When in Kansas, use ingredients the Kansans do—on the way to making a traditional-style Japanese dish. That was the idea Saturday when organic growers from Saitama, Japan, did a cooking demonstration in the sweltering heat at the Lawrence Farmers Market. A Kansas delegation visited Japan a month ago or so in this exchange sponsored by the Global Partners for Local Organic Foods.
I’m hoping write a more substantive post later about the exchange. For now, though, you can see, more or less step-by-step, the creation of chirashi zushi (scattered sushi) by the visitors. You also can read about the demonstration and visit in the Lawrence Journal-World story.
One cook prepares the world’s thinnest omelet:
Another rolls the cooked eggs and slices the roll into thin ribbons:
A woman described as the grand mentor of Japanese organics chops potatoes:
Dan Nagengast and Pat Graham, Kansas organizers of the exchange, explain what the cooks are doing:
Local ingredients in the dish included (I’m pretty sure): the eggs, potatoes, carrots, greens, which as I saw them prepared looked a whole lot like Swiss chard, although Graham said they were “beefsteak plant,” presumably Perilla frutescens. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perilla_frutescens.) Not quite local ingredients included the sushi rice, pickled ginger, sesame seeds and nori. We’re a little weak on local seaweed in Kansas. We have good mushrooms from Wakarusa Valley Farm, but I don’t know whether the mushrooms were local or not.
Anyway…to combine the sushi ingredients, one cook first added the vinegar to warm rice as another fanned the rice to cool it and dissipate moisture, Graham said:
Then, they added slivers of the various ingredients before topping it all with a sprinkle of sesame seeds. The final dish for display:
Next, the Japanese cooks set out samples for the hungry horde:
Arigato!
p.s. A special treat for me was hearing from Dan Nagengast while he was in Japan that someone there showed him a link to a post I wrote last year for Ethicurean about sweet potato greens. :)
Great event. Wish I had been there.
Janet Majure // Jun 30, 2009 at 6:36 am
Wish you’d been there, too, Ed. :)
Pat Graham // Jul 2, 2009 at 7:30 am
Great post Janet, thank you. One correction, the potatoes they were cutting up were actually for another dish they made that day (Kinpira) so no potatoes were used in the chirashi zushi. The mushrooms were indeed local. Yes, the greens were Perilla (beefsteak plant or, in Japanese, green shiso). The rice was “sushi rice” a special kind that is sticky (a Japanese variety grown in California and available locally at the Merc).
Janet Majure // Jul 5, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Thanks for the added information, Pat. I knew I didn’t see any potatoes in the sushi, but I couldn’t figure out what happened to them!
Global Partners for Local Organic Foods » Chirashi zushi (scattered rice) // Aug 5, 2009 at 4:25 pm
[…] see the preparation process in photos look at Janet Majure’s blog post (where the photo on the right is taken […]