For a long time, sushi was considered exotic, plus maybe a little scary. But now you can find it practically everywhere, even in the grocery store. But what are all the different kinds of sushi?
What Is Sushi?
Sushi is a Japanese dish featuring specially prepared rice plus usually some tipe of fish or seafood, often raw, but sometimes cooked.
And though you might automatically associate the word sushi with raw fish, it’s actually the rice that is the most important ingredient. Indeed, the word “sushi” refers to the sour flavor of the vinegared rice. Regardless of the toppings or fillings, sushi always includes rice.
As a matter of fact, sushi rice is so important that sushi chefs in Japan undergo years of training just to learn how to cook the rice properly, before they ever begin to handle any fish or seafood.
Sushi Rice
Sushi rice is a medium-grained white rice prepared with vinegar plus other seasonings such as salt plus sugar. The usual variety of rice used for sushi is Japonica; in particular, the Koshihikari cultivar.
Japonica is a medium-grained rice with somewhat rounded grains, which makes it noticeably different from the skinnier, long-grained rice that we’re used to in the West, which is known as indica rice. Japonica rice is starchy, with higher levels of a starch called amylopectin than indica rice.
This extra starch causes it to cook up fairly sticky, which makes it easier to eat with chopsticks, plus is ideal for molding it together to make sushi.
Keeping in mind that all sushi is made with rice, but there are really only two main types of sushi—nigiri plus maki.
Nigiri sushi is comprised of an oval-shaped mound of rice with a slice of fish or seafood on top. The fish or seafood is usually raw, but sometimes it’s fermented plus occasionally, such as with eel or shrimp, it’s cooked.
The word nigiri in Japanese translates approximately to “grip” in English. Thus the Japanese word nigiri-zushi translates roughly as “hand-pressed” sushi.
The point is that with nigiri sushi, the rice is molded by hand plus the fish or other topping pressed by hand atop the rice. Sometimes the chef will include a bit of wasabi between the fish plus rice. The stickiness of the rice, along with the moisture from the topping, helps to adhere the strip of raw fish to the mound of rice underneath.
Typical examples of raw fish on nigiri sushi include tuna, salmon, plus yellowtail. Fatty tuna, which comes from the belly section of bluefin tuna, is another popular topping. Garnishes include minced scallions or ginger.
Interestingly enough, despite how you’re probably accustomed to eating it, nigiri sushi is meant to be eaten by hand, not with chopsticks. And while dipping the sushi into soy sauce is acceptable, the correct way to do it is to turn it over so that the fish side goes into the soy sauce, not the rice side. Leaving grains of rice in your soy sauce is considered a major faux pas.