake just in time.

We were both so full that we didn’t really want to get up right then though, so we both ordered shochu to sip on for awhile.

Shochu is a liquor that can be made from lots of different things.  Mine was made from sweet potato, Jeff had one distilled from barley.  The taste is deceptively clean, you can’t tell just how strong this stuff is, but you can surely feel it!

 

We sipped and talked with the chef about our honeymoon in Japan.  He was telling us a story about how he had lost his wallet in a Tokyo subway with somewhere around $2000 US dollars in it and a bus pass loaded with a huge amount of yen on it that anyone who picked it up could use for themselves.  It was turned in to lost-and-found three days later with everything in it!

That completely lines up with our experiences in Japan.  Everyone was so polite and helpful and respectful.  You didn’t have to worry about someone stealing your stuff if you took your eyes off of it for a split second.  The streets were clean enough to eat off of, the subways were nearly spotless.  People throw their trash away and don’t spit gum on the ground and don’t go shopping in their pajamas even at a convenience store.

Not to mention the food was amazing!  While it’s hard to find a truly authentic experience of Japanese cuisine outside of Japan itself, Nakato does a pretty good job and deserves to be considered one of Atlanta’s best.

The head chef even gave us a few free passes to a Japanese festival for this weekend!  I think we’ll take my little niece and nephew and my sister and gorge ourselves on all that delicious food.  Sounds like a plan!