Many people I know are afraid to make sushi at home. Or too lazy. Or they worry about food safety. It’s not that hard, and it can be downright fun and enjoyable, but it is a lot more work than just going out to eat. They key to success is to plan what you’ll make ahead of time and limit the amount of fish you use. Before you can invite guests over you’ll want to sharpen your skills and create your menu by trying out some basic techniques. First make your own sushi with no guests, so you can see what works well for you and which areas will need a bit of work.

You’ll need to acquire the basic skills needed to make rolls at least. Don’t worry, it’s not that bad, but you’ll need to be able to cook sushi rice, cut fish and roll the rolls at a minimum. These are the three basic tasks we’ll talk about in the next few installments all the while planning to cover much more over time. But even before you can practice the basics you’re going to need to do some shopping.

Your first task is to find a Japanese grocery if you live in a fairly large city or on the west coast. Otherwise just find the best Asian grocery in town, they’re bound to have enough to get you going. For those who may live in less populated areas, consider ordering online.

Keep reading this series of articles every Tuesday, as we attempt to cover the basics of preparing sushi at home!

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Bumblefish Sushi
12 South 10th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19107

Bumblefish Sushi, right off market street in downtown Philadelphia is the subject of today’s post. I ate there last thursday and enjoyed the food.

They have a happy hour until 6pm, but we arrived just before the end of it. The manager was kind enough to give us a complimentary hand roll that was salmon, tuna, avacado – my kind of sushi! I also ate a regular sushi entree to see how good their bread and butter offering was.

The fish was fresh and appeared to be cut correctly. The rice was not bad and the nigiri was not packed too tightly or the wrong proportion for the neta (toppings). The surprise of this visit was the spicy tobiko – these small fish roe were probably spicier than most folks would appreciate, but I sure did.

So if you find yourself walking around market street in Philly, be sure to stop in and try this small place. Sit on a barstool by the window as I did if you want to recreate my experience.

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We had a great meetup in a small little sushi place on Normandy Isle (north Miami Beach) called Katana Sushi. This place was small and the name of the restaurant was NOT displayed outside like a normal restaurant. There was a line of people standing around waiting to be seated since the place only holds about 25-30.

This is one of those places where a busy Japanese sushi chef makes orders and puts them on boats, floating around in a circle in front of the hungry patrons. When you go to Kaiten sushi, the different color plates represent the price – take whatever looks good as it goes by. Very few hamachi made it past me, as it seemed so fresh – and after all this delicacy is wonderful when fresh. I haven’t eaten in one of these places in a long time, and I enjoyed the combination of great fresh fish, sushi kai-ten and cheap price.

The meetup group is organized by our local sushi expert Anne, who knows many great sushi bars in the Miami area.  She’s done a great job getting folks together in different locales, and restricting the size of each  meetup so we can invade smallish places like this.

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