YO SUSHI! Sushi School

It's no secret Sushi is my favourite food so as a recent birthday treat I took a fellow sushi lover for sushi making class at YO! I wasn't sure what to expect, my only experience of sushi making up until now has been at various events where you get to make one roll/bit of sushi and that's your lot. I was only expecting to make a couple of bits at YO....oh how I was wrong.

We made a whopping 32 pieces of sushi each...and a hand roll. That is an incredible and unmanageable amount of food. We planned on eating it all in the restaurant after the lesson so wondered why the teacher kept referring to take away. Now we knew. Mind you we didn't end up eating the take-away. It isn't really safe the next day and we had a whopping great Chinese planned for the evening.

First up we made the simple cucumber maki. The 'bread and butter' of your sushi. No one chooses this as the main event but it generally makes up the tray of sushi we all know and love. Everything was laid out ready for us so this was our first practise of using the rolling mat, clearly a skill that is learnt over time. I must say my skills got so good I was self declared top of the class.

Next up was our first ISO of the day - this stands simply for inside out roll (In Side Out, get it?) To master this you have to leave your sushi rice hanging over the seaweed so you aren't left with a gap when you are finished. Likened to seeing if a meringue has peaked / your eggs are whisked enough we lifted this up to make sure it was stuck. We Won!

Once we had done this it was turned over and covered in as much chili as we wanted to douse it in. I opted for an even moderate coverage - and thought it looked rather pretty.I must say, my roll was again pretty awesome. This was round whereas the maki had to be square. I found round much easier to manage.

Next up was futomaki, which was created like the iso but has another layer of seaweed inside that it wasn't ISO. Again this was a vegetarian sushi with egg, soy, cucumber, ginger and avocado.

Following another successful rolling of my futomaki we were onto one of my favourite YO! Sushi dishes, hand rolls. This was a crab and avocado hand roll. We learn that in Sushi whenever there is avocado there is always Japanese mayonnaise. Which is basically mayonnaise with a tiny bit of wasabi. To make it is really simple - the easiest one so far. A nice rugby ball shape of sushi rice, crab sticks, avocado, mayonnaise and sesame seeds (black and white).

When you think of sushi you can't not think of California ISO rolls. More crab sticks, avocado, mayonnaise and more sesame seeds. i was incredibly proud of my roll and if I say so myself it was better than the teachers.

As if we hadn't enough sushi, we were done rolling things and moved on to the nigiri machine. This is a trade secret. Those perfect shapes of nigiri rice and Gunkan rice are not hand formed. There is a magic machine that makes the perfect shapes. First up we made Gunkan which is roughly translated as 'battleship' as that's kind of what they look like. This was my least favourite ingredient of the day - fish eggs. Very orange fish eggs. This was incredibly easy to make, as was the Salmon Nigiri.

Simply...pop your nigiri prepared rice ball from the machine, top with a little wasabi for sticking purposes and pop on your salmon. Ta da. This concluded our sushi preparation session. Can you believe we made all this sushi? To eat? EACH?

I would highly recommend the Rice and Rolls lesson from YO! Sushi, the value is incredible. To give you an example we made 8 California rolls, these circulate around the belt for £3 for two - so this dish alone was 'worth' £12. To find out more about this class and others they do check out the website here.