Avocado Sushi Recipe

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Hello and welcome to Freshly Served, the healthy vegan cooking show. I’m Heather and tonight we are making sushi.

Now for those of you who think you need to use the white sticky sushi rice, you don’t have to. I use short grain brown rice. It is pretty sticky. It definitely gonna hold your nori roll together. It is a lot healthier than white rice. It has all the nutrients in it. Go with brown rice.

Now nori is a sheet of seaweeds that holds your sushi together looks like this and sea vegetables in general are very good source of minerals because they live in the sea they grow from the minerals that are in there so always a good idea to get some of those into your diet.

They’re a very good source of iodine which is crucial for the function of your thyroid gland so if you find that you have a lot of blood sugar fluctuations, try eating more seaweeds and see if that helps.

Thyroid helps to control metabolism and fluctuating blood sugar can have an effect on thyroid. Anyway, always good to get more of it and sushi is probably my favorite way to have sea vegetables.

So what you do to start is your gonna cook your rice and you wanna cook it ahead of time so that it have time to cool down and then what you’ll do is mix it up with a little bit of vinegar. Brown rice vinegar is the traditional. I use apple cider vinegar because I like it. I find it has a better balance but if you’re a traditionalist you can go for the brown rice that’s fine.

You want to stir it together with the rice to get it a little bit stickier and I’ve been told by my Japanese friend that I need to be a little more respectful of my rice and not ooze it. So you want to try to mix this as gently as possible.

Once your rice is ready to go, you’re gonna chop up your vegetables and I’m using avocado and some red pepper and for Sushi you really don’t need a lot of vegetable, because they’re roll up you want to keep things minimal and make it small.

The other thing I’m gonna put on there is some sprouts and I’ve got some fresh sprouts here. These are excellent to grow in the winter, they have a ton of nutrients in them and they’re very inexpensive if you grow them at home.

Now if you haven’t chop an avocado before, all you do is take your avocado and you’re gonna slice it around the pith. You can’t go through the pith. Well I haven’t tried but somehow I don’t think it will go very well.

Ok, once you have it cut all the way around, then all you do is give it a little twist and its gonna come apart and the pith will be on one side. To get the pith out cleanly, give it a little smack with your knife and the knife will go right into the pith, hopefully not through unless you cut your hand in half. And then give it a little twist as well and it will come out beautiful and clean.

Now this is how it works if your avocado is ripe, if it’s not ripe the pith is not gonna come out as easily, it’s not gonna chop as nicely and it’s not gonna be as nutritious for you because the nutrients will not be ready for your body to absorb.

Also if this properly ripe the peel is just going to come off nice and easy like that. When you’re looking for avocado ripeness, you wanna look for a color that’s very dark and when you press it, it should be a little bit soft but not too soft.

Key to cutting vegetables for sushi is to make very small, thin slices. Small was a slip of the mouth, what I meant to say was just thin. Ok, you want them really thin, same thing with the peppers. Avocados are sticky. Same thing with the peppers, you want to just cut them very very thinly so that you get a nice tight sushi roll. Nice pepper.

A sushi mat is not really a necessity but it’s gonna make things a lot easier especially if it’s your first time rolling. What you wanna do is take your mat and if you see these lines of thread, they go lengthwise. You want that pointed away from you when you’re rolling.

Then we take your nori roll, they are two sides. One is kind of mat, the other is quite a bit shinier. I’m not sure if you can see that but ok shiny? Not quite as shiny and you can see if I hold it to the light there are some lines on my nori roll right here, right here. See those?

Those are kind of guides where you should cut and that’s a little bit thicker than what I normally cut but anyway what you wanna do is when you have your sheet, line it up with the lines on your mat.

You don’t have it to be perfectly in line but that’s the direction you want to be rolling. So lay it down there, put some rice on it. You wanna spread it out so that the rice goes just the edge back here, goes as close as you can on the edge here and you wanna leave a strip at the end for where its gonna seal together.

And a lot of places will tell you to smush this down and that’s how I use to do it but a friend of mine who is Japanese told me that this is not nice for the rice so we’re gonna not do that.

What you do is take your vegetables, lay them out in a line here so there’s room back here and then the vegetables and then there’s a lot of room here plus that strip. And then I’ve got some sprouts that I’m gonna put in here as well.

Now sprouts is not your traditional sushi fixing but I love sprouts so I love them in my sushi and that’s what I’m gonna do. When you roll this, you take the back edge, you’re gonna press down here on your vegetables, take your back edge and fold it over. Ok?

Then you’re going to squish it back, take your bamboo mat out because it doesn’t make for good eating, roll it over again, squish it back this way towards you. Squish it down a little bit down, down and make sure you’re squishing all along the row.

Get your bamboo mat out again, roll it again, give it a little squish and then the final time is where we seal that end bit off. And there you go, you can see it has a nice clean seal except for these stray bits of rice and then if you let this sit for a few minutes it will cut out much easier.

Now what I do when I’m rolling is I keep these guys in order. This is the one I rolled first and this is the one I rolled last and then I’m gonna cut them in that order because the nori softens up as it sits with the rice and it will be a lot easier to cut once it had a few minutes to sit.

And all you do to cut, it helps to wet your knife a little bit otherwise the rice will stick to it. I’ve chopped off the end. At the beginning your end might not be too attractive and then just cut it in whatever size you like.

Sometimes the end is pretty if you have a little bit of stuffs taking in this has sprouts sticking out to it. So there’s the roll and yeah it does take a bit of practice to be able to roll them nicely so don’t get discourage if your first ones don’t look too nice, you will get better at it.

So some healthy vegan sushi, if the ends on your rolls are not holding together very nicely thinks of them as the treat of the sushi chef. I like to have these with a little bit of tamari. Pickle ginger and wasabi is also nice if you like the spice.

And these guys are my favorite to take at a potluck because they travel so easily. So I’m making this for Phil to take for a potluck tomorrow night. Hopefully they all enjoy them.