Rice is the most important ingredient when you create sushi. Do not under estimate the small piece of rice under the fish. There are a lot of work to be done before it is served with the sushi.

This is how they do it.

How to make sushi rice(shari):

And after making the rice, you need a good chef to put the rice and sushi fish together. Don’t think it is easy either. Try it yourself! It is really hard to squeeze the correct amount of rice let alone make the rice adhere to the fish. This is one example of how you can do it. Maybe it is too quick a demonstration, but you really need real time practise on this- it is easy to watch but hard to do.

Tamago sushi is one of the few cooked sushi entrees.

Simple but nice, it is a pice of rice with a sweet egg omelette on top. Seriously they usually taste more or less the same since it is made from egg and sugar. Nonetheless, this tamago sushi is one of the best way of using an egg and turn it into a delicacy.

Be careful, this cold egg sushi contains lots of cholesterol because it is full of egg(with soy sauce/fish broth)

Best guide I can find for making tamago batter (the sweet egg omelet)

Sometimes when people translate Uni, they would say sea urchin roe, it is not really correct. It is the organs that produce the roe, the gonad. It sounds kind of gross but I think it is really tasty. (Maybe that is why the restaurant name it sea urchin but not sea urchin gonad)

I have heard that the best uni is red in colour, with orange and yellow as the 2nd tier and 3rd tier. Luckily it all taste good when it is fresh. When it is not, it taste rather disgusting like a rotten egg. Sea urchin lovers beware of your cholesterol level too, it is realy high in cholesterol and fat and you should desist after 2 or 3 pieces (probably you can’t afford it anyways, it cost 3-4 dollars for apiece)

Wonder taste and aftertaste, buttery and fatty. Also love-it-or-hate-it kind of food.   Not recommended for first time sushi-eater or people who don’t like fishiness. But it is my favourite seafood so far. Use of sea urchin includes: chirashi(sashimi bowl), nigiri sushi, sashimi served with cucumber or seaweed, fried rice, steam egg with uni, many chef creation rolls etc….. Let me know if you can think of more.

Tai is a commonname containing a variety of different fishes in the Pagellus catagory. The English commonname is (red), (blackspot) sea bream. I think this is not a very prominent fish in the US since I don’t see them being advertised a lot in Japanese restaurants here.

Probably one of the reason it did not get as popular in US is because of its inflexibility in the use of the fish as a cooking ingredient. It is a shiromi (white meat fish) and is mild in taste. Since sashimi in US has to be flash frozen before consumption, the taste would just be quite undesirable to consume as a nigiri sushi or sashimi. It would not be a good ingredient to make a chef’s creation role either. The texture is quite chunky, and since it is not a fatty fish, you can’t really bring in extra flavour in a fish. The next best thing besides making it in nigiri sushi might be grilling it with a sweet sauce.

Probably you should eat this fish either very fresh or don’t bother to eat it at all. It’s hard to find a good one in sashimi grade.

The abalone in the sushi is usually sliced raw in very thin slices (I wonder if it is poached slightly) . The himo (the legs, the overcoat and the ligament) of awabi is usually served as an appetitizer and is also very tasty.

Abalone is one of the more expensive shellfish among all sashimi. Besides Japanese, Chinese people treated abalone as a premium food. Often served in expensive restaurants, abalone is served steamed in a whole shell, or it can be used as ingredients in soups because of its very fresh taste. However due to over farming of abalone by human, the supply of this delicious seafood has dropped and the price of abalone has increased a lot since then. Most of the abalone that you are eating now might have been farm-raised, and these farm-raised abalone taste a lot more inferior than the wild caught ones (who knows what food they are being fed).

Abalone is high in cholesterol and should be consumed in moderate amount only.