saba (mackerel) sushi is a a common type of hand roll found in Japanese sushi restaurants. We got it at Super H mart (read my last blog!). Man, oh man, it makes me wish that we have fish monger readily accessible in SLO. They're cheap too! Supermarket fish is far too overpriced and I can't really trust to make sushi out of it.
I love sushi because it's so simple. You cut up fish and put it on rice. Japanese cuisine often tries to reflect natural flavors of the ingredients and sushi is the epitome of that ideal. That being said, saba is a little more complicated. The monger cleaned, gutted and deheaded the saba for us, but there was a lot of prep that still had to be done.
Ingredients:
2 Saba cuts
Salt
Sushi rice
Nori
Water
Instructions:
First, you gotta do the "Mittsu giri" or the "cut in three". You cut the saba along the spine (left or right side, it doesn't matter) and split it in two. Then you take the half with the spine and filet the fish to debone most of the flesh. I find the easiest way to do this is to lay your non cutting hand flat on the boney flesh and apply light pressure. Take your cutting hand, holding the knife flat and diagonally cut across the flesh.
Do a salt rub on the mackerel and leave it in the fridge over night. About 12 hours later, wash off the salt and leave it submerged in water for about 3 hours. After this, the saba is ready to be deboned. The water should have loosened up any of the remaining bones in the flesh. Take your favorite pair of tweezers and pull out the bones.
Once all this is done, cut the saba diagonally so you get parallelograms instead of rectangles. This will show off the contrast of the white and dark meat of the saba really well. Make hand rolls of sushi rice and place the saba on top. For an extra touch, add wasabi paste or julienned ginger between the saba and rice.
