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. busy sushi bar online gamesSome brands use beet juice to dye the ginger, if it is too mature during the pickling process. sushi without rice caloriesHoa 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). how to eat low cal sushiBetween both stores, I spent around $20 for the basic sushi ingredients that I needed.bamboo sushi roller walmart

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). food delivery london batterseaHere’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.takeout sushi pittsburgh Unfortunately, I wasn’t aware of this until the guy behind the counter told me. japanese sushi knife saleBy 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. Instead 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. This 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. 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.

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). I 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. 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. Plus, 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.

Photo by Daniel Berehulak /Getty Images This question originally appeared on Quora, the best answer to any question. Ask a question, get a great answer. Learn from experts and access insider knowledge. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google Plus. Answer by Kaz Matsune, private sushi chef, sustainable fish director at Breakthrough Sushi: Traditional Edomae or Tokyo-style sushi chefs consider teate, or prep work, an important part of their skills. Teate consists of salt-and-vinegar curing, lightly searing and smoking, or soy marinating as the techniques to enhance the flavor of fish, carrying the tradition from the time when Nigiri was invented. Edo-style sushi chefs thrive on their teate techniques to make fish taste better than when they were raw. Therefore, any sushi showcasing the sushi chef's teate would be a good one to test his skill. One of them is kohada, or gizzard shad. To make the perfect kohada is a challenge. The reason is in its recipe. It goes something like this: After cutting, fileting, and cleaning kohada, sprinkle some salt and let it sit for 15 to 40 minutes, then marinate it in rice vinegar for 10 to 30 minutes.

If you read it carefully, you will notice that the recipe is very vague. There is nothing to tell you if you should marinate in salt for 15 or 30 minutes. The only way to understand this recipe and master it is through experience. No one can teach you—it can only be learned by each person. One must first watch other sushi chefs filet hundreds and hundreds of kohada, salting, vinegaring, watching how their colors turn and how the taste changes after a day or two. After watching the process, one must practice by doing the same, making lots of lots of mistakes until one develops one's taste and eye to determine how long to marinate the fish in salt and vinegar and how long to let it sit before kohada is ready to be served. I suppose it's something similar to wine-making, where one's experience and developed senses are required, and even then you'll never know how it will turn out in the end. Saba is another one that requires curing in salt and vinegar, just like kohada. The only difference is that it's easier to filet and cure because saba is bigger than kohada.

The other Edomae sushi that require teate are: anago (sea eel), ni-hamaguri (boiled clam), tako (boiled octopus), and ebi (boiled shrimp). Any sushi that requires no teate is not a good indicator of a sushi chef's skill because it reveals limited techniques. Uni or toro both require very little or no teate and therefore are not a good choice of sushi to test chef's ability. If given the same ingredients, I would say it would be very difficult to tell the difference between uni made by the master chef and the one made one a beginner—all one has to do is put it on top of sushi rice. In Japan, if you want to know how good a sushi establishment is, order tamago (egg custard). Though not fish, tamago is a good sushi to test a chef’s skill because it involves heat control. Training of tamago usually comes after a sushi chef masters the fish preparation, so good tamago means the chef has spent a reasonable amount of years in training. There is one sushi that sushi chefs use to test other sushi chefs’ skills: sumaki, or rice roll.

It’s seaweed-out hosomaki (thin roll) with just sushi rice inside. Eating and looking at sumaki can reveal several things: First, it tells you a lot about sushi rice. Because sumaki has no fish or vegetables inside, you can only taste the flavor of sushi rice and seaweed. The combination of sushi rice and seaweed is the base for any traditional Japanese sushi rolls, so it will reveal the level of chef's skill in making sushi rice and forming the roll. It will also tell you chef’s choice in reaching the recipe, such as: Type of rice vinegar: regular versus red rice vinegar Type of rice: region and kind (Sasanishiki, Koshihikari, California, Oregon, etc.) Single rice or blended: Many high-profile sushi establishments blend several types of rice Type of nori (seaweed) It's important to understand that one is never better than the other—just because one sushi chef uses red rice vinegar over regular rice vinegar does not automatically mean his sushi is better.

It's the reasoning behind it that matters. Second, hosomaki should have rice evenly placed so that if they are bound together, there should be some space in between rice, so that if you were to pour some soy sauce from the top, it will run through to the sushi rice to the bottom of the roll. This is very very very difficult to achieve because you need to keep each grain of rice intact when you make sushi rice as well as when you apply it on nori and roll it. According to chef Hachiro Mizutani, a former apprentice of Jiro Ono, of Sushi Mizutani in Tokyo, the only person who can make this perfect hosomaki is Jiro Ono. Because sumaki is only made when a master or trained sushi chef wants to see another chef's skill, it's not on a menu. In fact, if you are not sushi chef, you will never be able to order it—or more like you should never order it at all. So what should you order instead? I would order kappamaki (cucumber roll) or tekkamaki (tuna roll), both of which are thin, seaweed-out rolls.