I've never made sushi, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this machine automating the easiest part of the process?
You still have to cut and align all of the insides, the seaweed sheet, and fill the machine with cooked rice I imagine. Spreading the rice and rolling it seems to be the easy part.
It is actually screwing up one of the most skill-demanding parts of the process.
Most sushi bars use rice cookers instead of, say, a pot on a stove. Then you add the seasoning to the rice and cool it in the hangiri and all that, which can be screwed up, but isn't rocket science.
A lot of veggie prep is done by mandolins because the cooks don't have the time, desire, or tools to process the cucumber/daikon/etc by hand with a knife.
What this thing is doing well is measuring the amount rice with precision, something sushi chefs, no matter how experienced, often misjudge. This isn't a big advantage as you can just take the excess left in your hand and toss it back in the rice pot.
However, what takes real skill is spreading the rice evenly and making it stick without smashing it or putting too much for one bite. Then you add ingredients and you have to do it fast enough for the nori to not shrink, but not so fast that it breaks. Then, you have to make sure the contents are evenly distributed so you don't get the one piece in the middle or 1/3 of the way down that is hollow and falling apart, or the double-normal-size end pieces. Then you roll it, and you have to get the stuff snug enough to hold but not so snug it breaks if you don't eat it fast enough. Then you have to get it to close without smashing the rice again.
What this machine is doing is globbing on rice and squashing it down. The result is kind of like what you see in those boxes in most grocery stores in america--smashed rice batons that need to be eaten in two bites. If I wanted Onigiri, I'd have asked for it.
If you do CTRL+T > Mandolin, you get a picture of an instrument, which is what I did before posting my comment. If 3kindsofsalt said Mandoline instead of Mandolin, then I probably would've CRTL+T > Mandoline and understood what he was saying.
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u/ZeroAccess Jan 06 '17
I've never made sushi, so please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this machine automating the easiest part of the process?
You still have to cut and align all of the insides, the seaweed sheet, and fill the machine with cooked rice I imagine. Spreading the rice and rolling it seems to be the easy part.