The rouge fruit, alongside carrots, provides a touch of red, and is a nod to her longtime home in Los Angeles, where pomegranate trees thrive. “They are not a traditional ingredient in sushi, but they work!” she writes. In her cookbook, Japanese Home Cooking, Sakai includes a recipe for chirashi sushi for autumn that features pomegranate seeds. Once you understand the elements, you can swap in ingredients based on what you have and what you’re in the mood for.Īs with sushi – and all Japanese dishes – seasonality is a factor. A variety of flavours and all five colour groups appear in this spring-into-summer chirashi sushi recipe – but think of it as a template. It’s a way to think about using all of your senses (while cooking and eating), all of the flavours (sweet, sour, salty, bitter and umami) and the five basic colours – white, yellow, red, green (or blue), and black (or brown or purple) – as you compose a dish. It’s not absolutely essential, but the one overarching concept to keep in mind when preparing chirashi sushi is gogyosetsu, or the Japanese system of grouping things into fives. Nori, furikaki, sesame seeds, fresh ginger and tender shiso leaves are common seasonings. Raw fish and shellfish are popular options.Įggs, gently fried into thin sheets and sliced into ribbons, are a traditional addition. To make it, sushi rice is prepared, seasoned and then topped with a smattering of fresh, cooked, pickled, preserved, smoked, dried, seared or otherwise cooked vegetables, fruits and/or proteins. It can be all vegan or vegetarian if you want.” Really, the possibilities of a chirashi are infinite, because it doesn’t have to be about the seafood. “For chirashi sushi, you can use whatever you have. “When I teach a sushi class, I never teach nigiri sushi or anything you would have at a sushi bar, because that’s reserved for sushi chefs,” said Sonoko Sakai, a cooking instructor, author and grain activist who makes chirashi almost weekly. Literally translated as “scattered sushi”, it’s a homestyle preparation that’s far more casual than what you’ll find at most sushi restaurants. (Unless you are, or live with, a sushi chef… Then, please invite me over for dinner!)īut there’s another way to prepare sushi at home – no fancy knife skills required. You can certainly make sushi in your home kitchen, but it is, in my mind, impossible to re-create the omakase experience at home. There’s an intimacy to it, an unspoken trust and palpable respect for the ingredients, for the skill of the chef and the palate of the diner. I miss sitting at a slim restaurant bar, a sushi chef on the other side confidently passing composed bites across the invisible line separating the dining room from the kitchen. THE WASHINGTON POST – One of the things I’ve missed most during these past few years of limited social engagement and near-constant uncertainty is the calm elegance of omakase.
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