Sushi just might be the most popular dish in Japan.
Its origin is thought to date from the 2nd century AD. in Southeast Asia following the need to keep meat fresh without refrigeration. Then people preserved it with natural preservatives and covered it with rice to preserve its freshness and it was left to ferment for months.
This practice soon spread to China and later to Japan, where fish was used as the main ingredient. The Japanese fermented and preserved it with rice wine. Ten centuries later, people began to use vinegar to speed up the fermentation process. In this way, they did not have to wait months for the process to be completed.
Today when we think of sushi we usually think of rice rolls with ingredients inside and covered with seaweed, but there are hundreds of varieties of sushi, some of which are unique to a region or are prepared on certain special dates. Here are some of the types of sushi more important. All of them are prepared with a special type of vinegary rice, and perhaps this is what defines a dish to be considered sushi.
Nigirizushi: It consists of small rice balls with fish or shellfish on top. The ingredients can be tuna, shrimp, eel, squid, octopus, or even a fried egg.
Gunkan maki: Gunkan literlmante means “warship”, and if we see the image its name makes a lot of sense. They are small rice balls wrapped in seaweed and have seafood on top. There are many varieties, which use sea urchin or fish roe.
Norimaki: This is the sushi more popular. It consists of rice from sushi and shellfish or fish rolled in thin strips of seaweed. Although those with rice on the outside are popular in other countries, they are not found very often in Japan.
Temaki: Literally it means “hand rolls”, and they are cones of a sheet of seaweed with rice to sushi, vegetables, and fish or shellfish.
Oshizushi: He okizushi is a sushi wherein the ingredients are compressed into a package form. They are very popular and can be found at train stations.
Inarizushi: He inarizushi It is an inexpensive and very simple preparation, consisting of rice balls of sushi with ingredients, wrapped in tofu and fried.
Chirashizushi: Literally, “sushi dispersed ”, is a dish that resembles the donburi, with the difference that it uses rice for sushi.
A place where you can try a great variety of sushis is the kaitenzushi. These restaurants are arranged so that diners sit around a conveyor belt in which different saucers circulate. Customers can select the dishes of their choice. Dishes are served in plates of different colors, which determine the price per dish. At the end, the number of dishes are counted for the count. The price per dish varies 100 to 500 yen.
