Spicy "Tuna" Vegan Sushi

I crave sushi ALL THE TIME. I make it at home at least once a week. One of my favorite things about sushi is the flexibility of it. I have never been one to follow a recipe to the letter. I enjoy being able to customize my sushi rolls for whatever is fresh, in season, and just generally yummy sounding. And spicy things are always yummy sounding to me. Today, we are making vegan spicy "tuna" rolls. Instead of tuna, we are going to use a nice and firm tomato! Let's get our ingredients together:

• sushi rice
• rice wine vinegar
• mirin
• organic, refined sugar
• salt
• nori sheets
• whole tomato
• sesame oil
• green onions
• tamari or soy sauce
• Sriracha
• Blanched asparagus (optional)
• cucumber matchsticks
• avocado slices
• sesame seeds (optional)  
• wasabi 

Let's get started on the rice! Sushi rice can be as complicated or as easy as you want to make it. Sushi apprentices in Japan can spend up to 10 years just making rice before they get to graduate to forming the sushi rolls. You do not need to dedicate your life to the sushi mat to learn to make good sushi rice. The proper type of rice is very important. you need a short grain, high starch rice. Luckily, we have sushi rice in the bulk bins right at our local health food store. The first step, is rinsing the rice. I throw my measured rice into a sieve and rinse it until the water runs clear. Then I dump it in the rice cooker. Basically, just get your rice cooked  by whatever your preferred method. Let's get that rice cooking, while we start preparing our tomato.

 

Next, we are going to grab our tomato, and lightly carve an "x" into one side. Like this:

 

Then, we are going to toss that tomato into a pot of boiling water. Just for a couple minutes!

When the tomato skin starts to peel around the "x", take out of boiling water and immerse in ice water to stop cooking. Peel tomato, quarter it, scoop out the wet seeds from the inside, then dice up tomato flesh. We are going to throw that diced tomato into a bowl with a marinade of soy sauce, a small dash of sesame oil (a little bit of that stuff goes a long way!), sliced green onions, and loads of Sriracha (depending on how spicy you want it!)

Let this mixture sit and marinate while the rice cooks and we prepare the other veggies.

I like to blanch a few  stalks of asparagus.

I sliced cucumber up into matchsticks and sliced some avocado! 

When the rice cooker is done with it's cycle, I move the rice into a big bowl with a lid. For this recipe, I used 2 cups of uncooked rice, which made about 4 cups of rice. In a coffee cup, I am going to pout about a quarter cup of rice wine vinegar, a teaspoon pf salt, and a tablespoon of organic, unrefined sugar. I also added a dash of mirin. The mirin is not necessary if you do  not have any. I heat up the vinegar muxture in the microwave for about 30 seconds, stir, and then drizzle over the rice. I lightly fold the rice, and put the lid of the bowl back on and allow it to sit and steam in the bowl and cool down for about 10 more minutes.

 

The I am going to drain the marinade from my tomatoes!

 

Always wrap your sushi mat in plastic wrap! It just makes life easier. I am not going to go into tons of instructions on rolling sushi. Their are hundreds of videos on YouTube that explain it better than I ever could. Let me just say, it really is not very complicated. If you do not have a sushi mat, you can roll sushi in a tea towel. You can YouTube that, as well!

Here is my nori sheet, shiny side down! I only ised half of a nori sheet per roll on these. I don't like my sushi pieces to be HUGE. I prefer the one bite variety. So, I use half a sheet at a time.

 

Spread your sushi rice over the nori sheet. Sprinkle with sesame seeds (optional). The flip over the nori sheet, so the rice side is down.

 

The fill your roll! Here, I used our spicy tomato mixture, cucumbers, and avocado.

Roll until you are out of rice with different combinations of your veggies. Today, I used asparagus, and green onions, as well as my tomato, cucumber and avocado. I set each roll aside until they are all rolled. The trick to getting pretty pieces of sushi, is to use a very sharp nice, and wipe off the knife blade with each cut. The starchy rice will make the knife sticky. I wipe the knife of with a warm, damp cloth between every cut. Don't worry about it  being perfect. Serve with wasabi and soy sauce (or tamari, or Bragg's Liquid Aminos) and enjoy!