Making Sushi: Tuna Poke Rolls

Poke and smoked salmon sushi by one of my students. These kids do good work!

We are rolling some rice tonight. My college students are making sushi. One of the great things about sushi: you can use your imagination to combine ingredients to make a roll that is tasty to you. Since we're on a budget in these classes, we need to stretch expensive ingredients. High quality fish is not cheap, so sushi rolls are a great way to make things like ahi tuna go further. We made up a tuna poke (po-key), which is Hawaii's version of tuna sashimi. It's often served on fried wonton chips but here we rolled it inside a sushi roll.

How do you get high quality ahi tuna? Use you nose. It should smell like fresh mild meat, with no fishy odor. It has a  minerally whiff of the sea, but that's it. Not strong at all. Almost all ahi is flash-frozen at sea, so don't be deterred by frozen ahi. If you buy it still frozen, you'll know that it had no chance to degrade on its way to you. It's easier to dice the tuna when it is still slightly frozen, so don't defrost it totally before starting the poke.

Tuna Poke Rolls
(makes about 12-16 rolls, depending on how much tuna you stuff in each)

12 oz. ahi tuna, finely diced (it's easier to dice if partially frozen)
3 scallions, thinly sliced
½ Tablespoon minced fresh ginger
1 Tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons Asian sesame oil
a pinch or two of salt
1 Tablespoon toasted sesame seeds

1 batch sushi rice
nori sheets, 4"-5" high by 7" long (about ½ a sheet)

Possible poke enhancements:

• diced or sliced avocado
• sliced cucumber
• mayonnaise
• wasabi paste

The poke is great on its own in a roll, but any of these things will make it even better.

The simplest roll is a hand roll, a sushi cone! The trick with sushi rice is work with moistened hands. Sushi rice is really, really sticky. But, if you moisten your hands before grabbing and spreading the rice on the nori, it won't stick to your hands. When you put the rice down on the nori, don't press is down too much. Lightly press it with your fingertips so you don't smash the rice kernels.

Here's what it looks like filled but before rolling up. You'll need about 3 Tablespoons rice.

To roll, bring the bottom left corner up to the upper middle edge, where the rice ends. The top of the cone is the upper left corner.

The roll, turned around. To seal the bottom, you roll the naked nori over the stuffed side.

To finish, moisten the naked nori slightly and fold it around the bottom of the cone. Then eat! No fork required.

Dahlia enjoying her poke roll

A Spanish Potluck!

I think they liked the empanadas!

What can students cook on campus? My daughter provided these photos from a recent event at her college. She attends a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. Not exactly the center of  the culinary universe. The Spanish Club puts on a Tapas potluck each year. The club buys all the raw materials and the students volunteer to cook the food. The kitchens are pretty spartan but they manage to pull off some nice things, like empanadas.

They come together to enjoy all the delicious Spanish food.

Looks like it was a great success! Food is a great way to bring people together and build community.

Spanish tapas are first-rate party food. Many of them are easy to make. Looks like they had a nice selection of things on toast, including tuna and capers. Very Spanish!

Tuna Salad for Tapas
(serves 6 as an appetizer)

This is a very tasty tuna salad on its own and unlike most tuna salads, it contains no mayonnaise.

1 6-7 ounce can tuna fish, packed in water, drained and flaked
2 Tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
2 Tablespoons minced dill pickles
½ teaspoon pickle juice
½ teaspoon white wine vinegar
1 Tablespoon minced onion
1 hard-cooked egg, minced
1 teaspoon minced capers
¼ teaspoon cayenne pepper
salt and pepper
12  ½ inch slices of French or Italian bread
whole capers for garnish

Combine all the ingredients except the bread and whole capers in a bowl. You can make the salad ahead and refrigerate it until you are ready to serve it; it gets even better after some time in the refrigerator.

Preheat the oven to 400°F. Place the bread slices on a baking sheet and toast until they start to brown. Place a bit of tuna salad on each slice of toast and serve.


(Adapted from Tapas by Penelope Casas)

Bruschetta

Made with yellow cherry tomatoes from my garden

What a stupendous way to use up day-old bread! The Italians know how to get the most out of everything from day-old bread, to questionable pig parts.

Though bruschetta (pronouced brew-SKETT-ah) sounds exotic, it's just toasted bread (traditionally on a grill but an oven or toaster works just as well). Of course, we are talking toast made from good crusty bread, not white sandwich bread. Something sturdy to hold a generous amount of topping and crackle when you bite into it. This is an open-faced sandwich that you eat with your hands. Though often served as an appetizer, it is hearty enough to stand as a light entree.


There are many, many possible toppings. Here's a salad turned into a topping. Don't go light on the olive oil. Tuna tends to be dry and the olive oil counteracts that. We recommend tuna packed in water because soybean oil, which is used to pack most tuna, adds no flavor. By using tuna packed in water, you can add tasty olive oil.

Bruschetta with Tomatoes and Tuna
(serves 3, cost $8.70)

1 6-oz. can tuna fish packed in water
2 + 1 Tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
1 Tablespoon capers, chopped
zest of 1 lemon
1 pint cherry tomatoes, cut into quarters
¼ teaspoon black pepper
salt
6 ¾-inch thick slices crusty white or wheat bread
1 clove garlic, peeled

Preheat oven to 400°F. Drain tuna fish and put in a medium bowl. Add 2 Tablespoons olive oil, chopped capers, lemon zest, tomatoes, and black pepper. Stir to combine.

Use the remaining tablespoon of oil to brush one side of each slice of bread. Place bread on a cookie sheet in a single layer. Place bread in the hot oven and toast until golden brown and crispy. Slightly dried out bread will toast up faster. You want the toast to be crunchy and crispy, not at all soft. The amount of time will vary depending on how stale the bread is. Rub each slice of bread with garlic as soon as you take it out of the oven. Place 2 slices of toast on each plate. Heap up tuna-tomato salad on each toast slice. Sprinkle with salt and serve.

If you aren't serving all 3 portions at once, refrigerate the salad and toast the bread just before you want to serve it. It can be toasted in the toaster too, rather than the oven, if you prefer. Just make sure it's toasted enough to be crunchy-crispy!

How to Roast a Pepper

Peppers - red, green, yellow, poblano - have a lot of natural sweetness. To play up this sweetness, roast them, either in your oven or on your grill. The texture is also dramatically different - soft and silky rather than crunchy. It's an easy process and can save you a bunch of pennies. Roasted peppers are sold in jars but they are often quite expensive. They are packed in an acidic solution to preserve them. The preservative is usually citric acid, a totally natural preservative but it does change the flavor. Homemade roasted peppers are much sweeter because of this, and you can preserve them by freezing them with no loss of flavor or texture.The next time peppers are on sale, buy a few extra to stash away.

When selecting peppers to roast, look for boxy ones, without lots of wavy parts. The boxy ones will blacken up more evenly then the oddly shaped ones.

Whether you use a grill or the broiler in your oven, the process is the same:

Remove those stupid stickers and wash the peppers.

If broiling in the oven, place on a cookie sheet without a nonstick coating. The coating can't stand the extremely high temperature of the broiler. You may want to line it with aluminum foil to make cleanup easier.

Put the peppers in the oven or on the grill and leave until the skin on the broiling/grilling side is blistered and black. [Usually, you'll be able to peel the skin off easily if the skin has blistered enough to wrinkle up, even if it hasn't turned black.] Turn the peppers to get them blistered or blackened on all sides. When they are done, put in a heatproof bowl and cover the bowl with plastic.

Let them sit for about 10 minutes. The steam will loosen the skins and make them easier to peel.

Peel off the skin and remove the core and seeds. You can rinse them off  to get the last bits off but I was once berated by a famous Southwestern chef for doing this. He said it washed off the sugars. On the other hand, Rick Bayless(*) does rinse them off, so you'll be in pretty good company if you do.

Once the peppers are all clean, use them within a few days or freeze them. I recommend you freeze them as halves or whole. They are much easier to separate if you freeze them in a stack, since you probably won't be using your whole stash of peppers all at once.

Here's recipe that not only makes use of the roasted red peppers, but the beautiful summer tomatoes are now showing up in markets everywhere.

Tomatoes Stuffed with Roast Peppers, Shrimp, Capers, and Olives
(Serves 3, total cost is $8.40)

1 roasted red bell peppers, cut into 1" pieces
2 Tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
7 ounces cooked salad shrimp (see Note)
1 Tablespoons capers
2 Tablespoons chopped black olives
Zest of ½ a lemon, grated
1 Tablespoon chopped parsley
3 large tomatoes
½ teaspoon Salt, divided
½ teaspoon Pepper, divided

Mix together roasted red pepper, oil, shrimp, capers, olives, lemon zest, parsley, ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper.

Cut off the top of each tomato. Use a paring knife to cut up the center of the tomato, being careful not to cut through the outer wall. Remove the center and seeds with a teaspoon. Season the inside of the tomatoes with the remaining ¼ teaspoon salt and ¼ teaspoon pepper. Fill the cavities with the shrimp mixture. Arrange in a shallow baking dish and bake in a preheated oven at 350° for 25 minutes, or until the tomatoes are a little soft.

Serve with crusty bread to soak up the delicious juices.

Note: A 6-7 ounce can of tuna, drained and flaked, can be substituted for the salad shrimp

* Rick Bayless is a chef in Chicago who is well-known for his deep and broad knowledge of Mexican cuisine. He has a show on PBS (highly recommended) and many excellent cookbooks. If you want to learn how to cook real Mexican food, he is your guy.