Can You Make Sushi With Regular Rice? Avocado Sushi Rolls - Inside and out!

Today on Passion for Food we're going to be experimenting with the ultimate finger food, sushi. I thought it would be interesting to try and grain a little insight into whether or not you could use regular and by regular I mean long grain rice to make sushi. Now I know we've been told by practically every sushi chef and recipe on the internet that you have to use short or medium grain rice but is that true or is that just a little racist? Well I'm not scared of a little controversy so let's roll on out of here and find out. But let's take a moment to talk about rice. On the left here we have some medium grain extra fancy sushi rice. As we can see the grains are squat but not exactly round. And then on the right we have our regular long grain white rice. And while there are some minor differences to the actual starch content of the granules we're talking about here, mainly in the amelus content of short and medium grain rice, for the most part what we're talking about are big hunks of starch. So I really don't see what we grain from arguing about the specific size and shape of them. So into our favorite rice pot we go with one cup of regular long grain white rice along with one and three fourths cup of water. Now normally with long grain white rice I just use the two to one ratio but because I'm making sushi with this rice today there's not a lot of wiggle room. I want this to come out exactly perfect. Now I know my sushi aficionados out there are watching this thinking not only did this guy use the wrong rice but he didn't even rinse or soak the rice first. Freaking moron! Well hang on there's method to my madness. The reason I don't want to rinse this long grain rice is that little bit of extra starch on the outside is actually going to make it a bit stickier which in this situation is exactly what we want. So wait just until that comes up to a simmer and then we're going to slap a lid on this, turn the heat down as low as it'll go and cook it for exactly 15 minutes. So now that I've gotten myself into hot water with the rice let's go ahead and do a couple of side projects for our sushi. Starting with this super simple garlic chili mayo consisting simply of one cup of mayonnaise of your choice and about a tablespoon or so of this garlic chili sauce. Sriracha sauce or other spicy condiments of your choice will also work fine here. We'll just give that a real quick mix and that's it. Next up I want to toast some sesame seeds. Now you can skip this but I wouldn't unless you already have toasted sesame seeds which hey that's a little weird but in a good way. Seriously though toasting our sesame seeds is going to take the flavor on our avocado sushi roll from like a six all the way to a ten. It really makes a big difference. I just have these in a non-stick pan over high heat but don't go anywhere this really doesn't take but a couple of minutes. Once we can smell that sesame roasting we need to get them moving in the pan a little bit. So just give that a quick toss back and forth. Don't worry if a couple escape it's not like we're going to be finding roasted sesame seeds in weird places in the kitchen for the next six months or anything. But once we see that noticeable browning and smell that beautiful roasted sesame that's all we have to do. We'll pull these right off and once 15 minutes is up on our rice what we're going to do is actually cut off the heat and just let this sit here for an additional 10 minutes. Don't open the lid don't move it off the heat just leave it alone 10 minutes. Now normally with my rice I'm not quite so fastidious but we are making sushi with this rice so it needs to be absolutely perfect which it is. So we'll just dump that out into a large metal bowl. I like metal for this because it's a great conductor of heat it'll allow the rice to cool down faster. A large wooden bowl would also be a great choice not because as some sushi chefs suggest it absorbs excess moisture from the rice it doesn't but wood is also a great heat transfer agent so it'll help your rice cool down fast. But there's one final critical step we need to season our rice. Per 1 cup of rice we want 1 fourth of a cup of rice wine vinegar, 1 tablespoon of sugar, and about a half a teaspoon or so of salt. Just give that a quick mix until everything is dissolved and we just want to get this gently mixed in with our rice. I like to use a spoon like this and kind of come up from below the rice you don't want to be pressing down into the rice and mashing those grains into each other. Once all of our seasoning liquid is in there you just want to kind of continue mixing the rice around like this for about a minute or so. It'll both help develop the stickiness get that seasoning mixed in and help cool the rice down. Once we're happy with that I like to let it sit for a couple of minutes to cool down a little more before our final roll call assessment. One important tip when working with rice like this is you want your hand to be wet otherwise the rice is just going to stick right to you. And ideally what we want to see is when we squeeze the rice together just with a little bit of pressure it should be able to hold its shape like that. And this was the perfect texture so let's go ahead and get rolling here. This is enough rice to make eight of the half rolls I'm going to show you here today or four full rolls. So we have our sheets of nori and I'm going to go ahead and split these in half. I like making these half rolls because you get perfectly bite-sized pieces. I always feel like with the full-size sushi pieces I'm either wanting to bite it in half or stuff the whole thing in my mouth both of which feel like a social faux pas. Anyway in addition to our split nori we also want one of these little bamboo rolling mats covered in plastic. Now you can skip that and just use a piece of plastic wrap if you want. I do that quite often when I'm feeling too lazy to cover this thing. We want to make sure the nori is shiny side down. We want to put our rice on the rough side. And once a grain we want to make sure our hands are nice and damp to avoid a potentially sticky situation. And just get some rice spread out on our nori. Now don't press down too hard on the rice we want to maintain those great grains. Now that our rice has been pressed into service we just want to add some of these beautifully toasted sesame seeds. And on to the star of the show here our avocado. Now be careful when you're cutting these in half you know anyone who cuts their hands off while doing this well that's not my fault. And as far as scooping the flesh out of here instead of using a knife I like to use a spoon because you know the avocado is curved and the spoon is curved so everything just seems to work out best that way. So just get your avocado in a nice even layer on your rice and here's a pro tip for you add just a pinch of salt to the avocados those benefit greatly from just a little seasoning. And we just want to use our rolling mat to kind of guide the process as we hold the filling a little bit with our hands and we just want to connect those two ends together just like that. And just give it a slight press to bring everything together not too hard. And there we go we've done a pretty good inside job on our sushi here but what about the sushi with the rice on the outside? Well don't worry that procedure is exactly the same except once we're to this part we're gonna go ahead and flip this over. And with our toasted sesame seed covered rice facing down we're gonna go ahead and layer in our avocados along the shiny side right in the middle here. So a nice even layer and then we just want to season these with a quick pinch of salt. And just like before we want to use the mat to guide the process as we just gently hold that filling in place with our fingers and just roll that over until those two edges connect just like that. Just give that a gentle press to seat all of our ingredients together and that's it our inside out avocado roll is ready. So all that's left is to get these sliced up. This part can be a little tricky sometimes it does help to have a really sharp knife that's just a little bit damp. And unlike when you're cutting something like an onion you want to cut this more like bread with gentle sawing motions you don't want to be pressing down too hard on this. But that's it our beautiful avocado sushi rolls are ready to serve. Oh if only they could shashimi now. And of course as the final touch we just want to top that with some of our garlic chili mayo sauce that we made earlier. So just to answer the ultimate question can you make sushi with regular long grain rice? Yes, yes you can. I really hope you've enjoyed today's episode of Passion for Food. If you have give me a thumbs up below and don't forget to subscribe and hit that little bell so you don't miss our future videos. And don't forget to check out one of our other great recipes playing on the screen now. This has been Graham with Passion for Food.