Chicago is a good place to find quality sushi bars and restaurants. I really enjoy going out for a fantastic sushi meal, but only on occasion since it can be quite pricey. Last week, I got really psyched to roll my own sushi, and went out on a quest to find all of the right ingredients. If you have the backbone of what you need to roll your own (sushi mat/roller, sushi rice, rice wine vinegar, wasabi powder, nori sheets, pickled ginger), then making it yourself is fairly inexpensive and a lot of fun. I started my quest of finding ingredients in Uptown, at the intersection of Argyle and Broadway. This is known as Little Vietnam (I know, a far cry from the sushi homeland of Japan, but I swear they have almost everything you need to make sushi). I went to two stores, Hoa My Market on Argyle Street and Tai Nam on Broadway (they’re less than a five minute walk from one another). Both stores carry five to twenty pound bags of sushi rice (I think I paid less than $3 for a five pound bag), a ten pack of nori sheets for less than $2, large bottles of rice wine vinegar for less than $3 and wasabi powder for around $3.50.

The pickled ginger, however, I could only find at Hoa My Market, where they had both the pink pickled ginger and the yellow pickled ginger. The difference between the two is that the pink ginger is slightly younger than the yellow. Some brands use beet juice to dye the ginger, if it is too mature during the pickling process. Hoa My doesn’t carry sushi mats, but Tai Nam had them for super cheap (I had to ask for assistance to find these, as they were hidden somewhere near the back of the store). Between both stores, I spent around $20 for the basic sushi ingredients that I needed. As for the fish, I chose to go to the trusty Whole Foods Market in Lakeview. I’m a little unsure of purchasing fish at either of the markets previously mentioned, especially if I’m eating it raw (I’m pretty sure they don’t carry sushi grade fish at Hoa My or Tai Nam). Here’s the thing with Whole Foods and sushi grade fish - they don’t normally carry sushi grade, but they do take orders and can bring in whatever type you’re looking for, within reason.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of this until the guy behind the counter told me. By this point though, I was on a mission and wasn’t going to wait a day or two for a fish order. The next step was to sweet talk the employee at the sushi counter in the prepared foods section of the store. At the counter they had pre-packaged sashimi (thin slices of raw fish, not prepared into a sushi roll) priced a little under $10. sushi rice cooker reviewsInstead of buying that, I kindly asked the lady behind the counter if she had any fish that wasn’t sliced into sashimi and that she’d be willing to weigh out for me and sell. prodotti sushi onlineThis lady was my hero for the day, because she sold me a lovely quarter-pound piece of tuna for a couple dollars less than the sashimi package. how to apply sakae sushi member card

Next time I go to buy fish, I probably won’t do this again (I don’t want the people at Whole Foods to catch on), but instead I’ll just order it ahead of time. There are also other local options such as Hooked on Fish and Wixter Market. As for the vegetables, I picked up a small cucumber, daikon radish and an avocado while I was at Whole Foods. I would’ve liked to buy some asparagus, but it’s not the right season for that.jiro dreams of sushi wiki After several hours of shopping, I was finally home with all of the ingredients I needed to roll sushi (including a couple bottles of sake, because you shouldn’t eat sushi without it). delivery sushi tei indonesiaI made a spicy tuna roll (diced tuna fish mixed with a little sesame oil, Sriracha hot sauce, and sliced green onion), a tuna inside out roll (which I topped with a mixture of Sriracha and mayonnaise to add a little heat), and a couple of veggie rolls.best sushi delivery manila

Rolling sushi at home is a really fun activity and great practice if you want to look like a pro while entertaining in your home. Now that my kitchen is fully stocked with the backbone ingredients, it will be an affordable option to make more often. I would go through the process of making sushi, from the rice to the rolling, but The Chopping Block's Owner/Chef Shelley Young covers that in her How to Make Sushi at Home post. order sushi leicesterPlus, we offer sushi classes several times a month at both of our locations. A Sushi Workshop is the ultimate hands-on lesson in how to make sushi at home.There is nothing I hate more than being wrong. That's why I research things to death to make sure that I am not wrong too often. When it does happen though, it's a great learning experience, like the one I just got on freezing fin fish. has just posted on my How to store fish story has inspired me to finally get off my lazy butt and write up my frozen fish experiments.

I used to be of the conviction that frozen fish was ALWAYS worse than fresh. I know, I know -- Whole Foods and many fish cookbooks like to tell you that previously frozen fish can be even fresher than previously frozen fish because it was frozen at the peak of freshness. Just so that I don't have to use the "not previously frozen" terminology (that just takes too long to type), I'll use the word "fresh" to refer to fish that did not undergo the freezing process. The question I'll try to answer is , not whether it's as safe to eat. Why would I care? I can get plenty of excellent fresh fish here in Boston. The problem is that when it comes to eating fish raw, freshness is not the only thing you have to worry about. Depending on the fish, they might pose an extremely small risk (to read all about them, see my posts on parasites, parts 1 and part 2). But if you want to eliminate that risk completely by killing the parasites, the only way to do it is to freeze the fish for at least 7 days.

Cooking kills them too, of course, but that doesn't help you much with sushi. My attitude to raw fish is pretty laid back. But when I teach sushi classes, I want to give my students an extra precaution option. Some people don't want to take a risk of food-born illness, no matter how minuscule. When I am serving fin fish raw, I only use tuna, farm-raised salmon, farm-raised branzino, and farm-raised yellowtail. The only way to get yellowtail in Boston is flash frozen and shipped from Japan so parasites are not an issue for that one at all. The other fish are fresh, but the odds of them having parasites are practically zero, so I just buy them from a reputable market (The New Deal in Cambridge) and eat them. It doesn't kill bacteria, just temporarily stops it's growth, so freezing inferior fish does not make it "safe". I used to think that all fish would be damaged by freezing. Fish is mostly made of water, and water expands during freezing. This tears the flesh of the fish and makes it mushy.