Trout Nori Rolls

Sushi scares some people. Images of eating some raw fish (bait, as my father in law says...) or some other vile unspeakable thing have kept many otherwise adventurous people from enjoying something utterly delicious. "Sushi" means "Seasoned Rice" and therefore does not require any raw ingredients (but I catch you cooking Yellowfin to put in a sushi roll and I'm gonna whack you with a telephone book.) Nori is the seaweed wrapper that contains many sushi rolls, it's basically paper made from seaweed in a similar manner to how normal tree pulp paper is made. Nori is extremely good for you being high in many B vitamins. So now we've got some sticky, seasoned rice (we'll get on to that in a minute...) and some seaweed paper. All we need is a tasty filling and maybe something to give it a little crunch. Catch a lot of Trout? Salmon? This is your ticket.

I started with a 16" Rainbow Trout. I prefer this recipe with Kokanee but they simply weren't biting at Vallecito yesterday. I cook my fish for about 15 minutes at 400 and remove from the oven. Before it is too cool, remove the skin and gently pull the meat from the bones and place it in a large bowl. I spend a somewhat ridiculous amount of time picking through the fish to make sure all the little pin bones have been removed. Sure, they're pliant and edible but what wants bones in their sushi? Of course while this is happening you're cooking your sushi rice. The rice is the most important thing, get it right. If that means trying to make it a few times before you serve this to someone whose pants you're trying to remove, do it, nothing says "chump" like bad sushi rice! For the filling I mix the deboned trout with a pinch of salt, a spoonful of Japanese mayonnaise (regular ol mayo works just fine too) and a healthy squirt of Siracha pepper sauce. Stir it all well and you've got spicy trout filling that is deboned, cooked and glows with a bright red/orange hue. I like to cut sheets of nori in half, lightly cover one side with rice then flip onto a sushi roller covered in saran wrap. Oh yeah, you've got a sushi roller right? It's a mat of bamboo dowels that allows you to easily shape your rolls. They'll cost you a couple bucks and for this purpose, they can be easily covered with saran wrap, which is taped on both to keep the rice off the bamboo. Flip the rice covered nori onto the bamboo mat (easy to do if you make it on a little cutting board) and place your filling in a line down the middle. I like to add a strip of cucumber here too for crunch and color. You want to achieve a balance of flavor and texture. Try your first roll. Do you feel like it's hard to swallow and you just ate a ball of dough? Too much rice. Experimentation is the key to getting it right with this and all foods. A recipe just points you onto the right road, how you drive is up to you. There are plenty of sushi how-tos online, I'd check out of few of them, I am, after all, about as Japanese as Bratwurst. Good luck!

Rice:
1 cup sushi rice
1.75 cup water
2 tablespoons Rice Vinegar
1.5 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon salt
Mix the Vinegar, Sugar and Salt with a little heat and pour over the rice when it is done cooking, mix well but don't mangle your rice grains, keep them intact!

Filling
1 Nice Trout (or a few Kokanee)
1 heaping spoon of mayo
1 heaping spoon Siracha
Salt to taste
Cucumber

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