Customer Reviews

Quick & Easy Sushi Cook Book

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This book is an excellent guide in teaching you how to make sushi. There are literally hundreds of pictures in the book. You will find all of the typical edomae-sushi and "rolls" that you get at a Japanese restaurant. It will take you step by step through each of these, from selecting and making the rice, forming the rice balls, cutting the fish, choosing the fish, making sushi rolls, etc. I have been making sushi for myself and friends for over six years, and it started with this book. I highly recommend it for a "do-it-yourself" type person. One last tip: go to an oriental food store and get quality soy sauce, rice, seaweed, etc. It makes a BIG difference.

The pictures are undoubtedly the best feature of this book: they're clear, bright, colorful, and most-importantly, helpful. The text and recipes are easy to understand, although not flawless; occasionally, they read like poorly-translated stereo instructions.

However, the author has strangely neglected several of the most common types of sushi. There's absolutely no mention of fresh salmon (sake), yellowtail (hamachi), grilled eel (unagi), or even tobiko. Some of the more popular rolls in the USA, such as spicy tuna, California (crab & avocado), and spider (crab tempura) are also missing. A section on sashimi would've been nice as well, but no luck.

Rice, the basic ingredient of any sushi, only gets three pages in the back, and they're all in black-and-white (unlike the glorious color photos used for everything else).

In short, it's a nice presententation, but woefully incomplete.

The Quick and Easy series to which this book belongs is generally very good and this book is no exception for the most part. Each item is extremely well illustrated with step by step photographs and this is a definite plus here as the text sometimes is sometimes brief to the point of being perfunctory. There are quite a few recipes that beginners should have no trouble following but that is not always true for others. In particular, some of the fish cutting techniques will require bit of skill and confidence in order to produce results as illustrated. I also got the impression that the author probably had a readership in mind whose skills were more than just basic as the section on actually preparing the sushi rice only appears at the end of the book and is just a few pages long. Moreover, there is no progression throughout the book from simpler techniques to more complex, rather the odd simple item is interspersed with some quite difficult things. Still, that being said, this is a book I am very happy to have in my collection.