Minnesota Musing: Sushi Art - Making Each Roll Personalized

Sushi rice is rice that has been specifically cooked with stickiness in mind. Many people cook rice and are successful. Some people cook sushi rice specifically with art in mind.

A person can make a picture with their rice and ingredients with a little imagination. A person needs to picture a roll and transfer the roll to a sushi map. A sushi map would be the design, in logic. If you take a spiral, and count out from the center, you can pretty much transfer the information to a flat sheet of seaweed and create any custom sushi art that you can come up with.

Sushi is short grain rice that is cooked for 20 minutes in a covered pan, no peeking, and is cooked to stickiness.

It works.

What I have learned is that you can count on sushi rice to be sticky. You can also color it. You can cut your seaweed sheets into smaller pieces and you can roll rice into the seaweed sheets and re-roll them into a succession of rolls, until you have flowers, and faces and many other figures that look complicated when done, but are amazingly simple to create.

Simple, unless you fear the sushi. Then, very, very complicated.

I have used only a few ingredients together in my sushi attempts.

My first project, had seaweed on the outside, and sushi rice on the inside. I sliced several shrimp and part of a ripe avocado, toasted some sesame seeds. The sushi rice was flavored with a little rice vinegar, some salt and a little sugar.

My second project, since I am thus inspired, will include imitation crab, some more sesame seeds, another avocado and, although I thought about fresh asparagus, I decided against it. I have pondered about getting some pickled asparagus and using that, since it still has some crunch to it, but has a delicate pickled flavor which may turn out to be a good thing.

Does anyone reading this article, have any specific combinations that are really great? And, has anyone attempted any sushi art?