Sushi Class

The day we went to Tokyo on the Saturday before Mother's Day, we stopped for a few hours in Yokohama for a sushi making class that Sachiyo had arranged for us.  It was so much fun that I would highly recommend it to anyone visiting Japan.  Our teacher was a professional sushi chef named Hidetomo Mizobe or "Hide", who teaches out of his home by appointment.  

To become a sushi chef requires nine months of classes and then you must pass seven exams.  Hide works a day job but loves making sushi so much that he teaches on weekends and hopes to make a career out of it someday.  He has wonderful teaching skills and used a very professional slide show throughout our class.

He started out by giving us an exam and we had to raise our paddles with a green check or a red X to answer each question about sushi and Japan in general.  

It was a lot of fun and, of course, Nick won the contest with the most correct answers but he gave us all prizes just the same. 

I got some really nice Japanese origami paper.

He provided all the tools and ingredients on how to make sushi and afterwards he e-mailed the full slide show to us.  On the last night of our Japan trip, we made a huge sushi feast at Nick and Sachiyo's house using the slide show and we all remembered quite well all the steps involved.  

The main trick to making sushi here at home is to find where to buy good sushi fish.  Nick and Sachiyo have a neighborhood fish market they go to. 

We walked to it from their house and the owner had all our sushi fish cut perfectly for our dinner, as Sachiyo had told him ahead of time of our plans. 

A few days later after we'd been out on day trip to Chiba, Sachiyo picked up a sashimi dinner from this same fish market. 

In our class, we started making sushi by focusing on the rice first.

You use sushi vinegar, sugar and salt in the rice.  You mix it buy cutting into the rice with a wooden spoon until all is evenly distributed.  Here's a picture of Nick cutting the rice at home as shown on the slide show on his computer. 

After it is well mixed, you fan the rice to make sure it is at room temperature.  The key to forming the sushi is to wear gloves so the rice does not stick to your hands. 

 Hide's slide show showed us how to mold the sushi using the rice that is measured into 15 gram portions. 

We also made California rolls (because they are so popular and you don't need fish for those.)

Hide also gave us step-by-step instructions on making a very decorative sushi roll.  

It's a good thing we have the slide show on this one because there were a lot of steps in making this beautiful sushi roll.  We followed each step with Hide's helps and it miraculously turned out like this.  Amazing!

Our sushi class produced a final result of this plate of sushi.  

The best part was that we got to eat our plate of sushi!  This was definitely one of the highlights of our trip and we're so grateful to Sachiyo for coming up this idea.  Hide met us at the Yokohama train station before the class and we walked to his apartment with him from there.  Sachiyo says there are many sushi classes like this by individuals.  I guess they are cashing in on us tourists but we felt it was well worth the $75 a piece for this class.  It was such a nice, personal environment and we had a very heartfelt goodbye with Hide when he walked us back to the train station, like saying goodbye to an old friend.  We've already used our new knowledge on the last meal of our trip and we are eager to try it out again now that we're home.