Topped Rice Sushi (Nigiri Sushi)

Nigiri in Japanese means "squeeze" and it is the kind of sushi I enjoy making and eating the most. Each one is bite-size and usually has one ingredient pressed over a ball of rice.

The size of the rice ball should be big enough to hold a piece of fish or food on top of it and small enough to fit into your mouth. If you use a piece of fish as the topping, you don't need a piece of nori to stick it, but usually for other toppings like prawns or crabmeat a thin piece of nori is used to wrap around the ingredients.



I recommend you to use a dab of wasabi for fish toppings, but none or a small dab for the other (usually cooked or seasoned) toppings.

First you need to prepare the rice as I explained before. To prevent sushi rice to stick to your hands, you need to prepare a bowl of water and rice vinegar mixture and keep your hands damp with this water everytime you touch rice.

Ingredients:
- Sushi rice
- Nori (cut into finger size strips)
- Wasabi
- Soy souce

Toppings:
(You can really use what you want, I will give 4 types here)
- Salmon (really fresh, cut into thin slices)
- Seabass (really fresh, cut into thin slices)
- Prawns
- Shiitake mushrooms

Method:
1) Wet your hands, get a golf-ball size of rice in your hand.
2) Squeeze gently to form a solid block
3) Press with index and middle fingers of your other hand from the top to squeeze more
4) Rotate and squeeze until you have a slightly oval shape like a rugby ball
5) Take a piece of fish with your free hand, spread a piece of wasabi on the fish
6) Press the (wasabi containing) side against the ball of rice. Gently press from the front, back and then left and right. You should have the fish stick to the rice.
7) You can do this with salmon, seabass, tuna, and whatever fish you like.
(This may take some excersize to do it properly, though)



Shiitake Mushrooms:
1) Cut the stem.
2) Boil some water with soy souce
3) Place the mushrooms in it, cook slightly, take from water and cool.
4) If mushroom tops are small, you can place one mushroom on the ball of rice, then wrap around with a piece of nori. The nori will stick to the rice.
5) If you are using a bigger mushroom, you can cut them into sheets that are slightly wider and longer then your rice balls.



Prawns:
1) Remove the head of the prawn, do not remove the other shells
2) Wash under cold water.
3) Insert a stick (like a long toothpick) under the shell from the (missing) head to tail without touching the flesh. They will look like shrimp-kebabs on a stick.
4) Bring water and soy souce to boil.
5) Insert shrimps into the boiling water and cook for 5 minutes
6) Place the shrimps in ice water to cool fast. Remove when they are cold.
7) Remove the toothpicks, remove the shells (maybe except the last one, leaving the tail for decoration)
8) Cut the shrimp from (missing) head to tail along its belly without cutting the back skin. You should be able to open into two without breaking. You can remove the vein from the back of the shrimp.
9) Place them on the ball of rice and tie around with a sheet of nori.

There are many other things you can put as topping, I only listed four. You can use crabmeat sticks, all other kinds of fish and one of my favorites: omlette. I will tell about how to make sushi omlette in another post. Enjoy ;)