Making your own maki sushi is fun, easy and much cheaper than anything you’d get from a sushi restaurant. And the best thing is that  you don’t have to be stingy with your ingredients. After all, you’re not out to make a profit, which means you can use less rice and more of everything else! 

There are undoubtedly better tutorials for making sushi, but this post is meant as an encouragement for anyone who thinks that making your own sushi is too difficult or too expensive.  Granted, making your own maki rolls is a bit fiddly and they might not look as neat as the ones made by professional sushi chefs, but at the same time it’s a healthy, delicious,  no-cook dinner that can be made well in advance.

Ingredients (for 2 sushi lovers with large appetites):

250g sushi rice

rice vinegar

10 sheets of nori (dried seaweed sheets)

fillings: such as cucumber, crab sticks, omelet, salmon and avocado

accompaniments:

soy sauce

pickled ginger

wasabi

sake rice wine

• Boil the sushi rice according to instructions and dress it with a little rice vinegar, sugar and salt (optional).
• While your rice cools down, prepare your fillings. Slice them thinly and put them on a plate.

• Put a sheet of nori on a chopping board and spread some rice on the bottom half of the sheet.

• Add some of your filling. A few slices of cucumber and a few slices of salmon for example.

• Start rolling your sushi maki. The bamboo mat featured in these photos is there purely for aesthetic purposes, because I personally like to just use my hands. However, if you would like to use the bamboo mat, there’s nothing to stop you from doing that. You can probably find many good tutorials online or even on the back of the nori packaging. Make sure the maki roll is nice and tight and keep a bowl of cold water handy to seal the edges.

• Put the finished rolls on a large plate, cover with cling film and put in the fridge for a couple of hours. This allows the nori to get nice and soft. Right before dinner, take them out of the fridge and, using a very sharp large knife, slice each large roll into 8 or 10 little maki sushi rolls. Serve with soy sauce, pickled ginger, wasabi and a cheeky glass of warm sake.  Et voilà, there you have it: a huge plate full of really fresh, healthy, cheap and most of all utterly delicious sushi!