Sushi has a reputation for being fiddly, expensive and best left to the professionals, but most of that mystique comes from equipment lists in cookbooks. The reality is far friendlier: a mat, a sharp knife and a bowl of properly seasoned rice will get you a long way. You can put together a genuinely workable home sushi kit for roughly the price of a decent takeaway — less, if you already own a decent knife and a saucepan.
A makisu is the one piece of kit that is genuinely hard to improvise. Look for tight, evenly spaced bamboo strips bound with cotton string rather than elastic, which perishes quickly. They cost between £3 and £6 from Asian supermarkets and usually outperform the ones sold in cook shops for three times as much. Rinse yours under warm water, dry it thoroughly and store it flat — never rolled tightly, or it will take on a permanent curl.
Wrap the mat in cling film before making inside-out rolls; it stops the rice sticking and makes cleaning a thirty-second job. A clean tea towel and a sheet of cling film can stand in at a push, but the mat does the rolling, and rolling is where beginners come unstuck.
Blunt knives tear nori and squash the rice into paste. A 20cm chef's knife you already own, kept properly sharp, will beat a fancy single-bevel blade that has never seen a stone. If you are buying, a Japanese-style santoku or a short gyuto in the £15–£30 range is more than enough for home rolls. Fancier steel is a pleasure, not a requirement.
Budget £10–£15 for a combination whetstone, usually 1000/6000 grit. It is the single best investment in the whole kit and will keep every knife in the kitchen in order for years. Never put a good knife in the dishwasher, and wipe the blade between cuts when slicing rolls — a clean edge cuts cleanly.
No, but they are convenient. A heavy saucepan with a tight-fitting lid and a timer will cook sushi rice perfectly well on the hob, using the absorption method. If you would rather not think about it, a basic 1.0 to 1.5 litre cooker with a single switch costs £25–£40 and does the job beautifully; the fuzzy-logic models are lovely but unnecessary. Smaller is better here — you want a cooker sized for two to three people, not a family batch.
The rice itself matters far more than the appliance. Buy short-grain Japanese-style rice, around £2–£3 per kilo from an Asian grocer, and avoid the tiny 500g boxes labelled "sushi rice" at four times the price. Pudding rice works in an emergency but is starchier and claggier. Make your own seasoning rather than buying pre-mixed vinegar: warm roughly 100ml rice vinegar with 50g caster sugar and 15g fine salt until dissolved, then cool. It keeps for months in a jar.
A traditional wooden hangiri is a beautiful thing, but a wide, shallow plastic bowl or a roasting tin does the same job of spreading the rice out to cool. It needs to be non-reactive, so avoid bare aluminium. Beyond that, the essentials are modest:
To cool the rice quickly, wave a magazine or use a hairdryer on its cold setting while you fold it with the paddle. It sounds eccentric and works brilliantly.
Skip the wooden rice tub, the dedicated tamagoyaki pan (a small non-stick frying pan does fine), the presentation boards, the pre-seasoned vinegar and the gift-set sushi kits that cram a flimsy mat next to a plastic mould. Those moulds produce compressed, joyless rice cylinders.
Do not skimp on three things: the rice, the knife and the whetstone. Everything else can be cheerful and inexpensive. Shop at Asian and Chinese grocers, the world food aisles of larger supermarkets, discount homeware shops and charity shops, where you will often find excellent shallow bowls and trays for pennies. Buying nori in larger packs is cheaper per sheet, and spare sheets freeze well in an airtight bag.
Here is what a sensible first shop looks like: a bamboo mat at £4, a kilo of short-grain rice at £3, rice vinegar at £2, a ten-sheet pack of nori at £2.50, a rice paddle at £2, a combination whetstone at £12 and a roll of cling film at £1. That comes to around £26.50, plus a knife if you need one. Add a bottle of soy sauce, some wasabi paste and a jar of pickled ginger and you are still comfortably under £40.
Start with cucumber, tinned tuna mixed with mayonnaise, smoked salmon trimmings, crab sticks and thin omelette strips. Practise the roll, taste as you go, and remember that even a lopsided first attempt tastes good with enough soy sauce and a little patience.
The Sushi Course shares practical, down-to-earth guidance on sushi making courses and japanese culinary tuition for readers across the UK.
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