The other day we went to a "sushi workshop": a 3-hour hands-on lecture covering the basics of making sushi. The "lecturer" was the Sushi chef from the Hotel Ritz, a funny (and rather patient) Brazilian guy. I am not sure if this kind of workshops is common elsewhere, but the whole concept is quite interesting and original: you pay a fix amount of money (from 30€ to 50€, depending on whether you want to buy a basic "kit" for making sushi at home), they provide you with materials and explanations for you to produce some basic pieces. By "materials" I mean rice cooked in the right way and a small piece of salmon. At the end of the lecture, you eat all the pieces you manage produce along the session (each of us produced about 20 pieces).
Unsurprisingly, in such a short lecture you're not able to learn (nor to practice) the most crucial and delicate aspects of making sushi, namely cooking the rice and cutting the fish. On the one hand, I didn't know that not only you need to use a special kind of Japanese rice (which comes in different sizes) but also you need to add some vinegar to it once it is cooked. This process aims at obtaining a proper consistency in the grains, and depends critically on using a special wooden bowl. On the other hand, fish needs to be extra fresh, and has to be clean up and cut carefully, in order to take the most of it avoiding spines. If you make some mistake cutting the fish then you should go through a (long) process of removing the spines by hand. There is also a small instrument that helps you with that.
The main lesson from the workshop is that making sushi is indeed harder than what it looks. I would love to go to eat sushi to the restaurant of the Hotel Ritz, just to see how our teacher behaves in real life. However, this is extremely unlikely to occur. After this experience, we realize that paying 6€ for 10-12 pieces is not particularly expensive.
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