For any true sushi afficionado (or is otaku a better word?), the quality of sushi isn’t only in the freshness of the fish. Sure, fresh. tasty fish is indispensable for great sushi. Once you start to critically assess and compare sushi served in different restaurants, however, you will adopt more specific markers to rank the experience.
Seasoned sushi-lovers say that the quality of tamago, the tasty bit of sushi with omelette on top says everything about a restaurant. Personally, I find two other factors important in the sushi experience: the taste of the rice itself (not too sweet, not too sour, just right…) and the strong, cleansing taste of the gari, the slices of pickled ginger taken between morsels of fish to cleanse the palate.
Here is a recipe to make your own gari. It’s easy, and guaranteed to taste better and fresher than the stuff you can buy in shops.
Ingredients:
100g of fresh ginger root
250ml rice vinegar
2tbsp sugar
1/2tsp salt
1 sterilizable jam jar (250ml volume)
Preparation:
Sterilization of jars
In a large pot, bring water to a boil. Put the jar (with a little water to keep it from floating) and its lid into the boiling water and cover with lid. Let this cook during the preparation of the rest of the ingredients
Preparing the ginger
Cut the ginger into smaller pieces at the necks between tubers. Peel each piece using a potato peeler. Quickly rinse roots to get rid of small pieces of rind.
Slice into very thin slices (0.5-1mm) either using a sharp knife and lots of patience or using an adjustable slicer (a truffle slicer works well).
In a medium pan, bring water to a boil. Add the ginger slices to the water, and briefly boil for one minute. Strain into colander.
Pickling the ginger
In a small pan, heat the rice vinegar, sugar and salt. Dissolve the sugar, and bring to a boil.
Remove the sterilized jar from the pot without burning your fingers, pour out the water, and fill jar with the ginger slices. Pour the hot vinegar on top, so that all ginger slices are covered.
Half-close the lid and sterilize the final product again for 5 minutes (or as long as it takes you to wash up your mess). Remove jar from water, and let cool down. Ginger pickled this way keeps indefinitely, but should be kept in the fridge.
- When buying the ginger root, choose medium-sized tubers. Too small tubers make too small slices, whereas very big tubers tend to be too stringy.
- For the rice vinegar, visit an asian/japanese shop. With the recent popularity of sushi, you can get rice vinegar in delicatessen shops, but there, quantities are usually small and overpriced. I use Mitsukan Kome Su rice vinegar, 900ml for 11.80CHF, whereas Globus sells some re-branded rice vinegar at 5CHF for 150ml *gasp*
- Prepare the gari one day before you plan to use it. This increases the taste. You will notice that this home-made ginger tends to be more spicy than the shop-bought one. The spiciness of the ginger is correlated to the thickness of the slices by the way, slices that are still slightly translucent seem to me to be the best.
