Making Sushi Rice

You can screw up most of the steps in this guide and your sushi rice will be okay

The 4 essential ingredients you need is:

  1. Short-grain rice
    You can buy it at most American grocery stores in the ethnic foods sections. “Nishiki” is the most common brand. Any white rice will technically work, though.

  2. Rice Vinegar
    You’ll find this in the Asian foods section of most American grocery stores.

  3. Salt
    Regular salt.

  4. Sugar (or honey)
    The conversion between sugar and honey is 1:3 by volume 

Making the sushi rice vinegar

Mix together:

1 cup of rice vinegar

2 TBSP salt

1/4 cup sugar

Either store it in a bottle (I have an old vodka bottle where I keep mine) or use it immediately.

Cooking the Rice

Cook your rice as you normally would, with roughly a 1:1 ratio of rice to water, depending on what rice-cooking method you use.

Seasoning the Rice

Just mix in the sushi vinegar you made earlier with the cooked rice right after the rice has been cooked. Pour in your sushi vinegar at a ratio of 1 cup of sushi vinegar to 4 cups of rice (that’s based on how many cups of rice it was before you cooked it). Wait for the rice to cool a bit, and you have sushi rice ready to go! You should be able to mold it with your hand by pressing it together.

When you’re done making sushi for the day, store the rice in an airtight container to avoid losing moisture. If you want to use it a day later and the rice feels too dry and unworkable, you can re-add moisture by sprinkling some water in it, and then heating it up a bit in the microwave.

Freshly cooked sushi rice

Sushi Rice just looks like… rice